Tag: dc comp plan
Housing Priorities Coalition
DC Comprehensive Plan Fact Sheet
CSG Comments on DC Comp Plan Amendments
January 10, 2020
Director Andrew Trueblood
DC Office of Planning
1100 4th Street, SW, Suite 650 East
Washington, DC 20024
Via: plandc@dc.gov
RE: Coalition for Smarter Growth Comments on DC Comp Plan October 2019 Draft
ENCL: Detailed CSG comments on the Comprehensive Plan October 2019 draft
Dear Director Trueblood:
Please accept these comments on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, the leading organization in the Washington, DC region dedicated to making the case for smart growth. Our mission is to promote walkable, inclusive, and transit-oriented communities, and the land use and transportation policies and investments needed to make those communities flourish.
Summary statement: We wish to express our support for the Comprehensive Plan amendments, including the map amendments. We believe that these changes are a major step forward for the District, as it seeks to fulfill its new mandate from the Framework Element to build a more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable city.
We strongly support the housing goals to increase housing opportunities throughout the city and provide more affordable homes, especially in parts of the city where there are few today. We commend the refocusing of defensive language to “enhancing” and “respecting” neighborhoods while ensuring they help address our housing needs. We also support the continued focus on transit-oriented development. We recommend going further in rethinking the role of vehicle parking in our future as parking requirements are a government anachronism in a rapidly changing transportation and environmental context. We recommend eliminating government regulations for minimum parking requirements and focusing on improving multimodal access and transportation demand management.
A mix of housing types with access to better transit will build a stronger city and better neighborhoods for all. It is also a legal obligation under the Fair Housing Act to affirmatively further fair housing. We applaud the District’s specific production goals to create 36,000 homes, with 12,000 of them affordable by 2025, and we support the allocation of these production goals by planning area. We agree that this is a helpful approach to building a truly equitable city and directly addressing the need to undo a legacy of racial discrimination and segregation.
We support the Future Land Use Map (FLUM) changes in general. A highlight are FLUM changes for new housing capacity in Rock Creek West, the area with the smallest share of affordable housing, at just one percent today. The next two areas lagging in affordable housing opportunities are Capitol Hill and Near Northwest. We urge the District to designate more housing capacity in these areas to achieve the
minimum 15 percent affordable homes in each planning area. We value quality affordable homes to meet the needs of DC households in all planning areas, but we especially urge the city to use land use policy to help lagging areas catch up to their affordable housing production goals of 15 percent.
DC’s many compact, walkable, transit-served neighborhoods make it the most sustainable place to live in the region. We should make it easier for more people, of all incomes to live in the city, which offers lower transportation costs, and helps reduce regional vehicle miles traveled and greenhouse gas emissions. The Comprehensive Plan and the District’s increased housing production goals play a major role in facilitating our region’s increased sustainability and social equity. The District faces many challenges, but our most pressing need as we manage the benefits of rising prosperity is to ensure that our low-income residents, especially people of color, have access to safe and affordable housing and transportation, along with quality nearby schools and services. Therefore, we commend the District’s efforts to ensure equitable access to quality housing and neighborhoods across the city.
We have enclosed our detailed comments on the Comprehensive Plan and maps. These comments are supplemented by our joint statement with affordable housing groups submitted on December 16, 2019. In addition, we want to associate ourselves with the comments of Ward 3 Vision and the 21st Century School Fund.
Thank you for the good work of the Office of Planning and sister agencies in putting together this excellent draft. We look forward to supporting the quick adoption of the new plan.
Sincerely,
Cheryl Cort, Policy Director
Housing Priorities Coalition DC Comp Plan comments
December, 16, 2019: A coalition of affordable housing advocates and producers released comments today in support of the DC Comprehensive Plan draft amendments.
Support DC’s Comp Plan. Join Nov-Dec 2019 Meetings
Attend one of the DC Office of Planning meetings in your community to help ensure increased affordable housing is implemented
CSG in the News: Study: DC rent is 3rd highest in the country
Study: DC rent is 3rd highest in the country; Here’s how much income you need to afford it
WASHINGTON (ABC7) — The D.C. Council unanimously voted on the first step of the city’s Comprehensive Plan for development last week.
A spokesperson for Mayor Bowser’s office said she will likely unveil the remaining elements of the comprehensive plans as well as area housing targets and maps on October 15.
The comprehensive plan includes proposed solutions to the city’s affordable housing shortage – an issue that elected officials and advocates are coming together to try to fix.
The plan will go through review by the National Capital Planning Commission and Congress before it gets to the mayor’s desk for signing, the mayor’s spokesperson said….
Numbers from the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimate that over 50 percent of residents living in the D.C. metro area are renters.
According to NLIHC, the median family income for both renters and buyers is $121,000. This means families can afford to pay $3,000 a month for rent without being cost-burdened.
HUDs estimate of a fair market rent that recent movers paid for a modest two-bedroom apartment in D.C. was $1665, but 60 percent of rents are currently higher according to the NLIHC.
