Development economics and Anacostia

Given the comment thread on the earlier entry about moving the WMATA headquarters to Anacostia, it's worth reprinting this excerpt from a blog entry from July...

I have written other posts on this issue over the years as it relates to Anacostia specifically -- "Office buildings won't "save" Anacostia," and "Enclave development won't "save" Anacostia" are but a couple of the many many entries. [The latter entry is based on core-periphery arguments from the radical thread of global development economics studies. Even though it is focused on first world-third world relations, I find that the field offers a lot when considering similar questions in disinvested locations within "first world" nations such as the U.S.]

a. Office buildings aren't necessarily the preferred economic development that people ought to want. Crystal City was hardly a vibrant place when it served as an office and contractor ghetto for the Navy. If it weren't for some housing and hotels, it would have been even more bleak.

Similarly, M Street SE, the new destination for defense contractors locating near to their clients now housed at the Navy Yard, is equally bleak. It shuts down at 5 pm. This is because the office workers have little interest in the city beyond it being their place of employment.

Despite everything that we are told by urban planners and elected officials, office workers support miniscule amounts of retail. The numbers per worker are 2 s.f. of retail and 5 s.f. of restaurant space. You need thousands and thousands of workers to support much retail (add it up yourself). And the type of retail they support is extremely limited--convenience retail like drug stores, convenience food, dry cleaners, wireless phone stores, along with quick service food, like sandwich shops, rather than full-service restaurants.

Also see this piece from the Post in February 2007 "All Quiet on Carlyle's Retail Front," which I blogged about in "The retail numbers "they" don't want you to know"... lamenting about how the Patent and Trademark Office's locating by the King Street Metro in Alexandria hasn't led to a neighborhood and retail resurgence in that area.

b. There isn't a comphrehensiv economic and land use revitalization plan for Anacostia even though there are some plans for some areas. Look at the Ward 8 section of the Office of Planning's Neighborhood and Revitalization Plans and you'll see what I mean. And the old Anacostia Waterfront Initiative website, which had some planning documents, now merely redirects to the www.dc.gov website, as that development corporation was subsumed into the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

[Correction: the AWI planning reports are online here.]

You need a plan in order to have the revitalization that you expect. (Plus it has to be good, see below...)

c. And there needs to be a "Build Out Analysis" in order to determine if it is even possible to build the kind of office ghetto that people seem to be clamoring for. There is at Poplar Point, but to do so in the traditional Anacostia commercial district, which is historically designated not that the Ward 8 political and economic elites are committed to historic preservation, would mean that it would have to be torn down and rebuilt--just like Downtown DC was in the 1980s and 1990s.

For some insight into this, see the blog entry, "Arson as a(nother) redevelopment strategem," which is specifically about Anacostia. Being committed to historic preservation centric revitalization, I know that I wouldn't favor the destruction of the Anacostia commercial district in favor of an office ghetto.

d. And we would have to decide if we want Poplar Point to be an office ghetto, and would such use be the best way to use that property economically and in terms of neighborhood and city livability objectives.
-----------------
A colleague happened to send me a link to an article about "redevelopment" in Sacramento, from the Fresno Bee, "City efforts at renewal not always a success." Here is my response, which makes the same points I would make about an office-driven "revitalization" program for Anacostia, or frankly for M Street SE as well--if it isn't balanced, it isn't going to have the kinds of impacts that are claimed by the proponents, regardless of how much everyone wants it to work.

Building housing for poor people downtown isn't downtown revitalization. You need housing that attracts people with income--money to spend. (I read a statistic last weekend that surprised me. Households with incomes $70,000 or higher comprise 30% of the US population but are responsible for 50% of consumer spending.)

As far as revitalization goes, you do need to create new and leverage existing anchors/ attractions. But the general failure is not putting effort into improving the quality of the buildings and "offer" of the area around the anchors (as mentioned in the article) simultaneously.

In DC for example, we built a $450MM convention center. Its location is between two of the 1968 riot corridors. On one street, many of the buildings are still in dreadful condition and/or vacant. So why didn't the city put say $15MM into rehabilitating the buildings and in foster retail business creation there simultaneously during construction and in advance of the opening of the convention center? Instead, trickle down improvements were expected. Meanwhile, the improvement of that corridor has been slow going. (The Convention Center isn't all that successful either but that's another story.) And people keep complaining about how convention center attendees aren't leaving the confines of the building and exploring the area around it...

Without doing that kind of simultaneous linkage, revitalization takes so much longer. And without it, like the example mentioned in the story, you don't get people spending much time and money outside of visiting the anchor--they come in, consume the experience, and leave the city. And seeing poor people on the streets, litter, and graffiti when they do look outside, doesn't help either...