Also there’s the, shall we say, “philosophical” concept of DC, as NOT being an industrial/financial/trade center but rather strictly a political and cultural one. As it is they have a hard enough time running the place without taking it to a higher density.
I grew up in the suburbs of DC, and think that the low building height is one of the city’s greatest features. DC is not New York, LA, or Chicago - and it shouldn’t be. If you want tall buildings, there are plenty of cities that offer them. DC’s low skyline, coupled with wide boulevards and lots of green space make it a special place - I’m glad it doesn’t look and feel like all the other generic cities of the world.
I think I remember you once saying that if you had your druthers, cities would look like the Tower of Mordor surrounded by huge parking lots stretching to infinity… am I remembering that correctly?
Aside from the aesthetics of whether building heights should be regulated to preserve some sort of feel to the city, or the visibility of various historic landmarks, I also think that DC just isn’t a good place for skyscrapers for practical reasons. The transportation infrastructure here is already straining under the current density, and moving to super-high density would just cause spectacular failures.
There is only so much more that can be done to increase the Metro subway capacity without investing tens of billions more dollars to totally new subway lines and stations. Roads in downtown areas are relatively narrow – there’s only a couple six-lane roads in the city, many four lane, and even more roads that are more narrow. Routes into the city from suburbs are very restricted, with traffic coming from Virginia really limited to two (maybe two and a half) main bridges, highway access from eastern Maryland limited to two main routes, and access from Maryland to DC’s north and west relying on a small number of surface streets.
There is no friggin’ way that DC would seek to make substantial increases in the density of its downtown area by allowing very tall buildings unless there were a commuter tax to pay for the infrastructure improvements that would be needed for additional tens to hundreds of thousands of people commuting into the city center on top of the 300,000 or so that already make the journey.
And there is no way that other states, or Congress, would allow such a commuter tax.
DC’s uniqueness doesn’t seem to affect the truth of that argument much. If you want DC proper to be anything besides a playground for the affluent in the long haul, you’ve got to build more.
I can see the logic of height limitations in and around the Mall and the Federal triangle, but really, why couldn’t DC have gradually increasing height limits starting, say, 6 blocks north of Pennsylvania Avenue, and 6 blocks east of the Capitol? Each block further away, the height limit could go up by another two stories, up to a max of say, 300 feet, which would allow the Washington Monument to still be seen from every which way.
You’ve got it backwards. If there are skyscrapers to fill, the more people can live and work downtown, walk most places, and grab a Zipcar when they need to go somewhere not transit-accessible.
However, there is a wide expanse of very-low-income housing almost literally within walking distance of Downtown. The affluent live in Georgetown or vicinity if they live in DC at all, and most of them are further out in places like Chevy Chase or Fairfax. If walking-distance proximity to the Heart Of It All was really that important, then Northeast and Anacostia wouldn’t be Slumland.
When I was growing up in the San Jose area, the city’s downtown was going thru a big redevelopment boom. Many office towers were getting built, but there was a height limit of 27 stories on towers due to the location of the downtown next to the approach to San Jose’s airport. See Downtown San Jose.
Local legend there has it that the Pruneyard Towers in Campbell, a few miles away, were initially intended for downtown, but due to the building’s planned height, and that most of the materials were already there or in transit, they had to quickly find another location before construction started. You would have thought someone woulda checked sooner. Anyway, the tower(s) were built in Campbell, which was a bedroom community, but in multiple pieces, creating several smaller towers with a larger footprint. Maybe a south SF Bay Area local can confirm this.
Sounds fishy. Also, the Pruneyard Tower is 18 floors, 256 feet, shorter than the 88 building at 286 feet, and 6 other downtown San Jose buildings as well. I suppose the restriction could have been lower in 1970 when it was built, but I’m guessing not. And even if it were, an exclusion would have had to have been written in for the 255 foot Bank of Italy building, constructed in 1926.
i don’t think the geology of Washington, DC is suitable for such buildings. NYC has a lt of them because there is solid bedrock near the surface. DC is mostly on a river flood plain – I think it was mostly swamp when it was designated as the capital city. Building skyscrapers there would be inefficient – it would take a lot of extra work to get a solid foundation.
Oh, but there is a commuter tax. It’s called “speed cameras.” Projected to rake in $80M this year.
Yglesias has in fact conducted a long campaign to increase density in Washington. You could find a far more pertinent column. How about Doing the Math on the Cost of the D.C. Height Limit?
As usual, Yglesias cites another article rather than the original study. Here’s a more recent study by the authors that has more information, On the causes and consequences of land use regulations by Frédéric Robert-Nicoud, Christian Hilber.
That article brings up two points. One is that by their calculation, allowing the market to determine whether and how to build would theoretically yield higher returns to investors. The other is that we don’t live in a theoretical market but in a real world, in which interests compete, land developers vs. homeowners, e.g., and use their political strengths to advantage their side.
Density has some good aspects. It also has a number of problems. In most places, advantages and disadvantages are never in balance at any one time. Economists try to put numbers to these externalities but since we usually have no idea of what they are let alone how to quantify them, the numbers can be made to support any argument you want.
