Kids using AI to do their homework is a hot topic of debate amongst teachers and parents these days. But nobody is looking into the much bigger question: Can a lazy neighborhood blogger slough off his work to a robot? On three previous occasions, I’ve explored this question and decided: No. Not yet, at least. But this technology is moving fast, and the last time I checked was last year. Maybe it’s up to snuff now?
Let’s see! For instance, here is a lengthy piece I wrote last year on the intersection of history, zoning and popular bagels around the Call Your Mother saga. It’s probably the best thing I wrote last year. But it took me a couple hours to write, time I could have spent doing nothing instead. So could AI do it for me?
Here’s what I came up with after asking ChatGPT to write an article in the style of the Georgetown Metropolitan about the history of zoning, how it impacted 3428 O St., and why it was being debated at the BZA today. This is what it produced (with notes and corrections from me in bold):
“A Little Corner of Rules”: Zoning, History, and the Fight Over 3428 O Street NW
In the mode of the Georgetown Metropolitan
On a narrow triangular lot (It’s not triangular) where O Street meets 35th, a small, candy-colored corner building has become a civics classroom for the neighborhood. To some it is a morning-line generator, to others a source of spilled coffee and stoop litter; to lawyers and planners, it is an object lesson in how zoning — an invisible, centuries-old regulatory architecture — governs the mundane question of whether you can butter a bagel and sell it to your neighbor. That building’s address is 3428 O Street NW, and the shop inside (Call Your Mother) has done what businesses in Georgetown have long done: it has exposed the seams between how the city used to operate on the ground and how modern zoning reads the map. The result is an odd, instructive fight about law, history, and what it means for small business to exist in one of the country’s oldest protected neighborhoods. The Washington Post+4DC Planning+4The Georgetown Metropolitan+4
The old map and the new code
Georgetown is not simply a neighborhood; it is one of the nation’s earliest cases of America deciding to treat a place as a patrimony. The Old Georgetown Act of 1950 created, in effect, a special historic enclave on the Potomac with federal oversight of exterior changes through the Old Georgetown Board — a legal wall put up to preserve streetscapes and cornices, and, by extension, an entire way of living in close-grained houses and tiny shops. That act sits on top of an even older municipal practice: Washington’s zoning law, first adopted in 1920, which began the long business of mapping what goes where. The two strands — preservation and zoning — entwine in Georgetown in sometimes harmonious, sometimes mischievous ways. DC Planning+1 (Honestly the Old Georgetown Act has nothing to do with this fracas. It is strictly a zoning question.)
Zoning is a deceptively simple bureaucratic instrument: a map with letters and numbers. Those letters (R-1, R-3, MU, etc.) stand for permitted uses and dimensional rules. But overlays, exceptions, grandfathered uses, and a patchwork of ad hoc decisions make the map read like a palimpsest. In Georgetown, the “GT” overlay — a small, neighborhood-specific set of rules — sits over the underlying R zones to impose stricter controls intended to keep commercial spillover from swallowing the rowhouse blocks. In practice that means that whether a tiny corner shop may sell refrigerated cream cheese or toast a bagel depends on a stack of code citations, the history of what preceded it in that building, and the tolerance of immediate neighbors. maps.dcoz.dc.gov+1
The corner-store category: a trapdoor and a safety valve
A key change in the District’s zoning came with the Zoning Regulations of 2016, which for the first time created an explicit category for “corner stores” in certain residential zones (see Subtitle U §254). The reform was intended to revive the idea of small neighborhood retail while preventing wholesale commercialization of rowhouse blocks. The code says, bluntly: corner stores are allowed in specified rowhouse zones only under certain limits — maximum square footage, ground-floor location (cellars excepted), proximity limits to existing commercial zones, and, crucially, constraints on the kinds of activities permitted. The line in the law that matters most in Georgetown is the GT overlay’s proximity restriction: some corner stores may not be sited within 750 feet of lots zoned MU or NMU — an effort to prevent residential corners from becoming satellites of main thoroughfare commerce. DC Rules+1
