Posts about Height Limit

It was at 8 o'clock on the evening of Sunday, January 31, 1892, that [Howard J.] Schneider shot his wife, Amanda Hamlink Schneider, and his brother-in-law, Frank Hamlink, almost in front of their father's door, on [1733] Q Street between Seventeenth and Eighteenth. Schneider was a young electrician when he met Amanda Hamlink, in the summer of 1891.

He was of good family, not a bad-looking young fellow, who dressed well and drove fast horses. He made love to the young lady, became engaged to her, and one day in June when they were out driving he produced a marriage license and threatened to shoot himself unless she married him at once. Miss Hamlink yielded, and a minister in Hyattsville performed the ceremony.

The marriage was kept a secret until fall, when the young woman's father discovered it. Then there was a scene, the father suspecting at first that the marriage had been a fraud, and requiring Schneider to produce the certificate. After that Schneider went to the Hamlink house to live. His cruelties made the life of his wife an unhappy one. More than once he threatened to shoot her. Finally he began staying out late at night, and after due warning was locked out from the Hamlink house.

About this time, a few weeks before the tragedy, he became enamored of a young girl from Virginia who was visiting [her sister who also lived on that same Q Street block]. He determined to secure a divorce from his wife, and made preparations to go to Chicago. On the Sunday evening of the tragedy he had sent a colored man to the house with a note asking if his wife intended to live with him.

While he was waiting for an answer across the street from the house, his wife, with her brother and sister, walked down Q Street from Eighteenth. Schneider crossed over to them, leaving his chum, Marion Appleby on the south side of the street.

Grasping at his wife roughly by the wrist, he told her he wanted to speak to her. The brother interfered. Schneider drew a revolver and fired five shots. Three of them entered the body of his wife, whom he still held by the hand, one pierced Frank Hamlink's breast, and the fifth crashed through the window of the Hamlink house.

Frank Hamlink fell into the street, dying almost instantly. Mrs. Schneider was able to walk into the house. She languised until the 6th of February, and left a dying declaration detailing the circumstances of the crime.

Howard Schneider threw down his revolver by the body of Frank Hamlink and fled. Within a half hour he walked into the nearest police station and gave himself up, saying he did the deed in self-defense.

Although most of us have never heard a thing about it, Howard Schneider's trial was one of the most infamous the city has ever experienced. The Washington Post's April 10, 1892 edition (the day after the verdict) was the largest edition it had ever published up to that time. 10,000 additional copies and an extra came off the presses.

Many witnesses were called, and in a dramatic twist, most of them lived on T.F.'s block of Q Street row houses. This meant that they knew both the Hamlink and Schneider families and some were still indebted to T.F. for the property.

When T.F. took the stand, he was accused of intimidating some of his neighbors. In one instance, he had sold a Q Street row house to a Mr. Bean and still held 2 notes for $2000 against him. Before Mrs. Bean testified at trial, T.F. had told the Beans that he could renew the note. After she testified, T.F. wrote Mr. Bean that he would no longer do so because he was unsatisfied with his wife's testimony.

Howard and his friends did their best to plant evidence that he acted in self-defense, but the prosecution was able to debunk most of these details. They proved that Howard stole Hamlink's gun, shot him with it, and then threw it by his body. They showed that Howard planted a second gun and that he created fake bullet holes in his own clothing.

Perhaps the most telling and dramatically sad testimony of the trial came from Mrs. Schneider, Howard and T.F.'s mother, who was forced to describe the mental instability of her son. Of Howard, she said:

He was always talking to himself in his room…and would swear at me or some imaginary person. When I went upstairs to remonstrate with him he would slam the door and swear. He would leave the house after breakfast in pleasant spirits, and would return to lunch out of temper. Often he would break out at the table violently. He had trouble with everyone with whom he had dealings, and always complained that they were against him. He was constantly making appointments and failing to keep them.

Howard's important family bought him good lawyers, but that was all they could do to help him. For the year after he was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death, his attorneys appealed to overturn the conviction on insanity grounds. They brought the case as high as the US Supreme Court, which refused to step in. On March 17, 1893, after President Cleveland denied clemency, Howard J. Schneider was hanged in the DC District jail.

Cross-posted at The Location.

The conventional wisdom in community development is to preserve current buildings and fight redevelopment of existing low-cost rental units. But that's exactly what we've been doing for the last decade. Instead, the number of affordable units in DC has been cut in half since 2000. The low-cost housing that remains is often poor quality and far from public transit.

While much of the public debate about DC development policies today centers on the height limit, that's far from the only restriction on growth. Locals governments also impose mandated lot sizes, building setbacks, floor area ratios, and parking minimums that restrict the amount of housing and drive up the cost of building new development.

So what's the solution? Yglesias takes the economist's perspective, targeting supply and demand:

[W]e need to acknowledge that there are only two sustainable ways to reduce the price of housing. One is to lower demand by making a given place a worse place to live. Detroit features high crime, low-quality public services, and a bleak job market. The rent in Detroit is not high. [...] The other way is to increase housing supply.

