More on Tallness
I’m seeing some pushback on the height limits post in comments that I think deserve a response. BeyondDC sums up the critiques in two comments, which I’ll splice together here:
Long story short, there is just as much reason to believe that taller buildings will lead to less efficient use of land as there is to believe they will lead to more efficient use. Given the risks (and they go way beyond “character”), the height limit downtown shouldn’t be raised unless we have no other reasonable choice.
We’re not there yet, because the option to raise the limit elsewhere in the city (Tenleytown, Anacostia, etc) and create more uptown destinations is better…
In any event, using land efficiently is expensive for developers, so they don’t do it if they don’t have to. Surface parking lots aren’t the only result of skyscraper redevelopment. You also get a lot of above-ground garages, extraneous plazas, useless setbacks, etc. Check out Arlington for proof. Arlington’s urban design just isn’t as good.
If you have really well-written regulations you can get around some of those problems, buy why go to the trouble when it would be more advantageous to spread the office uses around to places like Anacostia anyway?
I’m going to disagree, on several counts. First I think the idea that it’s more efficient to have office activity spread relatively evenly across the city, rather than heavily concentrated downtown, is not something that can simply be stated and accepted as fact. Land use isn’t just about using land, it’s about using land well. If employers want to pack tightly together and are willing to pay a lot to do so, then maybe they have a good reason for doing so. And consider–much of the District still qualifies as what you might call underdeveloped. Should we reduce height limits downtown from their current levels to speed the spread of development to such places? Of course not. Then why should we constrain heights downtown to produce a similar effect?
Sure, land banking would be a problem. It’s already a problem. But there are ways to improve land-use in such cases. One is to facilitate agreements between developers so that you don’t have a collective action problem, where everyone is waiting for everyone else to move first in an underdeveloped neighborhood. Another is to tax the daylights out of bad land-uses. Make it so landowners are begging to put something other than surface or garage parking on a plot of land.
And one indisputable point is this–over the long-term, higher densities downtown will increase the development potential of all those currently underdeveloped places in the city. If we were to double the employment capacity of downtown, what might that do to residential demand in the city? And what might that do for land values and development prospects in NOMA?
When you push things out, you push everything out–that is, you push businesses and residences into the suburbs and exurbs. When you allow things to move inward, everything moves inward–you increase the value of being near concentrations of economic activity. The solution to proper land-use isn’t to try and artificially manage market supply, it’s to get the incentives for development right.
One other point that BeyondDC mentions in a post at his site on the issue is how the transition from one height regime to another is to be managed. How, in other words, do you prevent developers from tearing down all of downtown all at once? Not hard. First, we should obviously be concerned about landmarking historic buildings. And second, revision of the height limit rule should include a set annual height allotment for fully developed areas (like downtown). A certain number of permits allowing an increase in height would be available each year. These permits would be auctioned off to the highest bidder, with the revenues going into the DC Treasury.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Ryan,
What are your thoughts on a transfer of development rights (TDR) system?
I mentioned this on BeyondDC’s blog - the general idea is that the entire District would be ‘allowed’ to build higher, but the monumental core would still be limited in height. They could then transfer those rights to build higher downtown to other designated receiving zones - areas specifically designated to allow for more height.
October 14th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Ok, this is a great thought experiment, but it won’t happen. “Downtown”, which I’m assuming is the land south of Mass ave to the Mall, is never going to lift its height restriction. It just isn’t going to happen. But Poplar Point, Anacostia, maybe Ft Totten or Friendship Heights might, some day.
Shouldn’t the talk be about how to make that happen?
October 14th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I agree that you can defeat the land-bank problem with well-written regulations, and will admit you can defeat the transition problem that way as well. That leaves us here:
>If you have really well-written regulations you can get around some of those problems, buy why go to the trouble when it would be more advantageous to spread the office uses around to places like Anacostia anyway?
- me
>the idea that it’s more efficient to have office activity spread relatively evenly across the city, rather than heavily concentrated downtown, is not something that can simply be stated and accepted as fact.
- you
Depends what we’re trying to accomplish. If we’re simply trying to maximize efficiency within the existing commuting paradigm then sure, cluster all the jobs in as small an area as possible. The downside is that downtown becomes an office ghetto and the rest of the region becomes a bunch of bedroom communities. Even if you get residential downtown via good regulation, the rest of town is still deserted during the day.
If complete neighborhoods are your goal, then all neighborhoods need a full mix of uses, including office.
