Category: Washington

D.C. planner: Affordability is cities’ next big challenge

“Rock star planner” may be an oxymoron, but if there are rock star planners, Harriet Tregoning is one. Tregoning has been chief city planner in Washington, D.C., since 2007— a time of rapid growth and change in the District of Columbia. She’s stepping down to run the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A looming problem in many U.S. cities is affordability, she said in an interview with Next City, but looking only at real estate prices masks the problem.  “I think the challenge for American cities for the next decade or more is indeed affordability, but it’s not just about housing,” she said. (Read the whole interview here.)

She noted that for the 8 million jobs lost in the recession, the average wage was $24 an hour. While that number of jobs has been created in recent years, their average wage was $11 an hour.

“Middle-wage jobs are declining,” she said. “Or if they’re growing, they’re growing at a much slower rate than the other categories (high-wage, and low-wage hospitality and retail jobs). So affordability needs to be broadened to talk about job creation, middle-income job creation. What are we going to do with our infrastructure to enable us to produce more employment?”

Two topics in the interview have specific resonance for Charlotte. Tregoning talked about the retrofitting of some
suburban areas. “We have more urbanizing suburban development here in the Washington area than in any place in the country,” she said. “When Tysons Corner decided to do this, when Fairfax County decided to do this, it tipped the balance for a lot of other places.”

And she talked about the challenge for the city (which has a height limit) in accommodating new growth. Should the city, which has many areas of one- and two-story buildings, scrap or at least raise the height limit in order to allow towers in some areas in order to keep the growth from spreading into less-dense neighborhoods. Tregoning said:

“Our relatively torrid rate of [population] growth — more than 2 percent a year, 1,100 people a month — is causing the dialog to change. … Plenty of other places around the world accommodate much larger populations in the same kind of geography without having tall buildings. I think the dialog in our city will be, how do we want to accommodate such growth? What kind of neighborhood change are we willing to tolerate? And how will that dictate where in the city growth will go?

“ … The starting point will be asking every neighborhood, ‘Here’s the growth coming to the city, here’s what we project over the next 30 years. This is what your share of that growth looks like. How would you most like to accommodate that growth in your neighborhood?’ I think the easy answer is, ‘I know, let’s grow in that neighborhood over there! They need some growth, but our neighborhood, we’re good.’ The question is going to be, how to have a dialog where people really have to consider real choices about how that growth will be accommodated?”

Charlotte has yet to seriously confront that same issue: Where do you allow intense growth and how do you balance it alongside a wish to keep older, less-dense areas from being wiped clean of the past? The conundrum is most likely to arise as transit-oriented zoning comes to historic, low-density neighborhoods like NoDa and Optimist Park along the route of the Blue Line Extension. The city’s TOD zoning allows heights of as much as 10 or 12 stories. Even a beloved area like NoDa, which has no historic district protection, may well see most of its historic fabric scraped away in favor of 10-story buildings. Think that can’t happen? Just look at uptown Charlotte, which lost virtually all its old buildings and is now mostly new office and condo towers scattered among parking decks and surface parking lots that replaced its historic fabric.

When planners insist, Walmart gets urban


Multistory Walmart in Washington, in a mixed-use building.

Ed McMahon, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington — and a keynote speaker here in June for the RealityCheck regional planning exercise — sends along a photo of the new, urban-styled Walmart that opened Wednesday in Washington, on Seventh Street NW. “It shows what Wal-Mart can do, if you push them,” he writes.
In a later email, he said, “Wal-Mart* wants to be in hot urban markets like DC because cities are the only place left in America with more spending power than stores.” Because Walmart’s intention to build in Washington was controversial, he wrote, “The City Planning office pushed hard for good urban design.”

The huge retail chain has proposed six stores in D.C., McMahon writes. Two opened Wednesday. The other is on Georgia Avenue. A rendering is below. While the Seventh Street store has housing above the retail, the second one is single-use. but at least it’s sitting on the sidewalk like a respectable city building, and has parking underground rather than splayed out on an asphalt parking lot.

Now, just to get you thinking, just below is the new(ish) Walmart that opened near UNC Charlotte on North Tryon
Street north of University City Boulevard. The tract had been zoned for a conventional suburban-style shopping center since before the city even had plans for its light rail transit line or passed the transit tax in 1998. 
Bing maps photo
Despite knowing by 1998 that light rail would eventually be heading up North Tryon Street, the land was never rezoned for transit-oriented style development. Nor was other land along North Tryon Street.
Just a thought: The entrance to Walmart off North Tryon Street is roughly 1,500 feet (.28 mile) from the planned light rail station at McCullough Drive. It’s generally accepted by planners that the most important areas for transit-oriented development are those within a half-mile of transit stations; a quarter-mile walk is generally considered as far as most people will willingly walk. (Although I question that convention wisdom.)
Today, any piece of property if it already holds the city’s old-style commercial zoning, even if it is right smack-dab at a transit station, could sprout another Walmart-style building. And that does not mean DC-Walmart-style.
I just thought you’d like to know.
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* Copy-editors and punctuation enthusiasts may wonder why I switch from Walmart to Wal-Mart and back? Two reasons. First, the stores are Walmart. The corporate entity is Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  Second, I was directly quoting McMahon’s email, and he called it “Wal-Mart.”