Opponents of smart growth policies contend the suburbs have grown because of America's desire for a white picket fence and a two-car garage. Yglesias says that through policies that discourage additional housing units from being built in urban cores, we've given families little other choice but to turn their backs on urban cores in search of cheap housing. By easing restrictions on urban housing supply, some of those families could move closer to the core, cutting their commute times and reducing their carbon footprints.

Yglesias resists policy prescriptions, instead closing with a call for those on both ends of the political spectrum to let go of failed policies and take a fresh look at possible solutions. "Many on the Left—starting with my inspiration, Jimmy McMillan—are confused about the relationship between housing affordability, regulation, gentrification, and quality of life over the long term," writes Yglesias. "On the Right, the problem is one of myopia and identity-driven resentment." He also wants our public debate "to better distinguish between the price of land (a speculative investment commodity, like stocks or bonds) and the price of houses (a consumption good, like a car or a refrigerator)."

Yglesias has faced some pushback in urban development circles. In a reflection of how fast the online news cycle moves, we already have articles asking if the pro-density movement has gone too far, even though at last check DC's height limit remains alive and well.

At a time of political polarization, is it asking too much for liberals predisposed to distrust corporate developers and conservatives prone to distrust government solutions to come out of their corners? What processes in our systems of government and public debate could be better utilized to facilitate the discussion? Can a happy medium be found between opponents of DC's current development restrictions and the skyscrapers feared by their supporters?

Post your questions in the comments, and we'll try to ask as many as we can during the chat. And join us on Wednesday at noon for what should be a very informative discussion.

Many long-time residents have expressed a desire to limit the height to 4-6 stories to preserve some of the best views in the city and the overall neighborhood harmony. ANC 7B, which includes the Hillcrest, Fort Davis, Penn-Branch, and Fairlawn neighborhoods, went as far as to pass a resolution to limit height at the Penn-Branch Shopping Center.

Putting the community concerns aside, there are other hurdles to denser development in the Ward. Although Ward 7 is one of the geographically larger wards, there are only a handful of areas that are even candidates for development into a higher density. Most of the land use in the ward is either single family homes, medium-density condos, neighborhood-scale commercial, or parkland owned by the National Park Service.

None of these areas are completely untouchable into the future. However, given the long time-frame to amass property from multiple owners or navigate the federal process to convert parkland into development, it is a safe bet that these areas will not become more intensively used within the next 20-30 years.

The next issue is that some of the larger low-density commercial areas ripe for redevelopment already have shovel-ready projects with maximum heights of 4-5 stories. For example, Mayor Gray's proposal would not affect Skyland Shopping Center or the Minnesota-Benning project located next to the new 5-story Department of Employment Services building. It also probably wouldn't affect the potential Walmart location in Capitol View located across the street from the Capitol Heights Metro Station.

After excluding all the previously mentioned areas as candidates for redevelopment into higher density, the only areas left are around the ward's three Metro stations. Even transit-oriented development around them is a challenge.

The obscure location of the Deanwood Metro Station and odd shape of the potential development parcels around it, limit higher-density development. If the newly built Deanwood Recreation Center & Library and middle school are excluded, the only non-residential land left is a small sliver on the east side the metro station and an odd shaped industrial parcel on the west side of station. Even if the city made significant improvements to the road network to improve access, there is still the challenge of trying to put high density on small parcels.

Similar to Deanwood, Benning Road Metro Station abuts single family homes and is surrounded by oddly-shaped parcels. While Clarendon is an example of higher buildings next to low-density residential, the parcels around the that metro station aren't as narrow as at Benning Road. There is potential for redevelopment into a higher density. The question for this metro station is whether the existing height limit is adequate given the size of the lots.

Of all three Metro stations, the Minnesota Avenue seems like it is the only one that would even be a potential candidate for additional height over the Height Act limit. While the development projects there are already built or shovel-ready, the strip-mall commercial areas across Minnesota Ave SE and Benning Rd SE could be more densely built.

This commercial area sits in a valley with only a handful of single-family homes along Benning Road in this area. They would lose their panoramic views, but they would maintain some views of the city. The rest of the land in that area is Fort Mahan Park. One concern would be the buildings dwarfing the homes along Clay Place NE on both side of Minnesota Ave. Putting higher buildings closer to Benning Road and stepping down the height closer to the homes could resolve this issue.

The Minnesota Ave Metro Station is wedged between I-295 and Minnesota Ave. On the other side of I-295 is the PEPCO Plant. According to PEPCO, it will decommission the plant in the near future. There are a significant number of environmental issues associated with that property that need to be considered, but there are not insurmountable.

Regardless of the potential for additional height, the community has expressed that it doesn't want development at heights allowed under the Height Act. If Mayor Gray decides to move forward with this proposal, he will have to work very hard to move this through the legislative process while garnering the support of the community.

What would be the manifestations of these different approaches? How can we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of upzoning the center city for more office space? Is our goal to produce vital, walkable, and dense downtown districts, or simply to expand new construction there, no matter the use?