Complete neighborhoods should be the goal because (among other things) complete neighborhoods are ultimately more efficient by virtue of their ability to eliminate long trips. A centralized office downtown can make it so long trips are easier to serve, but a series of complete neighborhoods eliminates the need to serve as many of those trips in the first place.
We all recognize that mixed-use is a good thing. Why are we treating office uses like they’re special?
One more thing:
>one indisputable point is this–over the long-term, higher densities downtown will increase the development potential of all those currently underdeveloped places in the city. If we were to double the employment capacity of downtown, what might that do to residential demand in the city? And what might that do for land values and development prospects in NOMA?
That is a far from indisputable point. Downtown DC is *already* the third largest office center in the United States, after Midtown Manhattan and Chicago’s loop. Even with the height limit downtown Washington has more office space than downtowns San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles or Dallas. If lots of jobs are all it took, then the District’s surrounding neighborhoods should already have much higher population density.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Another point: “Tall” and “dense” are not synonyms unless every square foot of developable land is being used.
The densest residential neighborhood in the region is Columbia Heights, which has a higher population density than Ballston (probably our densest collection of residential high-rises) because there are fewer wasted spaces, even though the buildings are shorter. That pattern is true all over the country, because except in New York we’re not very good at using every available square foot. The densest neighborhood in San Francisco, for example, is the low-rise Tendernob.
That means taller buildings will only increase overall density if there are no more underdeveloped areas, which is simply not the case in DC, and isn’t going to be for a long time.
Maybe someday we will want to raise the downtown height limit, but until the District is fully populated with complete neighborhoods and there are no more empty Poplar Points out there, why would we want to? To get full benefit from tall buildings, there needs to be no more space for short ones.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
It’s not about commuting paradigms, it’s about economic productivity. To come in and say you know how best to make businesses distribute their operations is not a good idea. Many uses are competing for a limited amount of space. The more you limit available space, the more uses are crowded out. If you were to double densities in the office core, you could add five floors of residential to every building and still substantially increase office space.
As it stands, it’s really hard to see how residential units downtown would be economical. There just aren’t many people who are willing to pay the price per square foot that businesses are willing to pay. Now you could get mixed-uses there in two different ways. Zoning with no capacity increases or zoning with capacity increases. Both might make the neighborhoods more pleasant. The former, however, necessarily involves reducing the value of the land. This has an impact on District wage rates and on District tax revenues. These are the foregone costs I keep talking about. This is not a small matter–it’s more expensive housing, lower wages, and higher taxes (or reduced services) for every Washingtonian.
The rest of the city is not going to empty out because there are taller buildings downtown, or wherever you want to put them. You need to separate two distinct ideas. Cities everywhere underwent huge shifts as massive highway construction altered the economics of urban density. That shift has largely played out at this point–there are no longer easy gains to be had from wholesale outward population shifts. The problem is no longer an excess supply of urban land–it’s excess demand for urban locations.
Yes, not every square inch of available land in Washington has maxed out at this point. For lots of reasons that I’m sure you understand, wholesale repopulation doesn’t take place in a day, or a year, or a decade. But it makes no sense to pretend that we cannot make heads or tails of land values and rents and the pace of future growth they imply.
The funny thing is, the height limit is having the opposite effect of what you say you’d like to see. Excess office demand is working to reduce the residential content of places like NoMa. Increasing allowable heights and density downtown and elsewhere would make it easier to economically accommodate multiple uses.
This is very straightforward to me. Other things equal, taller buildings in dense areas means more stuff–of all kinds–in dense areas. That, in my mind, is highly desirable, and certainly not the kind of thing you’d want to artificially limit without very, very good reason.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
And BDC, in re: empty land, that’s just not a very strong argument for Washington. For one thing, the amount of empty land in the city that isn’t currently somewhere in the redevelopment process is very rapidly approaching zero. In NW and SW it is, for all intents and purposes, zero. Subsequent redevelopment in the city will almost entirely involve replacing underused structures with new ones. That’s a long, slow, and constant process.
Moreover, in built out areas, the height limit has price effects long before every other neighborhood in the city is at the zoning limit. We’re going to see some nasty effects on the affordability of District housing if we wait to talk about this until every last plot of land in the city has been built out to the hilt.
This isn’t the city it was ten years ago, when half of the “downtown” area was surface parking lots. We’re all going to start feeling developmental limits in our wallets in a significant way within the next decade.
