Testimony: Confirmation Hearing--Ellen McCarthy, Director, DC Office of Planning

From yesterday. Interestingly enough, droves of people came out from the Upper Wisconsin Corridor to testify against the confirmation. They aren't happy with the "revitalization" proposal for that area, which calls for intensification and densification, particularly in areas near Metro stops. Even though this is really a part of sound urban planning, residents criticize this as bringing too many people to an already congested area.

I will say that I went up there in 2003 for one of the planning workshops which introduced an interesting interactive exercise (people were given different colored stickers that denoted types of retail--restaurant, coffee, groceries, etc.--and put them on a map of the region to indicate where they most often purchased such goods; I think this is a good exercise to use in Main Street commercial district revitalization to demonstrate to people that retail is regional). At the time, I even said to another OP person that I thought the then Ward 3 Planner was likely to be eaten alive--that he couldn't make it on H Street.

This by the way is another reason why I advocate for some general workshops across the city about the principles of urban design, using Death and Life of Great American Cities, Cities in Full, Cites: Back from the Edge, and Cy Paumier's Creating a Vibrant City Center as the primary texts. Without knowing what makes cities work and be better, citizens often advocate for policies and practices that can be profoundly anti-urban.

Back to Upper Wisconsin... as Jane Jacobs says, people are asking the wrong question, which shouldn't be "why aren't there enough roads?" but "why are there so many cars?" I allude to this in the testimony below about suburban vs. urban sensibilities in approaching planning issues.

And as Ellen pointed out in her own testimony, in apartment buildings along Connecticut Avenue, 50% or more of the building dwellers do not own cars, do not have children going to local schools, etc....

This is one of those few instances where I can actually use the term "smart growth" and really mean it.

__________
Before the City Council of the District of Columbia
Honorable Linda Cropp, Chairman
Committee of the Whole
June 14, 2005

My name is Richard Layman and I am a resident of Ward 6, and Founding Member and current Executive Director of the Ivy City Village Community Development Corporation (ICVCDC). We are developing a mixed use, light industrial, and residential revitalization program in the Ivy City neighborhood centered around the creation of a building trades and preservation arts workforce training program for adults. I am here before you today to convey our strong support for Ellen McCarthy’s confirmation as the Director of the DC Office of Planning (DCOP).

Over the past five years, I have become increasingly involved in local land use issues, starting in my own neighborhood and gradually city-wide. In these activities, I have come to realize that of all the issues that a city government deals with–from public health to schools, from policing to trash pickup--building and land use issues are most likely to impact and engage citizens to the point where they actually get involved in the activities and processes of local government.

That’s why it is so important to make the right choice for the Director of the Office of Planning.

In an era when half of the U.S. population doesn’t vote in national elections, and as documented in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, in all aspects of community life American citizens are participating less, and dropping out, the number of people testifying before you today demonstrates how important planning and land use issues are to everyday citizens.

That says a lot about the importance of the Office of Planning to citizens and a myriad of other stakeholders, those who own property, work in, or visit the city, not to mention the federal government and our 536 uber-mayors–Members of Congress and the President of the United States.

With the vehemence of some of the testimony today, perhaps it is easy to forget how far the Office of Planning has come during the time that you have served as Council Chair. The Office of Planning had declined to but a handful of staffers with little direction, new residential construction was unheard of, people flocked to the suburbs to shop, and a myriad of other issues influenced too many people to live in places other than the City of Washington.

Times have changed.

At the same time, we must remember that urban planning is more than just what happens in one particular neighborhood or street. It is about building and maintaining great places to live and work. It recognizes what defines "sense of place" and local identity, respects our natural, artistic and historic heritage, understands "urban grain" and urban design, focuses on the primacy of pedestrians–not the car, considers transportation and infrastructure, and recognizes that successful economic development of an entire community includes assets of all types–people and organizations, not just buildings.

As the seat of the national government, Washington is also a "national" and an "international" city, and is the engine of the metropolitan economy. At the same time the city competes with other jurisdictions in the region for jobs, businesses, and residents. Every and any mis-step is seized upon by hungry competitors. This not only complicates the job of the Director of the Office of Planning, it makes it even more important and vital that the position be filled by someone able to balance the multiple and often conflicting constituencies involved in planning and land use issues.

I ask you to think about this appointment in that context, and with this in mind:

First, the primary planning and development paradigm in the United States over the past 60 years has been suburban; one that has promoted the growth of suburbia at the expense of the center city; and at the same time promoted an unmixing of uses–separate zones for living, work, and other activities–pods connected by automobiles traversing freeways and 8-12 lane arterials--an environment where people spend far too much of their time inside of cars.