For those in the fortieth percentile, in order to afford $1665 without being “cost-burdened” an individual would have to earn $66,000 a year, or $5500 monthly, the NLIHC estimates.
Assuming a 40-hour workweek, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into $32.02 an hour. Working at the minimum wage of $14.00 an hour in D.C. each week an individual would have to work 90 hours weekly at two jobs to afford a modest apartment.
Cheryl Cort, policy director for Coalition for Smarter Growth, an organization dedicated to bettering the district believes lack of affordable housing is one of the greatest challenges D.C. faces.
“Housing insecurity worsens other conditions in a person’s life. Many DC residents face daunting challenges — lack of access to quality education and training, violent neighborhoods, poor health status, low wage jobs and unstable employment. Lack of access to stable, quality housing compounds all these problems, and is also one of the solutions to a number of these problems,” Cort said.
Cort said the CSG stands behind the mayor’s housing strategy. In May, the mayor signed an order directing District agencies to identify new policies, tools, and initiatives that would start moving toward the goal of creating 36,000 new housing units, 12,000 of them affordable, by 2025….
Regardless of how the numbers add up, whether you’re renting or buying, one thing is clear – officials and advocates think housing in D.C. is too expensive.“Bold action to address housing affordability requires the entire city’s input and energy,” Cort said.
View the full story by WJLA here.
ALERT: We won! Yesterday, the DC Council voted for a more inclusive city!
ALERT: We won! DC Comprehensive Plan will help build a more inclusive city!
Yesterday, Oct. 9, 2019, after many delays, the DC Council voted on the Framework Element of the Comprehensive Plan, the guiding document that will shape our city for years to come.
With your help, we fought for and won two key amendments. The first prioritizes preserving and building more affordable housing, and preventing the displacement of residents. The second fixes the broken review process for Planned Unit Developments (PUDs) so it can be predictable, while also prioritizing affordable housing and preventing displacement.
These changes go a long way towards making the District more inclusive!
Take a moment to thank the DC Council!
What happened? Over the last few months we partnered with other housing advocacy groups, sent alerts to you at key points, met with Councilmembers and staff, and explained the issues to the media. With your help we were able to win two critical amendments:
- Councilmember Brianne Nadeau’s amendment which helps address racial and social equity in DC by explicitly prioritizing affordable housing and prevention of displacement.
- An amendment removing exclusionary language which made preserving “physical and visual character” a dominating requirement in development review. This language was too similar to the type of planning language that has historically perpetuated housing segregation. The Council replaced it with language suggested by the DC Office of Planning, which we supported.
We thank Chairman Mendelson and the Council, who heard us and made the revisions we knew were critical to a better plan. Thanks to these changes, well-designed affordable housing and mixed-income housing proposals will be able to move forward again.
Please be sure to thank the DC Council!
We’re excited to get to work reviewing and supporting good projects. Meanwhile, the rest of the Comp Plan chapters will be coming forward soon. Look for more updates from the CSG team!
We hope you will stay involved, helping to shape land use and housing policies and decisions to ensure our city is a place where longtime residents can stay and thrive, and newcomers can find new opportunities.
Background to the critical Comprehensive Plan amendments
The 2006 Comprehensive Plan focused too much on preserving the status quo rather than planning for a growing population and the need for more housing that is affordable to middle and lower-income residents. Opponents of new housing have used the 2006 Comprehensive Plan to delay thousands of new homes, and hundreds of new affordable homes — increasing rather than reducing displacement of longtime residents.
That’s why we developed dozens of amendments, and also partnered with other organizations to craft and submit numerous amendments to the Comprehensive Plan, provided testimony at the March 2018 hearing, and why you sent in hundreds of emails to the Council last year.
On July 10, 2019, the DC Council took a preliminary vote on the Framework Element of Comprehensive Plan bill proposed by Chairman Phil Mendelson. While the Chairman’s bill included a significant number of our amendments, as well as the Office of Planning’s amendments, the Chairman’s revised bill still fell short in addressing the need for more affordable housing.
As a result of strong advocacy to the Chairman and the Council by the Coalition for Smarter Growth, our active supporters, and our partners in the DC Housing Priorities Coalition, the DC Council voted for an amended Bill 23-1 on October 8, 2019. Amendments we won:
- Specific guidance to prioritize affordable housing and preventing displacement in the Planned Unit Development (PUD) approval process (section 224.9).
- Removal of exclusionary language about “physical and visual character” in the Planned Unit Development approval process, which would have made this “character” more important than any of our other values like preventing displacement and building more affordable housing. The Council supported alternative language recommended by DC Office of Planning, which we supported (section 227.2).
Learn more about the amendments in the CSG blog post: DC Office of Planning and advocates seek to change troubling provision in DC Comprehensive Plan bill
CSG in the News: D.C. Council Approves Measure To Curb Wave Of Development Appeals Washington DC
The ongoing process to amend D.C.’s Comprehensive Plan received a key approval vote Tuesday after Council Chairman Phil Mendelson removed language that had caused concerns among planners and housing advocates.