October 14th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Though taxing underutilized lot yields a better result, its introduction is more problematic than tax abatement for new developments.
I do prefer the ‘activity spreading approach’, but I agree, it cannot be engineered.
A middle ground, from a housing-office point of view might be: increased hight limit with +3 stories (max 5) + the right to build a retail/office only building, would be part of a transferable dev. right (others would be required a min ~30-50 residential percentage)
October 14th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
>The more you limit available space, the more uses are crowded out. If you were to double densities in the office core, you could add five floors of residential to every building and still substantially increase office space.
But crowded out to where? Anacostia? Sounds good to me. Your plan creates a really great downtown at the expense of the rest of the city, which gets nothing (nothing new, anyway). My plan (coupled with Alex’s TDR plan) benefits the whole city, including downtown.
>As it stands, it’s really hard to see how residential units downtown would be economical. … Zoning with no capacity increases or zoning with capacity increases. Both might make the neighborhoods more pleasant. The former, however, necessarily involves reducing the value of the land.
You’re not reducing the net value of District land if you use TDR. You’re reducing the value of downtown land in exchange for a corresponding increase in value of land at the receiving end. That’s bad if the receiving end is sprawl, but it’s good if the receiving end is urban and has excess existing infrastructure capacity, especially if you have capacity problems downtown (as we do).
>The problem is no longer an excess supply of urban land–it’s excess demand for urban locations…empty land (is) just not a very strong argument for Washington.
OK. So we agree that we want the rest of the city to develop to a higher density. Do we agree that’s a higher priority than more density downtown specifically?
If so then the question is really just one of timing. If raising the height limit downtown is dependent on filling out the rest of the city, how long will that take?
I’m not sure you appreciate just how much development it will take to use up all the land there is in the District (nevermind the metro area). If you add up all the riverfront land (Poplar Point, etc) there is probably at least 100 million square feet of development potential, which is equivalent to the amount of office space downtown now. In other words, we could double the amount of office space in the city using only riverfront land. Doubling would take how long? 30 years, optimistically? Then add in all the nearly-empty inudustrial pits (Brentwood) plus all the underused neighborhoods (Tenleytown), and there is probably double *that*. This is not something that’s going to happen in a short period of time. To actually fill the District (at anything resembling downtown densities) is going to take decades, even if the District receives 100% of regional growth, which it won’t.
October 14th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
A few last things. One, the economic imperative to concentrate productive activities isn’t something I’m pulling out of my butt. There are actually different values to identical amounts of office space spread over different areas. We can plan all we like, but we don’t get to make up the economics as we go along. A square foot of office space has a very different value downtown than it does elsewhere in the city.
Second, your plan to shift all the excess demand to Anacostia is lovely. It’s also entirely unrealistic. We don’t get to say where it’s going to go. We do have an extraordinary body of evidence that suggests that limits on development displace people and economic activity elsewhere, namely, to places like Herndon and Houston. That’s hugely costly, not just to the District, but in terms of energy consumption, and national economic productivity, and environmental impact.
My plan does not give the rest of the city nothing. You’re missing my two key points. One is that there are massive opportunity costs for the entire city to not building taller. At the absolute least, more development downtown increases tax revenues, which can then be used to reduce everyone else’s tax burden (encouraging inward development) or to fund more and better public services (encouraging inward development). In practice, office infill has absolutely jolted the city’s residential demand and sped infill development around the District.
As I said, building up every bit of the District to the zoning limit will take a long time. The cost pressures of developmental limits will begin affecting our lives long before we get to that point. Look at Manhattan. There are still tons of underdeveloped lots there, and yet the developmental limits imposed by zoning and NIMBYism have made it basically impossible for a non-millionaire to live on the island in anything bigger than 300 square feet.
And in the mean time, those increased costs are pushing people who’d like to locate in New York away, by the truckload. And where are they going? Out into the sprawl, my friend.
October 14th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
I’m not sure I understand your first point. Please elaborate. I’m not an economist. Why does a square foot of office space downtown have more value to the region than a square foot of office space elsewhere (assuming that elsewhere is walkable, near the core and has Metro access)?