Where you come down on this probably has a lot to do with whether you agree that “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” Or, alternatively, whether allowing land-developers to grow richer translates into betterment of the entire community. Some people believe this, others don’t. There doesn’t have to be one answer, either. You can have a Houston as well as a Washington, DC.
Your information is about a decade out of date. The areas surrounding downtown that were once slums have basically all be redeveloped into mixed commercial and residential units.
If you watch the end of Mars Attacks, there’s a scene of several bombed-out buildings that existed between Capitol Hill and Downtown DC through the late 1990s. Those areas have been gone for years, and now a one bedroom apartment on those exact blocks rents for an average of about $2,200.
Another example: the light industrial areas (including just plain vacant lots) in Northeast (extending about a mile or two north and east of Union Station) have pretty much all been redeveloped. One bedroom apartments in those developments rent for about $2,400.
ETA: I should add that the median sales price for a house in zip code 20002 (which is the area Northeast of Capitol Hill) has gone from $98,000 in 2000 to $528,000 this year.
Pfft. The shitty drivers with DC plates probably account for 60% of that!
As Ravenman notes, it’s getting further away all the time. I remember when 14th street between K and M was strip clubs and prostitutes. The Anacostia River and its adjacent parks are rapidly becoming the province of kayakers and spandex-clad cyclists.
It’s true that you can hold rents down in an area by making them dangerous and unpleasant to live in.
- Is that how you want to keep rents down?
- Do you want to keep the safe and pleasant parts of the city affordable?
Having never even visited Houston, I’ve got no insight into what it’s like, let alone why. But Yglesias has made an argument, I’ve quoted it, and I’m willing to defend it. But I don’t see a meaningful rebuttal here.
I’d really rather get more people OUT of DC than to try to pack more in, thanks.
I had to look our regulations up. There’s a max of 75 feet unless the property is zoned Commercial/Downtown, then there’s no limit. That’s roughly eleven blocks by eleven blocks plus a couple of octopus arms down specific streets.
Yup, that was me and you’re correct. But I think DC differs in that they don’t really have any really tall buildings at all. Now obviously I would want each building to have ample parking, but it seems like they are simply wasting space by not building up. It just seems…weird to have a height limit.
I don’t know much about DC’s metro area. Is it substantially worse than LA or NY or Chicago?
That is a solid reason I suppose. I don’t mean to offend people by calling it “petty” but I just get a vision of Abe Simpson shaking his fist at the sky and being cranky about it. The DC building height law, from checking Wiki, was passed like a hundred years ago. You’d think its time to modernize a bit
The geography, and the political climate, make it somewhat different. An example is the bridges (or lack thereof) across the Potomac, as Ravenman notes:
Some friends of mine moved from the Chicago area to the DC area about 15 years ago, because the wife of the couple got a new job in Bethesda, MD. They bought a new house in Gaithersburg, MD. All was just fine, until the job in Bethesda was eliminated after a company merger. She got a new job, but that was in Tysons Corner, in Virginia (i.e., on the other side of the Potomac).
That change only added ~15 miles to her commute, but, on average, it added an hour to the drive – and, at least once a week, it added one-and-a-half to two hours to the drive. The issue is that there are very few bridges across the Potomac, so they become traffic bottlenecks (and, if there’s an accident, or bad weather, they become parking lots). There’s close to zero likelihood that new bridges will be built, because the land along the Potomac tends to either (a) be state or national parkland, or (b) owned by wealthy, politically-connected individuals. Meanwhile, the metropolitan area around DC has grown dramatically over the past few decades, and traffic has become absurd.
In the case of my friends, that commute got to be so horrible that they sold the house in Gaithersburg, and bought a new house in Reston, VA.
Austin has established ‘view corridors’ to protect the Capitol view but that hasn’t slowed down the pace of high rise construction much. I assume that variances can be had to just about anything around here if you have enough cash.
You live in LA, right? DC’s equivalent of Sepulveda Blvd is probably Connecticut Ave, which is predominantly four lanes wide (during rush hour, parking is prohibited so it is sometimes five lanes, IIRC), the speed limit is mostly 25 mph, there is extensive bike and pedestrian traffic for most if its length, and there are multiple traffic circles between downtown and the suburbs. For a main artery, it just can’t handle the traffic like big streets in LA.
The Metro (subway) here is still pretty good despite complaints, but daily ridership is probably around 800,000 (that’s a guess) which is stressing the system, while New York handles several million per day.
Think of it this way: imagine your City of Mordor. Radiating out from the tower are sixteen paths leading through the parking lots for 300,000 people a day to approach the building. Now just eliminate 11 of those paths, with the same number of people who need to get to the building. That’s DC: water along one side, middle to upper class housing on the other sides. There’s really not a feasible way to get more people in.
Moving people around inside the city is somewhat better, but the small(ish) streets aren’t built for tons of traffic.
I think most DC types aren’t being anti-progress, but they are for preserving a very real charm in the city. Take, for example, a lovely beach in Hawaii. Would you restrict growth to preserve its beauty? Or build huge towers to allow more people to visit there? Hint: there’s a reason why people like Kauai much better than Waikiki.
I’ve always heard buildings in Santa Fe had to maintain the adobe style, but I’ve never heard of a height restriction. Still, a 50-story “adobe” would look silly.