Posts about Third Church

To give some background, HPO is a department of the DC Office of Planning with a full-time staff. Among other functions, they meet with people who apply for permits in historic districts, conduct research into the history of buildings, and issue written reports about redevelopment proposals.

HPRB, a group of 9 private citizens appointed by the mayor, makes decisions on cases. Department of Interior rules require certain members to have degrees or experience in architecture, archaeology, history, and so on, while other members can have any background. HPRB hears the case, listens to the applicant, HPO, and the public, and then determines whether a proposal is "compatible" with the historic district or landmark.

The decision in this case had many problems which the church can probably use to challenge the decision, if they choose. Some of the problems reflect flaws in the process itself, which will come up in other cases as well.

The staff position is inconsistent. The staff report primarily argues that there is a sacrosanct 90-foot cornice line on lower 16th Street, and that no occupiable space should go above there even if it's set back, as the owners suggested in their compromise plan. However, in 2007 the staff endorsed an occupiable rooftop event space for the Hay-Adams Hotel, one block away and closer to the White House.

HPO doesn't necessarily need to always come out exactly the same on each and every issue, but they should have cited that case and explained why they think this one is different.

Too many of HPO's and HPRB's decisions seem arbitrary and subjective. In most regulatory areas, there are set statutes and rules, and an agency's job is to interpret how the rules apply to the specific case. There are only a few historic guidelines HPO has developed over the years, and they're remarkably sketchy. Therefore, very few of HPO's decisions actually follow from written policies. This makes it difficult for anyone to plan an addition or new construction in a historic district.

The report strays too far into zoning. Former HPRB chair Tersh Boasberg used to cut off public witnesses who attempted to cite zoning rules at hearings. He would insist that preservation is not zoning, and point out that the board's only job is to decide whether a project is historically "compatible" or not.

This staff report smashed that wall. Rather than just discussing whether the proposal was "compatible," the report brought up the limits of the site's SP-2 zoning, and the fact that the Zoning Commission would have to rezone the property and grant a Planned Unit Development (PUD) to make the proposal work.

At least some members based their decision on this zoning language. Gretchen Pfaehler, for instance, said that "I would ask that you work to comply with the 90-foot height level as the law requires." She clearly viewed the issue as whether she should give an exception to the zoning rule.

But, in fact, her job is to pay that particular rule no mind. The Zoning Commission decides on zoning; HPRB decides on historic compatibility. Which steps a property owner does or does not need to change the zoning on their property is historically irrelevant, as Boasberg would often point out.

And while the law might set a 90-foot height maximum, it also allows the Zoning Commission to set a different height, still within the law. So the law doesn't "require" 90 feet, per se.

The staff report came too late. HPO staff provide a formal written report the Friday before a case comes up before the HPRB. In this case, however, they did not get it out on time. Since the report was late, the property owner didn't have an opportunity to review it ahead of the scheduled meeting. Unable to prepare a response to a report they hadn't received, they decided to postpone their case by one month.

Government agencies have considerable power to impede property owners from doing things on their own property. The very least we should ask is that they make these decisions in a timely way and not unnecessarily string anyone along. If a project is on the agenda for a specific meeting, the government is obliged to be prepared for that meeting.

The staff negotiate in secret. In zoning cases, the review process is quite transparent. A property owner applies for a certain change, the application becomes public, agencies and community members weigh in, and then a board reviews the application. With preservation, however, the process is less clear. The owner first spends weeks or months talking with staff and often negotiating over what changes to make to a project, before it goes before any board and often before it's even public.

HPO staff often ask applicants to make changes which don't have a clear basis in regulations, but are merely personal preferences. Sometimes the board ends up disagreeing, but often in those cases the owner has already taken elements away from their plan and the board has no chance to restore them. This process limits the effectiveness and authority of the law, in favor of subjectivity.

In this case, staff negotiated to reduce the height of the building. The owners proposed a compromise where they would take one floor off the building and set the new top floor back farther, making it almost invisible. At one of the presentations ICG made to the community, they said they felt this was a compromise staff were willing to make based on their conversations with staff. But at the very end, staff backed away.

Any applicant has to run a long gauntlet of multiple offices and boards, each of which can ask for changes. Sometimes these changes are inconsistent, or one group asks for a compromise in one area and then the next uses that agreement as a starting point to negotiate for even more changes.

Rather than discussing projects in secret, preservation staff should just publicly state what they think is or isn't historic about a project, let neighbors and others put in their two cents, and put the questions to the board.

The ANC received no "great weight." By law, Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) recommendations deserve "great weight" from District agencies. There's no clear definition of how much weight is great, but there is a general consensus: As ANC 3B explains it, "'Great weight' means that a District agency must consider and respond to concerns voiced by an ANC, but does not necessarily have to agree with it or abide by the ANC's decisions." ANC 2E's webpage says, "The DC agency must: make its decision in writing, explicitly answer ANC arguments, and send a copy of the response to the ANC."

