Tell DC what you think of its Comp Plan

The DC Office of Planning is making proposed amendments to the District’s 2006Comprehensive Plan, a robust document which is basically a long term road map for how we interact with the city, frombd官方网站登录入口to transportation, andland use.

And everyone gets a shot to weigh in. You, as residents of the District, now have until Friday, Jan.10, to provide public comment. The deadline was extended from Dec. 20, 2019.

What does this mean?

This means you get to tell the Office of Planning whatever you want to say about the Comp Plan. As an individual, your participation in this process is whatever you want it to be. You can send extensive comments, or you can just tell the Office of Planning that you want, perhaps, the entire northwest quadrant of the city to be designated as high-density mixed use. Up to you!

In all seriousness, if you’re interested in writing a comment in the next few days—and we certainly encourage you to—it can be technical, if you’re comfortable with the particulars of the Comp Plan and the Future Land Use Map, or it can be as simple as saying that you support Office of Planning’s proposed amendments.

This also means that your Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners have until Feb. 14 to write resolutions, vote on them, and submit them to the Office of Planning. You can also email your ANC commissioner and tell them what you think they should do.

If you’re an ANC commissioner, you’ve already probably gotten some information from the Office of Planning about how you should handle this process, and likely have in mind what you think you and your fellow commissioners will do.

So, while the public only has until this Friday to submit comments, ANCs have an additional four weeks beyond that to hear what their constituents have to say, and draft and pass resolutions accordingly.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Send an email toplandc@dc.govwith your thoughts about the Comp Plan.
2. CC your ANC commissioners, your councilmember, and the at-large councilmembers, including Chairman Phil Mendelson, on that email. You can look up what ANC you’re inhere, and check here to find your commissioner’s email address. If you’re so inclined, cc me atabaca@www.ethiopiaexpat.com.
3. There’s a form embedded below. You should fill it out if you support the Office of Planning’s amendments,andif you would like the amendments to the Comp Plan and the Future Land Use Maps (FLUM) to go further in adding greater density, especially in affluent parts of the city and especially around high-frequency transit lines.

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Here’s what we said about the Comp Plan?

For what it’s worth, we wrote about amendments to thebd官方网站登录入口,land use, andhistoric preservationelements. We also formally submitted comments as GGWash, which you can readhere, and as part of the Housing Priorities Coalition, which you can readhere.

The highlights of these comments are:

• 我们认为OP做了一个伟大的乔b with its amendments, and we support them.
• 我们还认为薪酬计划,通过Future Land Use Map, allow for greater density in all parts of the city, but most especially in planning areas—Rock Creek West, Near Northwest, and Capitol Hill—that have not produced their fair share of, (particularly affordable) housing. A specific change that could begin to induce this is to amend the FLUM so that those planning areas are, at minimum, categorized as moderate-density mixed use.
• 我们真的很喜欢OP的修改土地利用element, most especially changes to Section 309.10, which state that the District’s “established” neighborhoods should be “supported” rather than conserved. This language and similar amendments—all of which we think OP should retain—bolster the city’s initiative to build more housing in planning areas that have not produced their fair share of housing, or “established” neighborhoods.
• We’d like to see the addition of more language that commits both the Housing and Land Use elements to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing principles. AFFH is a federal rule that advances the goals of the Fair Housing Act by requiring that the US and its municipalities take “meaningful actions, in addition to combating discrimination, that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics.” The Trump administration has consistently sought to weaken this Obama-era rule, so local commitment to the same ideals and actions ismore important than ever.
• The Comp Plan shouldn’t say anything about minimum lot sizes or setbacks, either in OP’s amendments or future revisions. Minimum lot sizes and setback requirements are often used to stymie the construction of denser, smaller housing by mandating that the lots be bigger than necessary, or that the buildings have lots of space around them.
• We suggest the addition of language that eliminates minimum parking requirements, or the deletion of language that requires parking. Not building parking can save significant costs in building housing. The District should, in particular, discourage parking requirements in federal facilities planning, andnotsubsidize parking through tax increment financing deals or other, similar economic development deals.

If it’s helpful, you should feel free to borrow language from our comments when you’re writing your own. But feel free to be as technical or as broad as you’d like. Even saying something like, “I support more affordable, denser housing in wealthy parts of the city,” is useful.

Tell me more about this form, and why isn’t GGWash setting up a click-to-send action alert for this?

First: There is alotto the Comp Plan, and its various sections do different things. It has a set ofcitywide elementsthat address big-picture concepts like land use, housing, historic preservation, or transportation. It hasarea elements, which address the built form of the city’s 10 planning areas. There’s theFuture Land Use Map, which shows how and what can be built in a given area in the future, and theGeneralized Policy Map, which shows which parts of the city are slated for future planning efforts.

I summarized above what we think are the most urgent changes that the OP should make to its amendments before it sends a legislative package to the council. But there’s so much more that we could say—far more than could fit in a form letter.

We know that GGWash readers are fairly high-information, and probably have more points to make than what we’re prioritizing. If that sounds like you, send the OP an email atplandc@dc.gov(and CC your ANC commissioner, and your councilmembers, and the at-large councilmembers! And me, if you don’t mind—abaca@www.ethiopiaexpat.com!).

Secondly: Wecouldhave set up an action alert that would have directed a bunch of generic emails to the Office of Planning, or to the council (even though the Comp Plan isn’t in front of the council yet). But it’s harder to get emails to individual ANC commissioners, and OP is leaning heavily on ANC resolutions to guide changes to its amendments. Put simply, there’s not an easy way to automate the most meaningful feedback.

That’s because the most meaningful and reliable way to make administrators and elected officials feel like there is positive public sentiment for the things you want to see is tobethat positive public sentiment. Petitions and action alerts have an important role in advocacy, but there’s nothing as valuable as numerous personal emails. And—for all the reasons stated above—feedback on the Comp Plan is best delivered to OP, ANCs, and the council in your own voice.

But we understand that you’re busy, and don’t have tons of time to devote to wrapping your head around technical documents. So we’re asking you to fill out the form below.

It won’t send an email on your behalf to someone’s inbox, like a typical action alert. And, because there are so many vagaries to the Comp Plan, we’re not setting it up as a petition.

But it will let us know who you are, which is important: Down the line, as the council works its way through public feedback on OP’s amendments, we want to be able to reliably demonstrate to your elected representatives that they have constituents who want a more accessible, inclusive—and denser—District.

Filling out the form indicates that you’re willing to be counted as supporting what we’ve said about the Comp Plan here, and willing to be connected to your ANC commissioner and councilmember. I’d also like to be able to contact you directly if you have a stated interest in this.

Thank you!

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