But the code also embeds a paradox. “Corner store” as an enumerated use allows small retail, a deli counter, or packaged groceries. Prepared food — that is, food that requires more than reheating or simple assembly (toasting, full sandwich preparation, on-site warming) — is not a matter-of-right activity in many of these residentially zoned corners. To do that, an applicant must seek relief: a special exception (to allow prepared food under controlled conditions) and sometimes an area variance (if the property fails the numeric or proximity tests). Those are discretionary remedies; they require a hearing before the Board of Zoning Adjustment (BZA), public notice, and, often, sustained neighbor testimony. The result is that a kitchen that would be unremarkable on M Street becomes an object of law as soon as it eclipses the line the code draws between “retail” and “restaurant.” DC Rules
The building at 3428 O Street NW: a short biography
To understand why this specific building became a legal contested object, it helps to read its biography. The narrow two-story structure — the pink building that now delights Instagram feeds — is a classic Georgetown small commercial parcel: ground floor storefront, upstairs living space. Its use over the decades reads like a microcosm of neighborhood evolution. In the late 20th century the corner hosted an antiques shop and then a florist; a health-food experiment appeared briefly around 1970; most recently a flower store occupied the ground floor until 2019. When Call Your Mother signed a lease in 2019 and sought to open in 2020, it did so in a space that had an evident commercial ancestry — a fact that would matter in BZA filings and neighbor petitions. The Georgetown Metropolitan+1 (This is largely correct, but as you can see, it’s correct because it took the information from my own website. Fair play, I guess…)
The property’s public records show a mixed-use classification and modest square footage — under the 1,200-square-foot ceiling the code sets for corner stores — and its lot lines place it within the R-3/GT envelope that governs many of Georgetown’s residential blocks. But the GT overlay’s proximity rules and the question of whether on-site food preparation would be “objectionable” to adjacent rowhouses made the case anything but routine. The building, in other words, is legally small but politically large. Long & Foster+1
The fight: neighbors, ANC, and the BZA
When Call Your Mother moved in and began drawing long lines, the predictable civic machinery whirred into motion. Some neighbors testified about morning queues, people eating on stoops, and an increase in litter; others spoke about the delight a lively corner brings to a neighborhood. The local ANC weighed in with mixed recommendations; the Office of Planning’s memos examined the code and the precedents; eventually the matter landed at the BZA, where the operators sought both a special exception (to allow prepared food service) and an area variance (to accommodate the particular geography and prior uses). The Georgetown Metropolitan+1 (This is an entirely jumbled timeline of events. For instance, the first BZA hearings took place in 2019, before the store opened.)
Those hearings are necessarily granular. The BZA has to weigh whether the proposed use “will not be likely to become objectionable to neighboring property” by reason of noise, traffic, deliveries, or other conditions. The board considers mitigation measures — indoor trash storage, a queue management plan, signage asking patrons to leave the neighborhood when finished, capped hours, deliveries at certain times — and it conditions approvals accordingly. In November 2024 the Board issued a decision that, in practical effect, allowed the shop to continue operating after finding that the applicants had made adequate concessions and changes to reduce objectionable impacts. The vote was not unanimous; the decision acknowledged both the amenity and the nuisance. The ruling offers a template: Georgetown’s code can accommodate a small prepared-food operator, but only if the operator accepts operational constraints and the board is persuaded that neighbors’ concerns are addressed. The Washington Post+1
Maps, maps, maps (and why they matter)
If you want to understand Georgetown zoning, stare at the map until it becomes legible. The Office of Zoning’s interactive viewer is the canonical source: it overlays the zoning parcels, the GT overlay, historic district boundaries, and even older zoning layers if you care to dig. Until you place 3428 O Street into that viewer and see the R-3/GT shading, the 750-foot rule that sits invisibly between residential corners and commercial corridors feels abstract. The map does a simple job: it shows where the law applies and where the exceptions must be sought. If you want to see the parcel, the Official Zoning Map is the place to start; for historic context, the Old Georgetown Act’s map defines the district whose fabric the Old Georgetown Board protects. maps.dcoz.dc.gov+1 (What?)
