Passing on Raising the Height Limit: A Missed Opportunity

I got a note on Facebook the other day. Paraphrased, David G says:

"A penthouse in every pot, or something? Your thoughts on the article below, please."
House Votes to Give D.C. More Penthouses

Take that, Height of Buildings Act of 1910.
By Sarah Mimms, National Journal

As somebody who spends a lot of my day – both on and off the clock - thinking about the ongoing redevelopment of Washington, DC, I’ve understandably formed a lot of opinions about the Height Act. I went to five public meetings, read countless articles, and talked to dozens of experts and community members about the various proposals.

NOTE: What follows started out as a Facebook comment that went astray. Check back in a few days for an actual blog post with photos and links instead of just a wall of text.

Some Background about the Height Act

• Currently, the law limits building heights to the width of the adjacent street plus 20’, or less where required by zoning (which is in nearly all places).
• The DC Office of Planning took a year to study the situation and eventually proposed to increase the legal limit to a fixed ratio of 1.25 times the width of the adjacent street (the study found that this ratio would provide the best balance between creating monumental corridors and still ensuring that light would reach street level) within the historic core of the city.  The legal limit would be removed entirely outside the core since there’s not a clear federal interest in restricting heights elsewhere (case in point: 400’ buildings in Rosslyn, just across the river in Virginia).  However, zoning would remain unchanged thereby making any potential future increase in height to contingent on updates to zoning and/or the city’s comprehensive plan, both of which include much public comment.
• The proposal that Congress is actually going to enact won’t increase heights at all – existing or proposed buildings that are currently allowed to have mechanical penthouses will be allowed to create occupiable spaces on the penthouse level. Yawn.

There are good cases to be made for changing the law and for keeping it the same. Personally, I supported OP’s proposal to raise the height limit because I like having stuff in my community, and the best way to get good shops and restaurants, parks and movie theaters, and even transportation infrastructure is to increase the development density in the already urbanized places that can handle it best.  At the same time, I also supported the proposal in large part because as written the it would’ve had virtually no near-term impact on building heights but would’ve allowed DC to have a bit more self-determination – of which in my opinion we can use all that we can get.

Arguments for Keeping the Law as It Is

Backtracking a bit, the basic arguments are pretty simple. Those who want to keep the law unchanged want to preserve something about what we have in DC already, whether that be maintaining the prominence of federal monuments or keeping our skyline at a comfortable, approachable mid-rise level. I don’t really buy those arguments because 1) other cities (London was the example of this approach during the meetings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_view) have shown that it is very possible to enforce setbacks around major landmarks and preserve prominent view corridors while permitting growth outside of “sensitive” areas and 2) the people who see DC as an idyllic, vibrant mid-rise city in the style of Paris clearly don’t understand how decades of segregating land uses through zoning created a downtown that really empties out on evenings and weekends and that we’re only starting to claw our way back after a solid 15 years of infill residential development.

There’s a third camp of status-quo folks who oppose any increase in building density because they want to preserve the illusion of DC they have from the 1950s-1980s (whenever they arrived here, generally) of inner suburban living a short drive away from downtown. I’ve talked to some people who genuinely believe that DC is engaging in a war on cars and that somehow adding pedestrian protection, transit facilities, and other public amenities in public space infringes on their right to park anywhere and to be able to drive the whole way at 45mph. These people fear (entirely accurately) that increasing density throughout the city will make it harder to get places by car but claim that public transit can’t possibly absorb all the slack, driving people to drive more. Data over the last 5 years (a period when DC added an average of 1200 residents per month) indicates that auto usage is down in general thanks in part to gains in transit and bike ridership but  also in large part to an increase in mixed-use developments which allow people to live closer to where they work and walk. Our overtaxed transit system is something we’ll have to address in the coming years, but that’s the entire reason why we have long-range comprehensive transportation planning.

Arguments for Raising the Height Limit

On the other side of the spectrum are people like me who want to see the height limit increased.  I come at this viewpoint from a self-determination perspective that I’ll discuss below, but the more common reasons are economic and architectural.

