Category Archives: Uncategorized

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news round-up:

• Yellow closes for a brief renovation.
• Some big developments to watch for in Georgetown this year.
• Some business ins and outs, including the sad departure of Everards.

The first ANC meeting of 2026 will be held next Monday night at Visitation. Please see the draft agenda below.

A longtime empty lot in the heart of Georgetown is for sale. The lot at 3245 O St., immediately west of Hyde-Addison, is for sale for $1.75 million.

Many people have asked about the property over the years. I knew little myself, having heard rumors of a fight over the property but I tracked down a Washington Post article about the property from 1997 to finally get the details:

A protracted battle to preserve a crumbling historic house in Georgetown ended as the house was reduced to rubble yesterday.

While District officials have been balancing the city’s budget, debating the death penalty and tackling other weighty issues, community activists in Georgetown have been doing battle over “The House.”

Few paid much attention to the red brick house at 3245 O St. NW back in 1980, when Mark and Malika Roberts bought the property with the idea of tearing it down to build a new home.

But over the years, residents said, the house was unattended and uninhabited. It also became the most talked-about Georgetown house since the filming of “The Exorcist.”

The Robertses wanted the house demolished. Community leaders called for the property’s restoration, saying it was part of a patch of dwellings built for port workers in 1812. The residences, they said, were testimony to Georgetown’s being more than an enclave for the rich and politically powerful.

The battle moved to bureaucratic circles. Although the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board denied the Robertses a permit to tear down the house, officials at the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs granted them a permit in April.

Neighbors unsuccessfully appealed, first in D.C. Superior Court and then in the D.C. Court of Appeals. The appeals were exhausted last week.

And yesterday, private contractors demolished the house.

“In tearing this home down, we lost a bit of history,” said James Fogarty, a Georgetown advisory neighborhood commissioner. “A dangerous precedent has been set, where if a home is neglected, it can be destroyed without any regard to its historical significance.”

Next-door neighbor Betsey Werronen said, “Now not only is there a hole on our street but a hole in history.”

The Robertses, who have maintained that the house needed to be razed because it was a safety hazard, referred all inquiries to their attorney yesterday.

Adam Lipton, the Robertses’ attorney, said the house was demolished because it was a health hazard and a threat to a nearby elementary school. “The mortar in the wall was so bad that kids were pulling out bricks,” Lipton said.

“This is rewarding neglect,” fumed Westy Byrd, an advisory neighborhood commissioner. “For 17 years, the owners have neglected this property.

“The Historic Preservation Review Board denied the Robertses permission to demolish the property, but the city allowed them to,” she said.

According to property records, the family still owns the lot and would appear to be the ones selling it.

Happy New Year! Here is your January Northwest Georgetown ANC update:

Volta Park Update

I have been receiving many questions from constituents asking about the status of the Volta Park field renovation. As many have observed, after an initial flurry of work, it appeared that the construction ground to a halt in the early fall. I was repeatedly told by DPR that there was an issue with a pipe order. I had a growing doubt about that explanation, so I had a long conversation with the DPR rep in December. He assured me once more that as well as the delay over the pipe order, the contractor had run into some unexpected issues at the site, including the discovery of an ancient pipe that wasn’t on any of the existing maps. But he assured me that work was continuing even though it didn’t always look like it.

And last week DPR issued an official update on the project, which you can see below:

The ket takeaway from this recent update is that they are forecasting a completion date of this spring. I am not sure whether that also includes time for the grass to grow, during which the field will continue to be off-limits or not. I will update when I find out.

This has been a frustrating project, but I hope the final result will be worth the wait.

(Since first sending this update out on Saturday, I became aware of this article where a resident reports finding human remains on the worksite. I am very alarmed at that and am following up for answers from DPR.)

Parking

The TL:DR version: We’re thinking about pursuing the addition of resident-only parking for parts of Georgetown. Fill out this form to let me know what you think.

As discussed at the December ANC meeting, a few of my colleagues and I are exploring the possibility of introducing resident-only parking in Georgetown. We’ve continued to have discussions with the city since then and are eager to learn more about what is possible and what people think about the idea.