(If you are following along at home: open maps.dcoz.dc.gov, type “3428 O Street NW” in the address bar, and toggle the zoning layers. You will see the GT overlay and the adjacency to MU/NMU zones on M Street. That adjacency is functionally the line that was litigated.) maps.dcoz.dc.gov
What the decision means for other would-be bagel shops
The immediate (practical) lesson from the BZA’s ruling is simple: you can open a bagel shop in Georgetown’s residential corners, but you very often will need formal zoning relief and you will very likely have to accept operational constraints. The code’s tidy categories — corner store vs. eating establishment — are volumetric and behavioral. If your operation involves toasting, chopping, frying, or otherwise producing odor or grease on site, you’ll face the prepared-food threshold. If your corner is within the GT overlay’s 750-foot buffer to MU/NMU parcels you may need a variance. If your customers tend to gather outside, you’ll need a persuasive management plan. In short, the law is not designed to stop small commerce; it is designed to make it behave like a neighbor. DC Rules+1
There is another lesson, and it is a political one: zoning is porous to those who can marshal time, money, and public testimony. A well-represented applicant with good counsel and a nimble operations plan can secure relief; a less-resourced owner or a tilting public mood can doom the same proposal. That reality means that what gets to be a community amenity is partly a function of procedural access. This has always been true in zoning, but the Georgetown drama makes the inequity visible: in neighborhoods where property is expensive and neighbors are politically organized, approvals often come with conditions rather than outright prohibition — a small-town compromise enacted by bureaucrats and boards. Greater Greater Washington
The deeper history: why Georgetown’s rules look the way they do
Two things shaped Georgetown’s regulatory ecosystem. First, its designation as an Old Georgetown district and the establishment of the Old Georgetown Board (FWIW, among the first uses of federal preservation authority) froze an aesthetic and regulatory regime that privileges preservation over change. Second, decades of incremental zoning and ad hoc grandfathering created islands of commercial activity in otherwise residential fabric. Post–World War II patterns — the rise of supermarkets and the decline of corner groceries — removed many small operators, but the zoning map preserved the legal memory of some corners as commercial. The 2016 ZR16 updates attempted to reconcile neighborhood needs with modern retail patterns by carving out explicit rules for corner stores, but those rules were intentionally conservative. The idea was to let neighborhood retail exist without allowing M-Street-style commercialization to seep into the blocks. DC Planning+1
That conservative impulse is visible in the GT overlay’s distance requirement: the neighborhood wanted a safety valve that would keep residential corners from becoming annexes of the commercial spine. It is an eminently Georgetown solution to an eminently Georgetown problem. But policy always meets practice in the person who wants to make a living; hence the BZA’s role as a pragmatic arbitrator. The board is the place where the map’s abstract lines encounter the messy facts of customers, deliveries, and trash pickup schedules. dcoz.dc.gov
A coda: what the battle over 3428 tells us about neighborhoods
The controversy at 3428 O Street is not, at bottom, about bagels. It is about how a city decides what a neighborhood should be, and who gets to make that decision. It’s about the collision of preservation and commerce, of hard legal lines and softer community norms. The regulatory code provides structure; the community provides texture. When the two are in tension, the outcomes are necessarily compromise: limited hours, indoor trash receptacles, managed queues, conditional approvals.
For small business owners the moral of the story is to plan as if the zoning map were a gatekeeper — because it is. For neighbors, it is to recognize that businesses bring both disruptions and intangible benefits: vibrancy, morning ritual, livelihoods. For the city, the tale suggests that zoning will always be an instrument for balancing competing claims — not a neutral record of what already exists but a set of choices about what should persist.
And for anyone who wants a bagel on O Street: yes, you probably can buy a toasted everything in Georgetown; but the price of that convenience will be the compromises the board and the owner carved out in public record. The pink building at the corner will remain a small civic theater — where law, design, and appetite performatively meet each morning. The Washington Post+1
How to read the documents and maps mentioned here
- The Old Georgetown Act / historic district background: DC Office of Planning. DC Planning
- The zoning regulation that governs corner stores: Subtitle U §254 (Corner Stores). Read the statutory text for the small-use limits and the GT overlay proximity rule. DC Rules+1
- The D.C. Office of Zoning interactive map: type 3428 O Street NW into the search bar and toggle zoning overlays to see R-3/GT and adjacent MU/NMU parcels. This is the authoritative place to view parcel designations. maps.dcoz.dc.gov
- Longform reporting and case coverage of Call Your Mother and the BZA proceedings: local outlets including The Georgetown Metropolitan, The Washington Post, Eater, and neighborhood press (which document the building’s recent history and the BZA decision). The Georgetown Metropolitan+2The Washington Post+2
Honestly, it’s not terrible, but it’s still mostly words for the sake of words (probably because I asked it to write 3000 words). I don’t think a reader would come away with a genuine understanding of the issues at play, but only a vague understanding. I’ll give it some style points for the regular references to the pink building and bagels generally, but it still does not feel human to me. Or, at least, not written by a human that actually understands the story. But then again, that describes a lot of the humans that have written about the Call Your Mother saga.
So, alas, I can’t (and won’t) start relying on a robot butler to do this. But it is quite startling how much better this is from the initial attempts a few years ago.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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