Some see a blog as merely an online journal. But for blogger David Alpert, Greater Greater Washington has become a platform for voicing the need for change in policies that affect the quality of life in the DC area.
David has played an instrumental role in getting a number of these changes implemented. His efforts to make the Metro DC area greater include helping eliminate parking minimums in developments and putting a tax on plastic bags that pollute the Anacostia River.
We were lucky enough to sit down with David and talk to him about improving DC housing, the city’s walkable neighborhoods and more.
Thanks for joining us, David. Your background is in software development and product management, and you spent several years at Google. What sparked your interest in community planning and made you decide to blog full-time?
Ever since I was little I was interested in the ways cities and suburbs worked, and I appreciated walkable urban places which weren’t car-dependent. There were so many interesting debates going on in DC around new development, historic preservation, Metro, bike lanes, streetcars and more, but no good place to discuss them all and organize to make the city better. I had recently left Google, so I decided to start Greater Greater Washington to create that forum and start pushing for better policies. I kept enjoying it, and now two and a half years later here we are.
When the Washington Post named you as “Blogger of the Month” a couple of years ago, you told them that DC is the city that comes closest to your ideal. What are some specific places and things that make you love the District so much?
I really love the historic rowhouse neighborhoods, including my own neighborhood of Dupont Circle, but also all the others around the city like Columbia Heights, Bloomingdale, Capitol Hill, Georgetown and more. Outside the rowhouse neighborhoods there are architectural gems of different kinds in neighborhoods like Takoma. We have so many great blocks with lush trees and high quality buildings that are often 100 years old, lively neighborhood commercial streets, and more. And we have the best transit in the nation outside New York. Even with all those advantages it’s possible for many people to afford to live in these neighborhoods and be in a walkable environment but still have a nice amount of space.
The core theme of your blog is changes that will improve life in the DC metro area. When it comes to the local housing situation, what’s working?
DC is adding a lot of new housing in ways that doesn’t generate more car trips. Arlington has been a national leader in this area, growing their major corridors like Rosslyn-Ballston without increasing their traffic. Montgomery and Fairfax also have really made a commitment to building walkable places with projects like White Flint.
In DC, neighborhoods that had huge vacancy rates and lots of empty lots are now turning into lively places, in many cases just by adding new residents instead of pushing anyone out.
And Fairfax is really on the right track at Tysons Corner. They have the largest job center outside a center city in the nation, but it’s not working because nobody lives there and there’s no way to get there without driving, creating crippling traffic. The solution is to make it a “real city” with housing and good transit, and they’re aggressively pushing that vision. If it’s possible to turn a bunch of office parks into a walkable mixed-use center, then it has to succeed at Tysons.
… And what needs to be fixed?
We still need to do more to ensure a mix of housing prices so that people of all incomes can live in different neighborhoods. It’s not healthy to have one neighborhood where the only people that can buy are two-income law firm couples and another that’s people in nonprofit or government service. We shouldn’t want neighborhoods that are all one color or one age group. By mixing it up and having some housing at different prices in the same neighborhood, we can preserve that diversity which is actually something that attracts many people to neighborhoods in DC.
We also need to check the sprawl in outer counties. Prince George’s has many underutilized Metro stations yet most of the development has been in remote “town centers” that try to provide a less car-dependent lifestyle but have no connection to other parts of the region. They have a policy of preserving a “rural tier” but have repeatedly broken the policy when some deep pocketed developer wants to build some new strip malls and another subdivision.
In Loudoun and Prince William, as well, the development in coming decades needs to focus around centers like Loudoun’s future Silver Line stations or Prince William’s VRE stations, rather than just filling up each square mile with cookie cutter suburban subdivisions which, economic trends show, are not the kind of housing that have the highest demand. Nationwide there’s enough single family detached car-dependent housing for a generation; what there isn’t enough of is walkable communities which people of all ages want.
A lot of our readers don’t have cars and are seeking the “walkability” you talk about often. Which neighborhoods should these people check out first if they’re moving to or within the DC area?
There are so many worth looking at. For apartment living, there’s areas like the Penn Quarter and emerging Mount Vernon Triangle, the buildings on Connecticut Avenue and in south Dupont, the ballpark area, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, Bethesda and Silver Spring. For row house neighborhoods, Dupont, Georgetown, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Petworth, Capitol Hill, Bloomingdale, H Street, and so many more. For people who want houses, there’s Cleveland Park, Friendship Heights, Takoma and Takoma Park, areas of Silver Spring, Bethesda, Rockville and Wheaton, much of Arlington, Greenbelt… And there are surely many places I’m forgetting in this list.
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Read last month’s interview with Paul Williams, Executive Director of Historic Dupont Circle Main Streets.
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