Regarding your second point, shifting some growth to Anacostia (I never said all of it) strikes me more realistic than getting political buy in to eliminate the downtown height limit (which is Federally-imposed). If I have to restrain myself to the possible, so do you
As for the rest of the city and its development potential, for at least the next 30 years raising the height limit downtown doesn’t add any more density to the city than raising the height limit in the surrounding areas and targeting development there. There is enough easy-to-access land that our existing supply can accommodate the existing anticipated demand with no problem. You’re right that at some point short of 100% build out the supply has to be increased or costs go up too much, but right now we have SO MUCH underused land that the risk of serious inflation shouldn’t be very high. Inflation will only happen when development demand gets close to outstripping the supply of easy land, and the supply of available land is currently so high that assuming we make it easy enough to build on, we won’t start to run into shortages serious enough cause major inflation for decades.
The big challenge is getting developers to build in the underused parts of the city. That’s where the city needs the most help, and that’s where we should be using regulatory tricks like TDR and relaxed zoning to encourage development.
October 14th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I’m not sure I understand your first point. Please elaborate. I’m not an economist. Why does a square foot of office space downtown have more value to the region than a square foot of office space elsewhere (assuming that elsewhere is walkable, near the core and has Metro access)?
Downtown has enormous advantages over other places. It is better served by the region’s transit systems than any other place in the metro area. There is a complete business infrastructure in place there. All the kinds of things that businesses need to do business are there–all manner of office support services, accounting and law firms, and so on. Most importantly, there’s a darn good chance that your customers and your clients are there, or are at least more easily accessible from there than from most other places.
An additional square foot downtown is worth more because of those advantages and also reinforces those advantages. A square foot elsewhere is simply not as valuable to potential firms. But here’s the thing–its very likely that adding an additional square foot downtown would not only be more valuable than a square foot in, say, Anacostia, but it would likely also increase the value of the square foot in Anacostia. This is the nature of agglomeration economies.
Regarding your second point, shifting some growth to Anacostia (I never said all of it) strikes me more realistic than getting political buy in to eliminate the downtown height limit (which is Federally-imposed). If I have to restrain myself to the possible, so do you
Dude, that’s a totally different argument. At the outset I said it would be hard as hell to raise the height limit anywhere, let alone downtown. I’m responding to your argument that taller buildings downtown might lead to less efficient use of land. It’s a hypothetical question, yes. So what?
As for the rest of the city and its development potential, for at least the next 30 years raising the height limit downtown doesn’t add any more density to the city than raising the height limit in the surrounding areas and targeting development there.
Wait, what? Does raising the height limit downtown somehow prevent us from raising the height limit elsewhere? Or from “targeting” development elsewhere? Here’s the problem for you–rapid development downtown in the past decade has been a boon for development elsewhere in the city. You see development downtown as coming at the expense of development elsewhere. That’s not correct, and I don’t see how you can draw that conclusion based on the District’s recent experience. Development downtown is often a complement to development elsewhere. I’d say that a denser downtown would be a key ingredient in improving District and metropolitan Washington land-use.
There is enough easy-to-access land that our existing supply can accommodate the existing anticipated demand with no problem. You’re right that at some point short of 100% build out the supply has to be increased or costs go up too much, but right now we have SO MUCH underused land that the risk of serious inflation shouldn’t be very high. Inflation will only happen when development demand gets close to outstripping the supply of easy land, and the supply of available land is currently so high that assuming we make it easy enough to build on, we won’t start to run into shortages serious enough cause major inflation for decades.
This just isn’t how real estate markets work. Imagine a store with different kinds of meat. There’s filet and there’s sirloin and there’s spam. People come in and buy different types of meat. If it’s a store that’s known for its filet, then the filet may run out first. At that point, do people entering the store buy sirloin, or do they leave and go to another store? Some may buy sirloin. Others came for the filet, and if it’s gone, well, they’ll go to another store. If the store doesn’t get more filet, most of those folks will stop even considering the store. They’ll go directly to where there’s a steady supply of filet.
That’s how real estate markets work. Downtown is unique, and it’s basically unreasonable to think that most of the undeveloped land in the District could ever become anything close to as desirable as downtown. It’s possible, I guess, but to do something like that–to create, say, a Canary Wharf–would require a simply massive commitment to infrastructure development, up-zoning, incentive packages, and so on, of the sort that’s at least as unlikely as the potential for increasing heights downtown.
That’s not to say that un- and under-developed land is worthless. It’s not at all. Brookland, for instance, has marvelous potential to be a beautiful mixed-use area with housing, retail, arts and entertainment, and limited commercial development. But it will never, under any circumstances, compete with downtown for office space.
