In one of the nation’s richest Zip codes, a supermarket, shuttered since 2011, sits boarded up, pockmarked with graffiti, an abandoned eyesore marooned for more than a decade in a circular debate over how many and what kind of apartments should be built there.
The D.C. area is so short on housing that it would have to produce 87 new units a day to fulfill residents’ needs. The District says it’s on track to meet Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s (D) housing production goal, but a years-long waiting list persists of people in need of a place to lay their heads at night. And thousands of people roam the city’s streets, camp in parks or double and triple up in relatives’ apartments.
What this disconnect between need and supply looks like varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, but the common thread is a glacial pace in getting the okay for projects.
At Sursum Corda, a crime-infested, depressing 1960s development just off North Capitol Street in the heart of the city, authorities announced plans after the gruesome and revolting murder of 14-year-old Princess Hansen in 2004 to shutter the 199-unit project, move residents out and build a shiny new mixed-income community that would welcome back the displaced tenants.
Two decades later, 60 of those Sursum Corda families this spring finally moved into the spanking new Banner Lane apartments, a snazzy black-brick development that towers over what’s left of the old place. (Most of the rest of the original occupants had long since moved on with their lives and did not take their guaranteed spaces in the new building.)
By comparison, the remake of Union Station (which includes an air-rights project featuring housing, retail and hotels) is on a veritable fast track, approved by an important federal regulator this spring after a mere 10 years of talk. But nobody expects that project to be done before the 2040s.
Of course, not every development takes decades to get going. Some move with dazzling speed: Witness the explosion of housing in the area around Nationals Park in the years after baseball returned to Washington. Why did that neighborhood bloom so quickly? Because the city bulldozed the usual slow process and because so few people lived in the mostly industrial area before the stadium’s construction, meaning fewer NIMBY neighbors to make a fuss.
What makes it so hard to get big things done? The classic explanations — process, bureaucracy, money problems — are eternal and apply pretty much everywhere. But in Washington, those obstructions are multiplied: More process (federal on top of regional on top of city regulators), more bureaucracy (some projects have to pass through a blizzard of agencies, such as the Commission of Fine Arts, the Historic Preservation Review Board, the Zoning Commission, the D.C. Office of Planning, the Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, etc.) and more money problems (D.C. budget woes got notably worse after the pandemic emptied out downtown and pummeled the tax base).
Then there’s good, old neighbor battles. It’s a town chock-full of people who know how to gum up a bureaucracy. Neighbors in the million-dollar houses near the former Superfresh in American University Park pooled their ample resources to pay hefty attorney’s fees to flood the field with challenges.
“Painting the neighbors as NIMBYs is a little simplistic,” said Douglas Barnes, who lives nearby and volunteered his expertise as a longtime World Bank expert on development, writing a study of the project’s potential impact on pedestrian safety. “Actually, I’m very pro-development. We weren’t unreasonable. All of this could have been avoided if the developer had agreed to take one story off the [six-story] building. This could have settled six years ago. And the developer would still have made a good profit. They were absolutely unbending.”
The developers responded to neighbors by redesigning the project to look less imposing, but they didn’t shrink it as the neighbors desired. So the battle raged on, over height and mass, parking and the number of units to be reserved for moderate-income families (30 of the 219 units in the current plan).
The latest design is nobody’s idea of attractive, and a taller building would be great. The site just off Massachusetts Avenue is exactly where the city needs more density. But at least the project appears to be moving ahead — at last.
Or is it? I asked Barnes if the fight was worth it for the neighbors. “Financially, no,” he answered. “But the building’s been delayed for close to eight years and it probably won’t be built for another three or four years. So we at least bought some time.”
He laughed.
