The Georgetown Metropolitan

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.

3100 block of K St.

Dean and Deluca is dead. Long live the Dean and Deluca catering van.

Specifically, long live the Dean and Deluca catering van that has been left abandoned on Volta Place for months.

GM first noticed in September that the van had been left there, unmoved. The Georgetown Dean and Deluca closed at the end of July. This was part of a company-wide downsizing. There are now just a handful of stores still open. Some sort of bankruptcy seems to be in its near future.

But yet the van remains.

Shortly after GM noticed that the van had been there for quite a while, the block was slated to be repaved. No parking would be allowed. The van had already racked up a couple tickets:

Surely it would be towed away.

And yet when the crews came to repave the street, the van remained:

They tore up the street around the van!

It seemed like the van had declared itself a sovereign state. No city agency could pierce its hold on this precious square of asphalt.

But then the crews came back and finally moved this scofflaw van. Continue reading →

Photo by BeyondDC.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Lots of homes in Georgetown claim to be “federal”. Most aren’t (they’re typically not old enough and are likely Victorian). But this one really is.
• KickSpot in some legal trouble.

1500 block of 33rd St.

A new Turkish market is coming to the long vacant space at 1826 Wisconsin Ave. A sign has been on the window for several weeks, and the build out is making progress.

The market appears to be affiliated with Cafe Divan, next door, which is also Turkish. Continue reading →