And because it won’t compete with downtown, the fact that there’s plenty of undeveloped land hanging around out here does nothing to hold down rents downtown.
The challenge is to use land well. When we limit growth in the city, we absolutely shift some jobs and some people to places where we can be sure that land is not being used well. And we give up some nice opportunities here.
October 14th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
What Ryan said.
It should be pointed out, though, that it may take pretty significant height increases to spur redevelopment, since it won’t be worth anyone’s while to demolish and rebuild for an extra 50 or 100 feet.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Ryan, I have to quibble with your hypotheticals when put into a real world argument - I think a Canary Wharf style high rise district, along with all the infrastructure and other investment, is far more likely to happen in DC than an increase of the height limit in the traditional downtown.
What your hypothetical questions have missed is the qualitative benefits of the height limit - exemplified by the emotional reactions to keep it around. I can’t see DC undoing that - not in the current area we call downtown.
For a Canary Wharf style development, we’ve already seen proposals for massive infrastructure development to take a brownfield and turn it into a city with Poplar Point.
October 15th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I get the qualitative benefits–do read my posts. What are those emotional reactions worth to people? How much are they willing to pay in increased taxes and forgone wages to keep them? That’s the question. If we all understood the opportunity costs, would we still want to protect those views, such as they are.
Poplar Point is tiny. You’re not going to get a real office concentration there. And massive infrastructure development, Canary Wharf style, is a lot more than laying pipes and wires. London has poured billions into transport infrastructure to the Docklands.
But I wasn’t debating what’s likely to happen. I was simply pointing out the costs of the current policy.
October 15th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with what you’re saying. Honestly, planners like myself could always use a little dose of economic hypotheticals like this.
I’m not suggesting that you don’t understand the qualitative benefits - I’m suggesting that many of those benefits are not easily quantified, if they can be quantified at all.
DC’s urban form is a deliberate act of design, a strong case of what Spiro Kostof called the “Grand Manner.” It is an urban design befitting the Capital of a nation. I’m only suggesting that motives, such as these, are not easily accounted for. Proxies like the rents and so on are incomplete enough in my book to make them insufficient.
Anyway, my economic language is probably well off the mark, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
October 16th, 2008 at 9:51 am
I don’t see what allowing height limits in far flung places outside of DT would do. If we want urban and vibrant and pedestrian friendly neighborhoods, it’s better to keep those places that are less centralized with less development and activity at a height. Places like Tenleytown and most of SE will never be highly active job centers at this current pace, perhaps Poplar Pt. but that should be in the same scale as the ballpark area’s new development IMO.
So if we raise height limits, which I’m full in support of, we should contain it into the DT area that is the center of the city’s activity and will be in demand for commercial and residential space. Keep the limit in the monumental core and outside of DT.
You could probably make it an area bounded by NH and Mass. Ave’s and maybe G St. to the south.
October 16th, 2008 at 9:55 am
And if you want to go more into detail, develop some kind of tapered height limits outside of the main DT area and relax the height limit for future development in the areas like SE that are still developing.
I’m also in favor of transferable air rights and some good regulations. Another thing is that perhaps 50 stories is what people should envision more than 85 stories. Maybe someday, but I know all I’m advocating is highrise, not supertall, CBD until we need more room.
October 16th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Vik,
Poplar Point is not that far away from Downtown. As the SE area around the Ballpark fills in, that perception gap will shrink even more.
Consider the fact that Anacostia is 5 Metro stops from Gallery Place. The distance is similar to Rosslyn and Crystal City, and is closer than Silver Spring.
October 16th, 2008 at 11:36 am
[i]>A square foot elsewhere is simply not as valuable to potential firms.[/i]
Oooooh. OK, yeah. Naturally. I’m not talking so much about what businesses want as I am about what’s good for the city. Businesses will always want to go with the known commodity, which is why we need economic development in underused parts of the city in the first place. I’m talking about using incentives to get the business community to invest in parts of the city it has traditionally ignored.
And it’s not like I’m suggesting we declare a moratorium on downtown develoment. If a business wants to locate downtown they still can. There is 100 million square feet of leasable office space downtown right now, and room for so many millions more in downtown-adjacent locales like NoMa that inflation shouldn’t become a serious problem for decades. Meanwhile, my plan provides incentives where incentives are needed.