The main economic consideration has to do with affordability.  Downtown DC is largely built out and as a result rents here are among the highest in the nation (3rd or 4th depending on who you ask). Residents and corporations alike are being priced out to other parts of the city and to outlying jurisdictions. In some ways, this is a good thing – without rising prices downtown, we wouldn’t have a vibrant Rosslyn-Ballston corridor or even places like NoMa, H Street, or the Capitol Riverfront in DC. But it’s hard to ignore that widespread gentrification is pricing out the most vulnerable residents, and the only sustainable way to keep prices affordable (inclusionary zoning is a valuable tool but is only a stopgap measure) is to create more supply.

The fact is that there are fewer and fewer vacant parcels and surface parking lots left to be developed fresh.  Redevelopment of existing properties has potential to provide some new households and office space, but a number of changes within the city since the Zoning Regulations were developed in 1958 blunt the effectiveness of this measure.  First, preservationists successfully lobbied for protected zones around single-family housing neighborhoods and historic rowhouse neighborhoods, effectively capping development potential in those areas.  Secondly, demographic shifts since the 1950s have led to smaller households by persons and larger households by square footages.  In the 1950s, families were bigger and at the same time singles and couples without children were more likely to live in tenement-style dwellings.  Remember that DC’s population was about 25% higher in the 1950s despite the fact that we have significantly more dwelling units now, so we’ll have to add even more square footage in the future if we expect growth to continue.

Even those lots that are already built out but that may have excess development potential (eg, a 9-story building on a lot zoned for 120’ buildings) rarely make sense to reconstruct because the extra rent from adding an extra floor or two doesn’t make up for the cost of razing the building and putting up a new one.  This is especially true for residential construction in lower-zoned areas due to a quirk in how the height limits and the buildings codes line up. In those areas, fire codes require buildings taller than 6 storeis to have heavy frames (usually expensive steel frames), but prices in those parts of the city can’t make up the cost unless the height is substantially above 6 stories, so as a result we’re left a bunch of excess development capacity that just doesn’t make sense to build unless prices increase considerably or the height limit is changed.

In downtown, these economic considerations create an interesting architectural dilemma: everything is a box. Since heights are so limited, developers have an extra incentive to maximize the square footage of their buildings to recoup construction costs, and that means expanding to the fullest extent of their allowable building envelope. As a result, most of the CBD is full of bland glass and concrete boxes. Some more recent developments and re-skinning projects have started to buck this trend with some visual interest (including stuff by our clients – good job, guys!) but the box is still the prevailing style. The thought is that increasing the height limit and changing the floor area ratio (or alternatively allowing height waivers for interesting designs or architectural embellishments) would allow for more variety in shape and keep rooftop views from being just an endless expanse of flat roofs.

The Compromise Proposal is a Missed Opportunity

My biggest issue with how the debate turned out is that it really represents a missed opportunity for DC to take back some control over the city. This was the first time in 103 years that Congress has bothered to ask about our opinion on a significant law that affects the look and feel of our city, and the Council took a pass on the action. It’s always weird for me to agree with Darrell Issa, but I’m with him when he said "I heard, to my astonishment, for the first time ever, a rejection of home rule. I did not expect people to say, 'Please don't give me authority, I can't be trusted.'"

The Height of Buildings Act of 1910 was enacted partially as a knee-jerk reaction to a building that stood head and shoulders above anything around it at the time (The Cairo, at 1615 Q Street NW: http://www.davidrehunt.com/The_Cairo.jpg) and partially for safety reasons (there weren’t fire extinguishers at the time and the fire department didn’t have the ability to handle an incident in a building that tall). Modern building codes have made the safety reasons moot, and changes to zoning mean that it’d be impossible to build a skyscraper even if the Height Act went away tomorrow. 

Every single type of zoning in DC prescribes a height limit, and nearly all of them are far below what is allowed by the Height Act. For instance, in my neighborhood even the very narrow 19th Street has a 90’ cross-section (measured from building to building) and thus could be built up to 110’ based on the Height Act. However, the R-5-B zoning (moderate density rowhouses) only allows heights up to 50’. In some places, historic districts restrict heights even further.

These restrictions are laid out in the Zoning Regulations and are set based on the comprehensive plan. Updating the comp plan is a very detailed process which involves many levels of input, including numerous public hearings, input from a bunch of federal representatives including NCPC, the CFA, and Congress. It’s not like rolling back the height limits is something the city could do carte blanche – all that relaxing the Height Act would do is give the District the option to think about building taller at some point in the future. We don’t need to build taller at the moment, but now I’m not sure we’ll ever get the chance to do that.