The missing ingredient in this discussion is transportation. When we discuss the demand in downtowns like Washington's for more office space, we sometimes make an assumption that the transport network will be able to handle whatever is thrown at it.

In fact, there is a direct relationship between a downtown's growth and the transportation provided to it. In general, businesses want to locate their offices in places that are accessible and that provide the benefits of agglomeration, and this sometimes means downtown, but not always.

If the trip to and from the center—by whatever mode—becomes too arduous, there are significant reasons to locate outside of it. How does this fact apply to a place like Washington?

Once a downtown—which I will define as a traditional single-use American CBD—reaches a certain size, once it provides employment for a certain number of people, it has three basic options:

One, it can do nothing to its transportation network, in which case the downtown has no capacity to absorb increasing growth. In these cases, residential uses become more important since the relative land values demanded for office space decrease (as it is harder for more people to enter into the downtown from elsewhere and there is more interest in walking to and from work).

This is arguably what has happened to places like Chicago's West and South Loop, where almost all recent development there has been in the form of residential towers despite the close proximity to the downtown core.

Two, it can expand or improve transportation through the highway network, in which case parking lots become increasingly valuable and may displace existing buildings. This was the choice cities like Houston took since 1950, sacrificing what had once been walkable neighborhoods for an automobile-dominated core.

Three, it can expand or improve transportation through the transit network (bus and/or rail), in which case higher densities become increasingly valuable, and taller buildings may replace shorter ones or parking lots. This has happened in DC since the construction of Metro, beginning in the 1970s.

The discussion in Washington has hinged around the opposite side of the conversation, focusing on land use instead of transportation. The argument, asserted by people like Stephen Smith, suggests that the problem is that the government is exerting inappropriate control over densities by limiting heights and the result is that rents in the office core are increasing far higher than they would were there to be skyscrapers.

The problem is compounded by the fact that downtown Washington's growth is limited, notes Ryan Avent, by the fact that outlying neighborhoods are stuck to one- or two-story buildings (and there is little push to challenge that condition), so the Paris approach, in which the entire city is made up of 6 to 10 story buildings, is not much of an alternative, either.

These arguments are compelling: mini-downtowns in the suburbs, such as along Arlington's Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, can absorb some of the growth, but there is clearly strong demand for continued concentration in the center city.

Whether this is a long-term phenomenon, however, depends on the transportation provided into the downtown. Imagine that the height limits in Washington were lifted—or, at least, buildings twice as high could be built. In the short-term, this would surely produce the desired effects, allowing downtown to absorb more of the region's job growth, reduce office rents, and aiding in the continued gentrification of the city as a whole.

In the longer-term, however, as the city's downtown building stock is gradually replaced, the worker density in the center of the city would roughly double. Would this be sustainable?

If the city's transportation network remains as it is, mostly relying on the existing Metro network and a functioning, if not great, bus system, this would cause significant problems.

Here's why: Much of the Metro system is already at capacity during peak hours. In essence, today's transportation network is designed with a capacity roughly equivalent to what is generated under the current height limit.

Moreover, road expansion is simply not an option, not only because there is no room for new highways into downtown but also because, as already stated, a focus on roads-based transportation encourages downtowns to be transformed into automobile-based neighborhoods.

As the transit system becomes more congested, because of job expansion and a lack of transportation improvements, the cost of transportation into the core—in terms of time and money—will increase. This will reduce the appeal of locating offices downtown and encourage new construction to be residential rather than office-based. Is this desirable for Washington? Does the city want a mixed-use core or a office-based one?

The alternative is allowing an increase in zoning along with an improvement in the transportation network. This may seem obvious, but Washington has not yet committed the funds to an expansion of the Metro network or serious improvements to the bus corridors, putting in question the viability of a lifting of the height limits. The downtown's growth must be approached by considering transportation and land use in complement with one another.

Cross-posted on The Transport Politic.

That 808-foot tower is over 6 times the height of Grand Central's 130 feet; ironically, 130 feet is the maximum allowed in dense areas of DC for all buildings, meaning if someone proposed building Grand Central in any area outside downtown today, someone would probably say it's too tall.

Personally, I don't find the MetLife building to detract from Grand Central; it actually provides a great backdrop that emphasizes the historic station even more. But we're not talking about something 6 times the height of Union Station. C100 and CHRS came up with their own renderings about how much the proposed development will "loom" over Union Station:

You can barely see the building here. What's the big deal?

On the comments on the City Paper article, Alex Block notes that the C100 renderings also take out all the trees. Standing at ground level, the trees definitely do obstruct the view of Union Station. A building would irrevocably mar the view, but a bunch of trees don't (unless you live in the Watergate)?

Ultimately, these debates aren't so much about individual projects as about general values: do you think the city should have more buildings, or fewer? More stores or fewer? More parking lots or fewer? Does a new building that barely peeks over an old one create "prominent vertical scars," as the C100 press release argues, or enhance the existing fabric of the city?