Update from the Zoning Meeting
Thank you for all your continued support!
The Zoning Commission met on Oct 6 to discuss case ZC 22-06 (899 Maine Ave.). The meeting went on for 7.5 hours with several testimonies in opposition from the ANC, the Office of the Attorney General and the SW Waterfront residents. During these testimonies the developer admitted that the building will actually be taller than The Wharf buildings! The ANC expressed serious concern that allowing such height for the building is not only inconsistent with the Small Area Plan, but poses a danger to the SW neighborhood more generally.
Despite the strong opposition to the project, the Zoning Commission did not close the door to approving the project as currently presented. The Zoning Commission asked the developer to meet with the ANC and SW Waterfront residents to see if there's room for a better solution for all parties involved. The Zoning Commission is expected to meet again in December to resume discussion of the project.
It is very important to keep putting pressure on the Zoning Commission to not approve the project as currently designed. For this reason we kindly ask you to please write to the Zoning Commission at zcsubmissions@dc.gov expressing your opposition to cases ZC 22-06 and ZC 22-11.
Only with your support we can protect our neighborhood!
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For some more context, check out what an ANC representative who testified at the meeting said:
'(...) as density increases a new building of nearly 500 units with only a minimum of affordable units would reduce the number of low and moderate income families to a mere sliver of the whole, it keeps going down, that’s a kick in the shins of social diversity. There’s no shortage of market rate housing in SW, in fact, vacancy rates and new developments seem to reiterate the need for more below market rate, not market rate housing, so rather than redressing the severe shortage of affordable housing in the district, the development of this size with an extreme disproportion of affordable to market rate units would intensify the polarization between low and high income strata with not much in the middle, [posing a] threat to future economic diversity and continued social integration and the threat to the stated goals of both the SW Small Area Plan and the Zoning Commission.
The challenge for SW is to protect what affordable housing we have and as density increases in new developments ensure that that new development continues to reflect demographic diversity that we have memorialized in the plan and the community cherishes, once density and height limits are ignored everything mixed height mixed income mixed demographics is up for grabs. SW in fact has a large number of rent controlled apartments and buildings constructed before 1975, other low income and public housing units and new buildings built under PUD agreements that include significantly higher than required numbers of below market rate units, moderate income housing scattered throughout SW [will be] at risk if height limits are eased to permit denser development (...) ANC 6D considers this not a hypothetical but a realistic outcome of if disregarding the height limitations imposed on current SW development'