[i]>Does raising the height limit downtown somehow prevent us from raising the height limit elsewhere? [/i]
No, but there’s only so much demand for new space. The demand isn’t going to go up just because we raise the height limit. Without raising the limit there is enough supply to satisfy the demand for decades, so raising the limit isn’t likely to increase the amount of office space in the District for at least a generation. It will only concentrate it.
Raising the height limit [i]would[/i] increase the residential density downtown, which would be a good thing, but it would come at the cost of limiting office development elsewhere in the city. I would be willing to support height bonuses to downtown developers who include residential in their projects. Coupled with TDR, you could accomplish a lot doing that.
[i]>They’ll go directly to where there’s a steady supply of filet.[/i]
Which would be where, exactly? What advantage strong enough to pull away a business that wants to be in the District in the first place hath the suburbs over a secondary node in the District?
And again, there’s plenty of filet still available. You seem to be operating under the misconception that the central city is built out. [i]Metro Center[/i] may be built out, but NoMa and Southwest certainly are not, and are more affordable to build upon than would be redevelopment in Metro Center anyway. There is no reason to think downtown expansion into NoMa will be less successful than was downtown expansion around Farragut Square and in the West End in the 1960s.
Let’s compare. At the same scale:
[url=hhttp://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=canary+wharf,+london&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=50.644639,77.871094&ie=UTF8&ll=51.505484,-0.020256&spn=0.018966,0.038023&t=k&z=15]Canary Wharf[/url]
[url=http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=washington,+dc&ie=UTF8&ll=38.866945,-76.997423&spn=0.024526,0.038023&t=k&z=15]Poplar Point[/url]
[url=http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=washington,+dc&ie=UTF8&ll=38.893872,-76.970387&spn=0.024517,0.038023&t=k&z=15]RFK[/url].
Clearly we do have the land for a Canary Wharf in DC. Further, considering downtown’s existing infrastructure capacity problems, it is far from clear that building infrastructure at RFK to support a new uptown would be any more expensive than the downtown investments that would be necessary to accommodate that much new development there.
Now let’s go back to NoMa and the ballpark district. It strikes me that with or without a height increase NoMa and Ballpark are going to receive much of the next wave of downtown development. That’s already happening, so it’s not any great leap on my part, but even with a height increase the prospects of cheaper land and no existing 12 story buildings to demolish are going to pull many developers in that direction. Letting them have skyscrapers strikes me as a good way to ensure that we pull enough activity to them to guarantee that they become desirable parts of downtown, rather than downtown’s back side.
I don’t have numbers handy for Ballpark, but NoMa is currently planned (under the height limit) to support about 21 million square feet of development, of which about 12 million square feet is planned to be office (right now there is about 10% of that). For comparison, downtown Baltimore - with all its skyscrapers - has only 13 million square feet of office space. So without raising the height limit an inch, there is just about enough room in NoMa alone for a whole downtown Baltimore.
Now let’s talk about the waterfront. It can’t reasonably be called downtown, but at downtown-like densities RFK is big enough to support probably 20 million square feet of development under the existing height limit. Say half of it is office. That’s 10 million square feet - more than downtown Richmond, which has about 9.
Let’s say we double the height limit for just NoMa and RFK. (13 * 2) + (10 * 2) = 46 million square feet of office development potential. As long as we’re making comparisons, 46 million is about equivalent to all the office space in downtown Philadelphia (actually it’s a little bit more).
… And that’s without Poplar Point, the rest of the waterfronts, Walter Reed, or places like Tenleytown and Brookland.
We just don’t need to raise the limit downtown. If we absolutely had to do it then maybe it would be worth the negatives and the political fight, but it’s just not necessary.
October 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Head’s up: I just posted a long reply, but there were a few links so the spam filter seems to have caught it.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
BDC, the problem is that you’re thinking statically. As in, there are a set number of firms that want to be in DC, and we can put them here or we can put them there, and if we put them here then we can’t put them there. This is absolutely the wrong approach. I don’t really know what more to say, except that a guy just won the Nobel prize in economics for a theory that says you’re wrong.
Putting more stuff downtown makes all of the city a more attractive place for further development. There is basically an unlimited set of firms that might be interested in locating downtown, given the right set of conditions. To many of these firms, NoMa is not an acceptable substitute for the Golden Triangle. The rents say so, and we can believe them. Allowing more of these firms to locate in new space in downtown would increase the return to other firms of locating in NoMa.