In short, this is how resident-only parking (or “ROP”) works: Right now, most of the residential blocks in Georgetown allow for anyone to park for 2 hours while residents with a Zone 2 parking permit can park an unlimited time. These are known as “RPP” spots (i.e. Residential Parking Permit spots). With the ROP program, a portion of these spots would changed to require a Zone 2 permits to park in them at all during some or all hours. So if you don’t have a Zone 2 sticker, you can’t park in that spot during the restricted hours.

Typically when DDOT implements this program, it sets aside approximately 50% of the spots on each included block as resident-only. And generally they simply designate one-side of the street as resident-only. (If there is parking only on one side of the street, they split whatever there is there between ROP and RPP.)

In other words, on ROP blocks, half the parking would be essentially reserved for people with Zone 2 stickers for some period of the day (or all day). The other half would remain as they current are, namely that anyone can park there for two hours and residents can park there unlimited. (And like now, the two hour rule doesn’t apply to non-residents when they park overnight, on Sundays or on holidays.) Residents can continue to park unlimited in all of the spaces. (And people with valid visitors parking passes can also continue to park just like a resident in any of the spaces.)

I first explored this option almost three years ago. This was driven by the sharp uptick in non-residents completely ignoring the two hour rule. It is fairly obvious that during the height of Covid, when the city basically stopped ticketing, a lot of people who routinely come to Georgetown for work or other reasons got used to simply driving here and parking all day long. While the city reintroduced ticketing a long time ago, it’s clear that they are not effectively enforcing this particular rule.

And the statistics back up this observation. I recently learned that the city publishes data on each and every parking ticket it issues. The dataset is gigantic, and frankly I don’t have the know-how to look at the data over a long period of time. But I took January 2019 and compared it to January 2025 as a way to compare pre and post Covid. The results were shocking.

In January 2019, the city issued roughly 6,800 tickets in Georgetown. Last January they only issued about 3,500. That’s basically a 50% drop.

And even more alarming, in January 2019, the city issued about 2,100 tickets for cars exceeding the 2 hour rule. Last January the city only wrote 650. That’s a 70% drop. Do you think there’s been a 70% drop in people exceeding the 2 hour rule? I sure don’t.

Since first floating the idea three years ago, I wanted to first explore what could be accomplished working directly with DPW to ask for more enforcement. The numbers show that this was mostly futile. A different approach is necessary.

The primary challenge to enforcing the two hour rule is that it requires a ticketing agent to:

A. Notice the car

B. Wait at least two hours

C. Come back and notice the car again, and

D. Decide to actually issue the ticket.

People who want to come and park all-day in Georgetown face a fairly low risk of getting a ticket as a result. And even if they do get a ticket, it’s only for $35. That’s a fairly safe gamble for a daily commuter who’d rather not pay to use a garage instead.

The advantage to ROP parking is that when a non-resident parks there, the DPW ticketing officer only needs to come by once to give the ticket. And moreover, the ticket can be issued immediately after the person parks and walks away, not hours later. Obviously it still depends on some enforcement—and staffing shortages are surely impacting DPW’s abilities on that front—but lowering the threshold for a violation most certainly changes the risk calculation substantially.

There are obviously trade-offs for a ROP program. Residents might find it harder to get a spot in the normal RPP spots if all the non-residents are forced to park there. So if your side of the block is the RPP side, you might have a tougher time finding a spot directly in front of your house. (Ideally this would be off-set by the increased chance that you’ll get a spot on your block in the first place.) Additionally, non-residents will likely have to drive further away from M and Wisconsin to find parking, which has the potential to impact parking supply on blocks far from the commercial streets. These are considerations that I think we need to keep in mind.

This would not be a perfect solution. But it’s really the only tool the city is offering us at this time and right now I think on balance it would be an improvement to the quality of life of Georgetown residents.

The process to actually implement this is not short, and if we do move forward with asking DDOT to give us a proposal, there will still be plenty of discussions to be had with all the relevant stakeholders concerning what the program would look like and whether we should do it in the first place. Right now. what I’d love to hear from my constituents is this:

• What do you think of the idea?
• Would you want it on your block?
• What concerns do you have if we do move forward with it?

Please fill out this form to let me know the answers to these questions! Alternatively, you can email me your thoughts at 2e02@anc.dc.gov.

I’m signing off for the year! Have a happy holiday and see you in 2026!

