Posts about Convention Center
Meta
Three years ago, GGW was born
Greater Greater Washington started publishing three years ago yesterday.
Photo by colleenita on Flickr.
What were we writing about then? Quite a few things that were still relevant today.
Parking policy: Tommy Wells spoke at a Coalition for Smarter Growth forum about parking and how he himself became a convert on performance parking because of all the cars the baseball stadium was going to bring to his neighborhood. He had devised the "livable, walkable" slogan for his campaign, then discovered a whole community of people who believed strongly in this philosophy.
Sidewalks at construction sites: DC instituted a policy requiring covered sidewalks or pedestrian walkways during construction, instead of the then-common practice of just forcing pedestrians to cross to the other side of the street.
Last week, TBD reported that the Convention Center hotel is apparently not following this practice at 9th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, NW.
Potomac Yard station: Alexandria officials were talking about getting developers around Potomac Yard to pay for a new station. That tax structure has become a reality and the environmental review begun; will the station get built on time?
Our first mission statement: My vision for this blog, three years ago:
Urban centers and walkable suburbs in America are experiencing a renaissance, including the Washington, DC region. Unfortunately, too many people are forced to leave great neighborhoods to find affordable housing or good schools. If people want to live in single-family homes, they certainly may. But everyone should have the choice to live in an apartment or townhouse in a walkable, safe, livable neighborhood.This still seems to apply just as strongly today.People make a city great. Downtown job centers, historic neighborhoods, and new edge cities should all be full of people, walking to do errands, sitting outside at sidewalk cafes, enjoying parks, living life, and interacting with each other. Unfortunately, the streets of downtown DC are fairly empty during the day and even quieter on weekends, with little more than one inward-facing office building after another. We should encourage more mixed-use development downtown, with more residences and more retail shops, enabling restaurants to operate all week and more people to live near where they work.
We should continue the trend of building new, mixed-use neighborhoods in areas such as Arlington, Alexandria, Bethesda, College Park, Rockville, Silver Spring and Tysons Corner as well as the District of Columbia, where people can live, work, eat, shop and find entertainment in walking distance. We should construct buildings that engage a vibrant street life, with stores and restaurants and human-scale features, rather than cutting themselves off from the wider world.
We should expand Metro and build streetcars in DC to allow more people to get to work and other destinations without need of a car. We should put higher density development near transit stations, to enable more people to travel without cars, and so that the region can grow without adding traffic congestion. We should make it easier for people to get to work by walking or biking or rollerblading if they wish, with adequate and safe sidewalks, bike lanes and paths.
We should stop building new highways which only foster more driving and more traffic. And we should set appropriate prices for driving in and out of our city, or using parking spaces in our neighborhoods, so that people who choose to own cars, use the roads, and park pay the fair cost of the land they are using, without being unfairly burdened or subsidized.
The Washington, DC area is already great. DC itself has some of the most beautiful, mixed-use, and transit-accessible neighborhoods in any American city. Arlington and Bethesda contain Smart Growth areas that are models for cities everywhere. As the region grows, we must preserve what already works and expand what is possible, to ensure that there are enough great neighborhoods for everyone who wants to live, work, shop or play in one.
Budget
Living within our means
A $750 million public financing deal for a convention center hotel had scarcely appeared on the table before it was taken off again. One of the driving forces behind the fall of that proposal? DC's recently enacted debt cap. It's an early sign that this tool will help keep our leaders fiscally honest, especially when it comes to economic development subsidies.
Washington Convention Center. Photo by OZinOH.
Just last fall, the DC Council adopted legislation prohibiting the District from allocating more than 12 percent of its total annual budget toward debt payments. The additional borrowing proposed for the Convention Center hotel would have pushed our debt above the 12 percent cap.
Why put a limit on debt? Any debt the District issues creates a long-term payment obligation. When DC issues bonds, it pledges its tax revenue to pay it back Debt limits are also something that Wall Street pays close attention to. When a city or state's debt gets too high, it can lead to a lower bond rating. That in turn, means higher interest rates when it's time to issue bonds for things like schools or libraries. Managing debt well, by contrast, can lead to better bond ratings.
DC already has more debt than most cities and states, and there is pressure for more. The city is borrowing a lot to fix up schools and other public facilities. And we have authorized over $1.5 billion in debt to subsidize economic development projects over the past decade, like the retail center at Gallery Place. Until the debt cap, there's been no real limit on economic development subsidies.
That's why a cap is so key. Knowing we cannot issue an unlimited supply of debt, elected officials must make choices and set priorities over the infrastructure and development projects they want to support with public tax dollars.
With the new debt cap, a decision to publicly finance the entire convention center hotel project could have forced officials to scrap many long-planned developments around the city such as the Southwest Waterfront redevelopment. When faced with that decision, officials decided that the convention center hotel could not trump those already- planned projects and had to find another way to make the project go forward.
Politics
Evans-Silverman: two worlds, two boxes of tools
Interviewing Jack Evans and Cary Silverman, the candidates for the Ward 2 DC Council seat, one could think the two are running for completely different offices. Evans seems to be running for reelection as the Council version of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, devoting his energy to financing deals that will stimulate development throughout DC. Meanwhile, Silverman sounds like a candidate for a more powerful, larger Super-ANC, focusing on local neighborhood needs and problems.