The staff report made no reference to the views of ANC 2B, which includes the site, and which voted to support the compromise plan. The staff report does not explicitly respond to the ANC's arguments, and therefore there is a strong case that they did not afford "great weight."

The meeting stayed nowhere near on time. This doesn't relate to the outcome of this particular case, but it's an important issue with the process in general. The agenda called for this case to come up at 1:30 pm. It actually started around 2:30, and members of the public got to speak closer to 4.

Acting chair Pfaehler also asked everyone to keep their remarks to 3 minutes, but several testified for over 10 minutes without a word from the chair. Meanwhile, 40-50 people had shown up to testify on McMillan, the next item on the agenda. But given the late hour, Pfaehler concluded there wasn't time to cover it, and sent all of them home.

They had taken considerable time out of their day to provide comment and didn't get a chance to do so at all. They may not all be available for the next meeting, so some of those comments will simply not be heard. The board needs to better manage its time, to show more respect to the people who dedicate part of their day to present views.

Overall, any process which leads such subjective decisions, where much of the negotiation happens in secret, with inconsistent rules about what is and isn't appropriate to consider, and unpredictable timing, needs fixing. In an upcoming article, I'll suggest a few ways to address these problems.

In one of DC's most controversial preservation cases, the HPRB rejected the application, since the church had been designated as historic. The owners appealed, and Mayor Fenty asked planning director Harriet Tregoning to personally sit as the Mayor's Agent, which hears such appeals. Using the broader discretion available to the Mayor's Agent, she granted the raze, but only once the owners present a new design that gets past historic and other review.

Separately, the church and developer also reached a settlement with the DC Preservation League where they gave $450,000 for DCPL's operations preservation programs involving religious properties in exchange for DCPL ending their fight against the project, the staff report notes; other groups such as the Committee of 100 continued to oppose razing the structure.

Earlier this year, the developers working with the church proposed an 11-story building with ground floor retail, offices above, and a church space on the first 3 floors at one end. Since the buildings along 16th have cornices at 90 feet above the street, they designed a building with its own cornice line slightly below that height. Behind and set back, a glassier structure would rise to the higher point.

Original proposal. Image scanned from submission by ICG Properties.

This building would still not be as tall as the adjacent one to the west on I Street, which falls into a different zone and isn't part of the historic district.

At a community meeting with residents of the Dupont and Golden Triangle area a few months ago, people were generally enthusiastic about the proposal. Architect and former HPO staffer Michael Beidler suggested some ways to set the upper portion back slightly more to create more separation.

Last month, however, the designers presented a different and significantly smaller proposal. Staff of the Historic Preservation Office (HPO), and some of the groups that opposed the original raze, opposed having a building taller than the 90 feet prevailing along the street. In response, the architects shrank the top portion to a single extra floor, set significantly back and only minimally visible from anywhere outside.

Revised "compromise" proposal. Image scanned from submission by ICG Properties.

In their staff report, HPO rejects even that proposal. The report argues that on 16th Street, it is not historically appropriate to allow any buildings over the prevailing 90 foot size. A few buildings have penthouses, but not ones with space for people to use, and the report seeks to draw a firm line there; if this building can even have a single floor of occupiable penthouse, then the St. Regis hotel will want a rooftop restaurant, it says, and several other buildings will likely follow suit.

The property owner's argument is also more difficult in that they're looking to exceed zoning, though in legally permissible ways. In the typical preservation density dispute, staff want to restrict a building far more than the zoning permits in that area. Here, the owners want to rezone the property from SP-2 to C-3-C as well, which would give greater flexibility, and also to seek a Planned Unit Development, where the Zoning Commission reviews the project in exchange for even more flexibility.

Still, if successful, HPO's action has consequences for the city far beyond the look of the street. To take away the top 2 floors whe moving from the original proposal to what the owners call the "compromise" proposal, they reduced the interior space from about 14,000 to 10,000 square feet, they said during a presentation. At a typical rule of thumb of 250 square feet per office, that would cut 152 potential jobs from downtown DC. HPO's recommended limits would squeeze that further.

Jobs are the centerpiece of Mayor Gray's agenda, and one prerequisite for jobs is space. Already, many companies DC would love to attract, like technology companies, have trouble finding affordable office space compared to the suburbs or other cities.

Downtown, in particular, is the best place for jobs because it already has the transportation infrastructure to move more people in and out than in any other part of the region. It has the restaurants and the office supply stores and more. Plus, residents of many neighborhoods don't want too many office buildings coming into their areas; Dupont residents fought for decades to prevent the neighborhood from completely changing into an office-only extension of the Golden Triangle, for instance. Jobs, and space for jobs, downtown reduces the pressure elsewhere.

To me, the original concept doesn't look out of place in downtown. The grand avenue leading to the White House would be just as grand, if not grander, if buildings flanking it had slightly taller sections behind the main cornice lines that more closely matched the buildings right off 16th.