There are many office markets–some of them extremely local, some of them metropolitan, some of them regional, and some of them global. Downtown competes in all of these, and the way we structure downtown therefore has an enormous effect on the economic potential of the city and on things like employment and wages.
I know it’s counterintuitive, but it is the case that limiting heights in our downtown diminishes the return to business of being in the city, and therefore depresses demand for other space in the city, commercial and residential. In doing so, it shifts demand elsewhere–generally to places that are a lot more sprawling and environmentally problematic.
One last thing. You write:
I’m not talking so much about what businesses want as I am about what’s good for the city. Businesses will always want to go with the known commodity, which is why we need economic development in underused parts of the city in the first place.
First of all, it is very often the case that what is good for business is good for the city. That doesn’t mean we turn the keys to the city over to the chamber of commerce, but it does mean that some measures that negatively impact returns to business will harm District residents.
Secondly, it’s just not true that firms pay exorbitant rents to be downtown because it’s a known commodity, and they’re too stupid to locate in places that are equally good but unfamiliar. Those firms pay good money for good locations because they believe such locations tangibly benefit them. And indeed, a downtown location does benefit firms, as I explained before.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Alex B, I agree with you on Poplar Point. It would be more or less an extension of the downtown somewhat. But I see us debating the height limit in downtown b/c we’ve already built out that area. If we’re going to build in Poplar Point which I’m in favor of, why would we build taller there than in DT? I don’t see anything wrong with some Ballpark-like or NoMa-like density in Poplar Point realistically. I’d love for it to be like Gallery Place but I don’t see it happening.
Basically, the arguments for lifting the height limit in DC but only outside of DT, is it simply for the preservation/tradition? I just think we should build appropriately for whichever area we’re dealing with. RFK, the SW Waterfront, Walter Reed, these areas should be developed to a high density, but I’d prefer for the long term if we concentrated our growth in the CBD and also showed a commitment to building the beautifully landscaped low-medium rise neighborhoods that we all love about DC in these outer-DT areas that will be developed.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Oh. Sorry about the formatting. I get my message boards mixed up with my blogs sometimes.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Vik,
It’s probably a little simplistic to say that keeping the height limit within the downtown and monumental core is only for matters of preservation and tradition, but that’s largely the point.
DC’s urban design is unique amongst American cities - and that’s not just because of the height. The broad streets and radial avenues of the L’Enfant plan are a physical manifestation of the political role of the city. The height limit plays into that, as well - stemming from a later era of the City Beautiful, where L’Enfant’s vision was honed, altered, but largely implemented as-is.
In short, Washington’s built form as we know it is not and never was a purely economic beast - certainly not when compared against other American cities. That form can, should, and does evolve constantly, but I just can’t see any wholesale change away from what we have today. I wouldn’t be opposed to a few extra floors here or there in downtown, but the only place you’ll see full-fledged high rise development, IMO, is outside of the monumental core.
October 16th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
I just want to commend all the posters (ryan and BDC especially) on what honestly amounts to development/transit geek porn. Your arguments are all cogent and - most importantly in political discussions online - honest and on the issues.
Thank you for making me smarter instead of dumber.
October 16th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I hear the preservation aspect, but I would be opposed to building highrises in areas such as uptown DC that are charming in their own right as it is. SE that is lacking development, fine, but there, due to a lack of employers, you’d be more prone to seeing what we see in sunbelt sprawlers typically which are highrises and large parking lots next to them. If we can develop areas like Poplar Pt. and maybe Walter Reed and RFK into high density mixed-use areas that are job centers, than perhaps they could support a nice urban highrise districts in the future after they’ve built out.
But I envision having highrises in DT DC could give the effect of Millenium Park in Chicago, just not as dramatic. You could have views of everything around the Mall, but looking north in the distance, you’d have a great view of some highrises especially with how it slopes up. I still think you could preserve parts of the L’Enfant vision, at least we’d still have wide avenues and a distinctive layout.
I don’t see it happening, but it wouldn’t bother me a bit to see some 600 fters or so DT.
October 17th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I’ll point out again that it wasn’t very long ago that what we now think of as the entire western half of downtown Washington was not at all part of the central business district. We’ve been in the NoMa situation before, and it’s worked out just fine.
Anyway, to sum up, I think it’s probably fair to say that there are compelling economic arguments for taller buildings downtown, but equally compelling city planning arguments against it. The trick is going to be figuring out how much to sacrifice one for the other.