Better to have a s**** neighborhood than to encourage investment-induced displacement

That was a sentiment that was explained to me in 2002 by a person in the H Street neighborhood, who said that many people preferred crime, neglect, nuisances, and other sordid privations rather than worry about the consequences of a nicer neighborhood and property prices going up.

Shockingly that is the sentiment of someone who works for the Meyer Foundation, one of the region's leading foundations, WHICH WAS FUNDED FROM MONEY DONATED BY OWNERS OF THE WASHINGTON POST.

KAREN FITZGERALD, a member of the Montgomery County Park and Planning's Master Plan Advisory Group on the Purple Line and is a program officer for housing and community development at the Meyer Foundation, makes this point in another letter to the editor:

Those who support the Purple Line on "social justice" grounds would do well to study what has happened in the District and other cities when Metro or light rail is brought into low-income neighborhoods. Real estate becomes more valuable, a wave of development brings in new housing and retail, and many long-time residents (many of whom were renters) are pushed out. Indeed, the introduction of mass transit into low-income neighborhoods greatly increases the likelihood that long-time, often low-income, renters will be displaced.*

THE ISSUE THEN ISN'T TO DO NOTHING, BUT TO ADDRESS AND PLAN AND RESPOND TO THE IMPACT AND POTENTIAL NEGATIVE IMPACTS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN, RATHER THAN AFTER, OR MORE LIKELY, NEVER.**

Do we really want a grim, crime-ridden, trashed, bankrupt community, like DC was 20 years ago, when 30 people were murdered within 18 months, a few blocks away from my house, during the height of the crack epidemic, when a woman was brutally raped and murdered by a group of neighborhood toughs in an alley behind H Street NE?

So the Meyer Foundation should get off their a****, maybe they have, and pull together advocates, including thoughtful deliberative people like me rather than knee-jerks, and get a housing policy hammered out, and a plan for implementation.

It's very difficult for those of us blogging away, with little support and connections, and the "grease" to get things done.

I wrote this, in the context of H Street Main Street and exhibiting at the one and only CityLiving Expo, back in 2003:

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THE QUESTIONS PEOPLE ASKED REALLY MADE ME CHANGE MY THINKING ABOUT TWO THINGS. I always write that "diversity of housing types" is important and necessary to the neighborhood, especially in terms of reducing displacement, but I didn't really know what that meant until we started getting questions on Saturday...

First, people kept asking about condominiums. I explained that this is coming but we are working on some zoning changes to make this happen. We need to work with the property owners on the 200 and 300 blocks of H Street to make sure this happens. It should also shape the development of the BP site. The land that we have available is too precious to waste. And as everyone knows we need more residents to strengthen the neighborhood ane more customers for the commercial district.

Second, it means that over the long term we (HSMS) really need to work on some of these broader housing issues as they relate to revitalization of the greater neighborhood and the strengthening of the H Street retail trade area.

We need to develop a position statement on housing issues in the broader neighborhood. We need to monitor developments that are in our trade area, developments that we might not ordinarily monitor, because they are in Wards 5 or 7. This should be linked to the encouragement of transit-oriented development associated with the proposed light rail developments along H Street/Benning Road and Florida Avenue.

(We probably need to develop a position statement about light rail as well. Personally I think it should be encouraged, and on an accelerated timetable. The paper on the www.apta.com website called "Bring Back the Streetcars" indicates that a 4-6 year timetable is not out of the question. It makes sense to coordinate this with the streetscape improvement program. Fixed-rail transit investments generate great economic returns. It will vastly benefit the H Street commercial district. It should be no surprise that the H Street commercial district began declining once streetcars were removed from the corridor...)

It means that we need to weigh in on projects such as the Clark Realty development on Bladensburg on the old Sears site. Maybe they need more density. It means we need to advocate for housing above Hechinger Mall (like Kevin and I have been saying for years.) It means we need to look at the northern parking lots of RFK (problematic because they are owned by the federal government? which are wasted. Condominiums could be developed here, along with maintaining quality public space so that the Open Air Farmers Market would not be displaced. Etc.

We also need to work on inclusionary zoning and related incentives to ensure that affordable housing is required, as well as to ensure quality design. (WRT design, don't think it doesn't matter. The Pritzker condominums at 300 Mass Ave. NW are much more attractive than the condos at 4th and Massachusetts by Paradigm, and that is because the latter development used office building style window glass instead of the residential style windows of the former. Similarly, the new apartment building on the 1000 block of New Jersey Avenue NW is pretty utilitarian. Incentives should have been provided to get them to include balconies and other design features that would have softwened the facade and made the building look more inviting.)

(Note that the newest housing in the greater neighborhood -- 800 block of 10th St., Wylie Court, and the development across from Hechinger Mall -- is all pretty utilitarian and cheap looking and really denigrates the overall aesthetic of the neighborhood's architectural style and sense of place.)

Also, we need to make up a sheet about the residential living opportunities in the neighborhood, comparable to the sheets that the DC Marketing Center has developed for the H Street commercial district (as well as others throughout the city). Similarly, we need to add a "residential house photo tour" to the hstreetdc.com website.
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(Of course, in response one prominent member complained that I write too much, and too long. That person is a high-level person working on commercial development issues for a city-funded non-profit)

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* She needs to learn more about spending in low income households, the large portion devoted to transportation, when low income households own many cars, and have to travel long distances to work, and the income on household wealth and the ability to climb the ladder of economic stability and success. Greater transportation connectivity builds income for people, households, and regions. E.g., see the work by Newman and Kenworthy.

** Similarly, the elected officials in NYC and New York State who opposed congestion pricing on equity grounds missed the point. Deal with the equity issues, through tax credits, rebates, etc., if you think driving is so important that it still needs to be subsidized. But don't scuttle or fail to consider the plan because of purported equity issues. One doesn't (tired rostrum here) "throw out the baby with the bath water." One washes baby. Takes baby out of the tub. Drains the tub. Similarly, do the policy and address the negative effects, if they are there.

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Oops, there goes my chance at grants from the Meyer Foundation. But given this level of discourse, can you see why getting local foundations to fund challenging, transformational thinking and policy development is so difficult?