The report makes a good point that it would be better to set limits for the entire street, rather than piecemeal. However, this debate should more properly be part of a zoning discussion. If piecemeal rezoning a block of an SP-2 district to C-3-C is inappropriate, then it should be inappropriate in an SP-2 zone not subject to historic review. The Zoning Commission has the power to decide whether this should be a C-3-C PUD or just a standard SP-2; they should properly make that decision, not HPRB.

If this were already C-3-C, or if the Zoning Commission decides to rezone it, then a building of this size isn't inappropriate. The report makes repeated reference to provisions in the Comprehensive Plan about preserving the "historic, majestic, and beautiful" avenues, but an avenue can still be all of these things with buildings scaled to downtown.

The developers have some legitimate gripes about this process. They were originally scheduled for an HPRB meeting on May 3, but HPO did not issue its staff report by the Friday before the meeting, as usual. That forced them to postpone the project since there would not be enough time to respond to the staff report, said Sylianos Christofides, a principal at ICG, the project's developer.

In the meantime, the Dupont Conservancy, which initially endorsed the "compromise" approach, reversed its position between the two meetings. They say that ICG changed the project, warranting re-review, but Christofides insists they made no changes. Disclosure: I am a member of the Conservancy and was present at the meeting where the project first came up, but not at the second one.

This process also misses opportunities to create a more appealing building. When applying for the raze, the developers insisted that they would replace it with a top-quality building; I wrote that "HPRB now has a chance to shape some excellent architecture at this site."

Proposed glass above church entrance. Image scanned from submission by ICG Properties.

The church entrance will have an interesting faceted glass arrangement (which hopefully would not be too hard to clean), but the rest of the building, while perfectly reasonable for an office building (and far better than some of the concrete boxes nearby), isn't especially interesting either. Instead of pushing for more significant architecture on the rest of the project, HPO has focused on just asking for a smaller building.

A grand avenue might have been better served by a building which stands out for its detailing and architectural quality instead of just having to get smaller so as to fade away and not impinge upon the consciousness. In past eras, the grand avenue leading to the White House was a place for notable and visible buildings, not invisible ones. Sadly, our preservation process has more recently evolved into one that tries to make each building as close to nonexistent as possible rather than truly great.

Update: Rebecca Miller of DCPL emailed in with additional information about what the $450,000 payment will fund:

The fund is to be used towards educational and outreach programs related to religious properties and mid-century modernism. The fund will also have a grant component to which congregations will be able to apply to the fund for bricks and mortar money or other projects such as research etc.

Is our group too white, as DePillis wonders? It's too bad Dan Reed had decamped for grad school in Philadelphia by the time that Hyattsville meetup happened, else he'd very likely have been there. And we're always happy when Bradley Heard has time to write something. But yes, we're pretty white, as are planners in general, and it'd be really great to increase our diversity.

DePillis is pointing out an issue that I've long known we need to address. Since we don't pay anyone, I'm limited in how much I can influence this. But we're always looking for contributors, of any race, gender, age or other characteristic. The only requirement is quality, and a general fit with our philosophy. Email info@ggwash.org if you'd like to write for us.

Richard Layman also raises a point about the challenge of building relationships with insiders versus attacking them. It's a tough line all journalists walk. In our case, we criticize agencies and officials when warranted, but also try to be be fair and understand the challenges people on the inside face.

When it comes to Jim Graham, I'd just note that I criticized the DC USA parking garage, one of the listed issues, in February 2008, March on bike parking, May twice, June, a New York analogue, March and April 2009 ... you get the idea.

The thing about Jim Graham is that you just have to understand where he's coming from. He's very much a politican, and makes decisions based on what voters want. But that means all you have to do to win is get a lot of Ward 1 voters to support your policy. He also has an absolutely first-rate staffer in charge of transportation, which counts for a lot. Finally, that quote from me at the end of that section is the only one I'd say was a wee bit out of context.

I also have just a few little nitpicks. Remarkably few, actually, given the amount of content in the piece. One of the little Metro-line graphics lists ANCs among the "anti" groups. Sometimes they are anti, but some ANCs are terrific. Last election cycle, a bunch of good candidates won many Ward 3 ANC seats, turning several ANCs from knee-jerk naysayers to constructive participants in neighborhood visioning.

Also, I wish I could take credit for the bag fee, but that one was all amazing legislative legwork by Tommy Wells and his staff.

DePillis's piece is quite balanced, and pretty accurate for an article of its length. As someone who does a fair bit of journalism myself, I know how hard it is to say a lot and be absolutely precise in every tiny, mostly-irrelevant detail.

So what if Drinking Liberally really met in Manhattan, not Brooklyn, or Jaime hadn't quite yet started planning school at the time she started contributing, or if the landmarked Brutalist church at 16th and I is Third Church, not First Church (which is up in Columbia Heights); you're not going to go fundamentally wrong reading it, and DePillis deserves good marks for a tough job well done.