Mac Hyde, a Virginia Commonwealth University graduate student and former Cleveland Park resident, asked us to share this survey, created to further his research exploring ways to add more housing units in neighborhoods from Forest Hills south to Woodley Park. In return, we asked him to provide more background. Hyde will also share the survey results with Forest Hills Connection. The deadline to participate is Wednesday, March 6th.
Washington, DC, like many cities throughout the nation, has a critical shortage of housing, with a recent Zillow analysis placing the shortfall at 134,000 units. This underproduction of housing has led to some of the highest rents and home prices in the United States, pricing many folks out of homes near where they work, go to school, or otherwise would like to live.
With an average median sales price of $753,139 according to data from Redfin, Washington, DC is the 13th most expensive market for home sales among U.S. cities with 300,000-plus residents. If the analysis is limited to cities of 500,000 residents or larger, that ranking jumps to eighth. Prospects aren’t much better for renters either. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the District is $2,320, according to an analysis of Zumper data by Yahoo! Finance, making DC the ninth most expensive city for renters.
While there are many techniques that can be used to try and tamp down home prices and rents, the simplest by far is to build more housing. By building more housing, especially in neighborhoods with good transit connections and existing commercial corridors, the District can accommodate population growth that has already happened while supporting local businesses and minimizing traffic.
One technique that could be used to achieve increased density without disrupting the character of the existing neighborhoods is called Gentle Density. Gentle Density is typically defined as the construction of attached townhouses and small multifamily buildings that do not appear out of place in single-family neighborhoods.
While the concept of Gentle Density is new, it has been implemented in several cities across the United States. One of the more notable cases was in Minneapolis, where the city council effectively scrapped single-family zoning, replacing it with the ability, at a minimum, to build three detached residences per parcel. This, along with other zoning reforms, has resulted in both an increase in the number of housing units built and a remarkably small increase in rents, 1%, compared with 14% for the rest of Minnesota.
As a former Cleveland Park resident, currently seeking my Masters of Urban and Regional Planning at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), I am keen to be a part of the solution to the housing affordability crisis in DC. In partnership with Cleveland Park Smart Growth, I am studying the possibility of increasing the supply of housing in the Forest Hills, Van Ness, Cleveland Park, and Woodley Park neighborhoods.
As a part of the study, I am conducting a survey, open to residents who live within a half-mile of the Van Ness, Cleveland Park, or Woodley Park Metro Stations. The survey will take approximately six minutes to complete and will be open for responses through March 6th. All responses are anonymous. This project is not affiliated with the DC Office of Planning and the recommendations made are not official positions of the District.
If you want to learn more about the project, please head to cpsmartgrowth.com/gentle-density-study.
The survey link is vcuportal.questionpro.com/housing.
Carolyn Karr says
I think this is a good faith effort to address our housing problems. I support the idea; the difficulty may lie in the way the policy is applied in individual cases. It’s definitely worth trying, however.