Category Archives: Uncategorized

Yesterday workers were out in front of the soon-to-be-a-Chase-Bank at Wisconsin and P to repave the parking lot. This was inevitable, but it is still a shame and a huge missed opportunity.

Street facing surface parking lots should not exist in Georgetown. It is a huge waste of precious commercial real estate and reflects a misplaced suburban mindset that customers must drive.

Nowhere is that more clear than with this property. When there was still a chance this property would revert to a market use, there was talk of either turning the parking lot into a small condo building, or otherwise repurposing the space for pedestrian use. Just imagine an outdoor cafe, or beer garden, or really anything designed for humans, not cars.

But when Chase bought the property it was inevitable that this gigantic corporation would bring with that suburban mindset. And yesterday put a thick layer of asphalt over the hopes that this could be used for anything but the storage of a couple people’s SUVs. Continue reading →

Photo by Mike Maguire.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Another public meeting on the future of the canal coming up in November.
• What better place to watch tonight’s World Series game one than at the only bar that was open the last time a DC team was in the World Series?

3100 block of Q St.

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM visits a playful photo in the archives of the DC Historical Society.

The information for the photo indicates that it is of an unknown location in Georgetown, but it is dated to 1964. GM scoured Google Maps trying to pin down the exact address, but couldn’t find a match. Anyone recognize the home?

We’ll just have to speculate as to the colors. At first it looks like a group of paint swatches from a homeowner trying to decide on a final paint color. But the design seems too finished for that. Plus, there’s the white flower in the center. Maybe some hippies?

Photo by Mike Maguire.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Inside one of the most beautiful homes in Georgetown.
• You can buy this one, it just will cost you a million dollars for each fireplace.

Dumbarton Oaks

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Yahoo is winding down its listservs, which a lot of neighborhoods–including Georgetown–use.
• Interesting talk coming up at the Georgetown library about the history of the late, great Washington Star newspaper.

Potomac River

This week, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced an ambitious effort to establish 12,000 new affordable housing units across the District. A central conviction of the plan is that too much of the city’s current affordable housing has been concentrated in its poorer, eastern corners. The wealthier, westerly corners must pick up the slack. And that includes Georgetown.

To carry this out, the Office of Planning divided the city into ten districts. Georgetown is in “Near Northwest”:

And then it set goals for each section. Here is how many affordable units each district currently has, and how many the administration wants to establish:

Near Northwest currently has 4,010 affordable units. The Office of Planning wants to add 1,250 more by 2025. The Near Northwest district spans Georgetown, and parts of Foggy Bottom, Dupont, and Shaw. So if the new units were evenly distributed within the planning area, only a portion would be in Georgetown. (However, most of the existing 4,520 units are located in the Dupont/Shaw area, so if the overall numbers were to be equally distributed, Georgetown would be expected to carry more of the weight of the new units.)

The immediate questions of how these units would come to be remain unanswered. The city currently has only a couple tools to create affordable housing. It can use public money to take “naturally occurring” affordable housing (i.e. already cheap housing) and make sure it stays that way. It can use inclusive zoning or planned unit developments to incentivize the creation of new affordable housing. It can dispose of public land in a manner that requires the construction of affordable housing. Finally, it can increase funding for housing vouchers. These existing tools, funded at current levels, have failed to prevent the evaporation of affordable housing across the city. So more innovations (and/or funding) will be necessary to make a serious dent in the problem. Continue reading →

Photo by Mike Maguire.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• New York-based fast casual restaurant, Dig, is coming to the old Little Tavern building at N and Wisconsin.
• The BID rolled out a new website.