They're both right. Every ward Councilmember is some blend of the two, a shaper of citywide policy and simultaneously steward of a ward. In Evans-Silverman, we have candidates who represent each end of that spectrum. But the Council job isn't just one or the other, and we need a Councilmember who will do both jobs.
Evans and Silverman don't just focus on different problems, they apply their own boxes of tools to the same ones. For example, I asked both whether the O Street Market (which both enthusiastically support) would finally revitalize Ninth Street. Both said it's a start, as well as the convention center hotel, but we need more. What else? Silverman wants a convention center exit near the neighborhood retail and wayfinding signs directing convention-goers to nearby businesses; Evans discussed the other projects underway in the area that will add more retail space and more residents. We need both types of tools in our toolbox, and our Councilmember should pursue all avenues for revitalizing that avenue.
Evans and Silverman even speak different languages. Coming out of the Shaw Logan Circle ANC and, more recently, the Mount Vernon Square Neighborhood Association, Silverman speaks the language of the neighborhood activist, which explains why he is so popular among ANC and citizens' association members. That community's vocabulary centers around keeping the governmental ship sailing smoothly, enforcement of existing laws, quality of life issues, and often a cautious approach to change. Evans' vocabulary, meanwhile, is one of growth and fulfilling the potential of DC as a major city.
This dichotomy mirrors the debate we have on Greater Greater Washington. DC has many residents who moved here when DC was a small town and like it that way. They are (at the moment) more likely to belong to the local citizens/civic association or sit on the ANC. They are more likely to own cars and drive. On the other hand, we have a growing number of newer residents who are putting down roots here. They (or should I say we) see DC not as it was but as it could be, maintaining the beautiful houses, strong sense of community, and range of ages, races and creeds while also accommodating more people and enjoying more vitality.
Ironically, unlike in the mayoral race where energetic Adrian Fenty out-campaigned the more seasoned Linda Cropp, it's the younger (though long-time resident) Silverman who represents small-town DC, and Council veteran Evans who champions the cosmopolitan vision. Their policy prescriptions reflect that: Evans would like to make K Street more mixed-use, voted for the hiker-biker Klingle trail and supports boulevardizing the Whitehurst; Silverman would have voted for the road (though he is willing to let throughly-beaten sleeping dogs lie) and would keep the freeway. Yet Silverman bicycles to work, while Evans drives and enjoys the free parking in front of the Wilson Building. Evans cites the many events he has to get to each day, and the 45-minute public transit ride from Georgetown, as obstacles to transit (though not to bicycling).
At the moment, I plan to vote for Evans, if nothing else because of his reliable vote for transit infrastructure but against roadway expansion. His experience with economic development is also an asset to DC, and his power benefits the ward. But it's good that Silverman is running. We need his energy and dedication to improving the neighborhood. Many problems, like dealing with vacant properties, require the Councilmember to personally push city agencies for a resolution, which Evans doesn't do but Silverman promises to.
It's too bad Evans can't replace Carol Schwartz as Councilmember at-large, letting Cary represent the ward. Barring that, my ideal outcome would be for Evans to narrowly win reelection, preserving his good policy vote and his experience on economic development while also pushing him to devote more time to the ward over the next four years. And if he doesn't, he ought to lose in 2012, whether to someone new, or to a future version of Cary Silverman with a little more political experience and a policy sophistication to match his constituent-service energy.
Want to hear more from the candidates? There's a debate on Thursday, August 7th, 7:00-8:30 at the Phillips Collection at 21st and R.
Public Spaces
Architecture as culture, not art
Last week, I wrote that "I'd like architecture critics to write about a building's influence on the street as much as they write about the 'chiseled setbacks and crisp vertical lines'" beloved by Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Well, the Post's Philip Kennicott did just that, in a very pro-urbanism piece praising the new convention center's proposed pedestrian alley for its "ability to draw people in."
"Feels like a city": the ped alley
proposed for the old Convention
Center redevelopment.
"In Washington, there are people who wander the streets looking for things that feel like a city," he wrote. "And what is a city? ... People, motion, business, crowds and chance encounters."
Absolutely. This is what architecture is about, not art. This is the way journalists should cover architecture, based on what "feels like a city." Oh, and architect Philip Johnson, centerpiece of that Architecture as Art exhibit? Kennicott is not a fan, calling it "sheer staginess and theatricality," and "nakedly about the power of the architect to impose his ideas on a place... You feel great relief that much of this diminished architecture [of his later work] was never built."
Maybe we ought to be giving the architecture columns to more culture critics and fewer architects.
@ggwash
- Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits
- Amid scandal, don't lose sight of Gray's policy achievements
- Montgomery plans 160-mile, "gold standard" BRT system
- Bethesda gets new but terrible bike racks
- DC's parks are 5th best in the nation, says "Park Score"
- VDOT ignores own data, pushes widening I-66
- DC's divide need not be black and white
Greater Washington
District of Columbia