Washington is a real city, urban and proud of it, not a suburb. But because most current residents of the District settled here after living elsewhere, too often they apply inappropriate suburban land use and development perspectives to the land use questions that come before us–perhaps not even recognizing that they are doing so.

Questions of density, height, mixed-use, transit, etc., are difficult, complicated, and nuanced, and answers appropriate to the urban context are fundamentally different from those of the suburbs.

Second, like only a few very fortunate center cities, Washington is experiencing a marginal but significant increase in demand for urban living. People want to live in vital and interesting "18 hour" neighborhoods such as Downtown or Dupont Circle and emerging neighborhoods such as 14th Street NW, the Uptown Destination District, or H Street NE (where as many as 1,300 units of housing are in development or planning stages just on 3rd and 4th Streets NE between H and L Streets).

The District has many such neighborhoods of historic residential and commercial buildings, where people aren’t dependent on cars to get around and they can walk to work and to stores, shops, restaurants, and other activities. But a downside in the intermediate run is that many of our neighborhoods are faced with rapid change–new residents, new development and plans for more, and increased demand for quality municipal services–which can be wrenching and difficult.

Third, the District is dependent on increasing property and income tax revenues to achieve a balanced budget, and as Jane Jacobs pointed out in the classic text Death and Life of Great American Cities, cities need a basic level of residential density and mixed uses to be successful and to be able to support a variety of retail and other uses.
Somehow we need to be able to accommodate these changes without diminishing the character and scale of the neighborhoods that make the city attractive in the first place. Figuring out how to do this is difficult and many people are dissatisfied with the process. On the other hand, it wasn’t that long ago that urban sociologists thought that cities experienced a cycle of birth, growth, and inevitable decline. Who thought that revitalization and growth would again be part of this cycle?

Fourth, the ongoing tension between Downtown and Big Projects such as convention centers, sports arenas, and baseball stadiums versus more ground-up and neighborhood-focused revitalization can likely be ameliorated but never eliminated. One of the ways to address this is to recognize the experience and lessons that the profession of urban planning offers to the successful execution of revitalization.

I have frequently testified before Council on historic preservation and related matters. I find it hard to believe that all too often, the City’s economic development agenda pays short shrift to architecture and history, which in fact are the defining elements of the District’s "competitive advantage" vis-a-vis cookie cutter Toll Brothers constructed subdivisions, strip shopping centers and malls of the suburbs, and the false–albeit successful–construction of "sense of place" through chain-populated lifestyle centers such as Pentagon Row.

Clearly, the knowledge of urban planning best practices needs to percolate up, down, and across the various branches of District Government and its agencies. Ellen McCarthy, with a long history of living in the District (although like most of us, she came here from somewhere else), is well situated to help move the District of Columbia forward on each of these dimensions.

Ms. McCarthy has been a strong proponent of neighborhood-based planning in a city where for many reasons, the concerns of the commercial center of the city, Downtown, will always be paramount.
As a Deputy Director of the Office, she managed successfully what I always thought of as an interesting, complementary, and at times oppositional portfolio–combining "development review," neighborhood revitalization, and historic preservation.

In the Ivy City neighborhood where I work today, Ms. McCarthy engaged OP in an "economic planning" study of the Cluster (Cluster 23). This study produced a far-reaching vision that intends to keep community residents front and center in the revitalization plan–when typically such people have been forced out as new projects make their way into distressed neighborhoods which then become "hot" and desirable.
Ellen McCarthy has been strongly supportive of our CDC’s efforts to develop a neighborhood and workforce revitalization program centered around the creation of a building trades and preservation arts training school and related micro-enterprise development. We hope to be a key driver in the execution and implementation of the revitalization plan for Cluster 23.

This example is important because as successful as the city is, many segments of the population and certain neighborhoods still face persistent poverty and astounding rates of unemployment.
It is vital that the Director of Office of Planning be focused on "Growing an Inclusive City," while at the same time harnessing and directing the growth of the commercial core of the city, which is dependent on its proximity to and the constant growth of the Federal Government, and the other successful areas of the city. Ellen McCarthy is the person who can balance this (at times) competing urban planning mission.

For that reason, I strongly encourage the City Council of the District of Columbia to confirm Ellen McCarthy to serve as Director of the DC Office of Planning.

Thank you for your consideration of this important matter before you.