ULI panel walks Mt. Pleasant.

The Urban Land Institute’s Washington chapter took a look at Mount Pleasant Street, a neighborhood commercial corridor that’s suffered more than its share of empty storefronts and bad turns of events. ULI recommended better connectivity to Columbia Heights and Adams Morgan, bike lanes, improving Lamont Park, and occasional weekend street closures among other ideas to revitalize the corridor.

The street already enjoys many of the characteristics of a successful neighborhood retail street. The historic buildings are architecturally interesting and varied, and the area is very walkable with a nice street grid. It’s well served by bus service, and the Columbia Heights Metro isn’t far. And many of the existing ethnic businesses provide retail diversity that’s absent from many other commercial streets.

However, the street isn’t thriving as it should. One major obstacle is the lack of connectivity to other areas. Right now, the Columbia Heights retail area runs along 14th and a little bit to the west on Park Road, but residential blocks and busy 16th Street divide it from Mount Pleasant. There’s a similar gap between Mount Pleasant Street and Adams Morgan’s commercial areas along Columbia Road. Poor lighting and loitering contribute to a “perception of safety concerns.”

ULI recommends building upon the area’s current mix of neighborhood-serving retail and ethnic businesses. The street doesn’t have buildings to support big box retail, plus there’s a lot of that next door in Columbia Heights, and without large buildings and large parking garages, it’s not going to be an office destination either. But it can become a regional draw for interesting, ethnic restaurants and shops. ULI’s specific recommendations include:

Better connectivity and wayfinding. Better signs to and from Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights could help people know about and find Mount Pleasant Street. They also recommend including “Mount Pleasant” on signs in the Columbia Heights station. Some have even proposed renaming that station to Columbia Heights/Mount Pleasant.

Bike access. There is no bicycle lane on Mount Pleasant Street today. ULI suggests adding a northbound lane as well as bicycle parking. Persumably southbound bicycle traffic would share the existing standard lane.

Improved public realm. This includes better lighting, removing some of the window grates, and promoting rooftop dining on the street. They suggest “putting the ‘park’ back in Lamont Park,” a paved triangle at the northern end of the street, to “make it a proper gathering place.”

Left: Lamont Park. Right: 3100 block of Mount Pleasant Street.

Photos from Google Street View. Click for interactive versions.

Adding development potential. A few parcels, like the one-story strip mall at 3124 Mount Pleasant Street, could benefit from redevelopment, but according to ULI the current zoning limits the parcels too much to make it worthwhile for landlords. They suggest rezoning the strip from C-2-A to C-2-B, which allows slightly taller buildings (65-foot instead of 50-foot), containing more residential FAR and a higher lot occupancy.

Try closing the street on some weekend days. Mount Pleasant Street could host a larger farmers’ market and additional vendors on occasional weekends, creating an outdoor market as a greater regional draw. Some residents on the Mount Pleasant Forum discussion suggested operating this like European cities do for market streets, where vehicles can drive on the street but pedestrians are allowed to stand anywhere. That lets vendors’ trucks get in and out and even other drivers if they wish, but the street isn’t operating for the primary benefit of cars at that time. European cities also often raise up entire blocks to sidewalk level, emphasizing the pedestrian priority. The Mount Pleasant Transportation Study recommendations also suggest doing this around Lamont Park.

Residents of the neighborhood don’t all agree on these or any other recommendations. In fact, ULI listed “lack of consensus” and “fractured leadership” as some of the challenges for the street. On the forum, one participant vehemently argued against even trying to close the street on the occasional weekend day, arguing that it would divert traffic to other streets.

“Newton’s Laws of Motion may not be directly applicable to traffic flows, but the concept is about the same,” he wrote. Actually that’s not true in the way he means it. There is no “law of conservation of traffic,” and traffic scientists have discovered quite the opposite; traffic fills to occupy the available space. Traffic acts more like air than water. Regardless, there’s one good way to find out: give it a try.

There’s another factor not part of ULI’s report: residential density. More residents in the surrounding area would mean more patrons for the local neighborhood-serving shops and restaurants. Mount Pleasant has many large houses, but the current zoning drastically limits owners’ ability to divide a house into smaller apartments or condos. In neighboring Columbia Heights and Adams Morgan, on the other hand, zoning allows more units in a building, which allows for more residents.

During the zoning update, some residents advocated for even stricter limits on owners’ ability to subdivide houses. Maintaining a variety of sizes is important to create a mix of people from singles to large families, but artificial limits on the population also handicap the neighborhood’s retail street. Easing this limit without abolishing it completely, or removing it in only part of the neighborhood, could protect some of the family-sized housing while also bringing in customers for the struggling businesses in Mount Pleasant.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.