DPW announced over the weekend that it is beginning its leaf pick up next Monday for Zone D, which includes west Georgetown. So if you live west of Wisconsin Ave., make sure to get your leaves out to the curb, asap. They can be piled in the tree boxes or bagged in paper bags.

If your a constituent of mine (i.e. you live above Volta Place) and your leaves don’t get picked up within the next three weeks, please let me know!

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news round up:

• On the effort to fix the Rose Park trash situation.
• Sit-in to support GUTS bus drivers.
• Salt n Sundry coming with pop-up.

The ANC will meet for the last time of the year next Monday night at 6:30 at Visitation. A draft agenda is above. As you can see, there are Old Georgetown Board projects listed on the agenda. The OGB is right now working through the backlog of cases that built up during the shutdown. In fact, they’re meeting tomorrow to go through projects that were supposed to be reviewed back in November. Then they’ll meet again on Dec. 11th to go through the rest of the backlog.

However, there still are no Commission of Fine Arts members. Projects needing permit approval will still need to wait for the CFA to be filled again before moving forward. There’s a meeting of the CFA scheduled for January, so perhaps there will be members by then. We’ll see.

Hello and welcome to your December Northwest Georgetown ANC update.

Leaves and Snow

It’s that time of year again, when the city makes an (often unsuccessful) effort to clear the leaves from the streets. This lack of success comes in several forms, but last year the largest complaints were:

• That they completely missed whole blocks
• That they didn’t take bagged leaves, and
• Even for the blocks they did pass, they missed lots of leaves

The ANC has been repeatedly pressing DPW to address these complaints. And I can at least report that the city is now stating that they’ll take bagged leaves. (Remember that bagged leaves always have to be in paper bags, not plastic.) We also provided the mayor’s rep with a list of blocks that were missed last year, so hopefully they will not be missed again this year.

As for timing, DPW splits each ward into four zones: a, b, c, and d. It works through each zone sequentially. Right now it is starting zones c, which in Georgetown is east of Wisconsin Ave. So if you live east of Wisconsin, get your leaves out as soon as possible.

The area west of Wisconsin is in Zone d, and will be picked up after c. Depending on weather, this could start in a couple weeks. You can check this website for updates.

Hopefully they will actually get all the leaves this year. But if after a couple weeks, your block is still untouched, please email me at 2e02@anc.dc.gov and let me know.

In either event, leaf pick up season will be followed (or briefly coincide) with snow season. Unlike with leaves, this job is mostly on us. Please remember that your sidewalk needs to be cleared within 8 hours of daylight after it stops snowing. (If you’re able, go ahead and shovel your neighbors’ sidewalks too!) If you are unable to shovel your sidewalk, please let me know and I’ll try to arrange someone to handle it for you.

Breakfast With Santa and Volta Park

Don’t forget that this weekend, the Friends of Volta Park are hosting their annual and beloved Breakfast with Santa:

Speaking of Volta Park, I continue to share the concerns that many have expressed about the apparently abandoned work on the ball field renovation. I am continuing to push DPR for answers on why it continues to be delayed and what impact this delay will have on the overall timeline. Some residents have also expressed an interest in clearing some space on the field for use by residents while the wait continues. I will update as soon as I get some clear answers.

On the positive side, I was recently informed that a splash pad may be coming to the park. It would likely be located in the plaza south of the rec. center. I think this would be a great asset for parents of young kids.

Book Hill

There is a public meeting next week for the planned Book Hill Park renovations. It will be on December 9th at 6:00 pm in the library. This will be the second meeting for the planned renovations and I expect that they will be presenting some of their initial findings and recommendations at this meeting. If you’re interested in the park, come on out!

And with that, I wish you a warm and happy holiday season!

There will be a community meeting next week to update the public on the status of the planning for the Book Hill renovation project. Click here for a summary of the first meeting. At that meeting, planners proposed several possible elements for the project, including repairs to existing infrastructure and the possibility of a new terrace. We’ll see how the plans have evolved since then.

My understanding is that the city is reprograming money from the “Triangle Park” project at the intersection of 33rd and Wisconsin and moving it to the Book Hill project instead. Apparently the crepe myrtles in the triangle park were deemed worth keeping and thus no viable plan for dramatically improving the pocket park remained. But this is great news for Book Hill since it will dramatically increase the available money.