How D.C. could look if the height restriction changes | Hacker News Reader

How D.C. could look if the height restriction changes

washingtonpost.com

53 pointsmshafrir61 comments

What a horrible hit piece by WaPo against the plan to raise the height limit. As if the taller buildings are going to be windowless slab-sided monoliths!

Height is beautiful: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_3nsDtd8zatQ/S9382uGLh6I/AAAAAAAAAh...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v171/lugnuts/Bridges/IMG_5...

http://www.thewrigleybuilding.com/images/about-top.jpg

Also, the growth of D.C. is something I intensely dislike. It reminds me of Trantor in the Foundation series. It's all fueled by federal spending. The city has no finance industry, not a lot of technology besides defense contractors, no manufacturing, nothing that would justify the growth other than lots of highly-paid federal workers.

I'm actually a proponent of a robust federal government, but I hate the fact that it's concentrated in D.C. I think we need to spend money on say the SEC or the EPA, but we should push the work of these organizations down to local field offices, so the incidental benefits of federal jobs and contracts go back into the communities that pay the taxes to support them. Moreover, local siting makes federal offices much more sensitive to the local culture and concerns.

I didn't think it was a hit piece simply because they didn't get creative with their building design.

The purpose was to show that regardless of raised height, you'd still be able to see the US capitol, and the tall monuments/government buildings will remain as iconic as they are today in the skyline.

I generally agree but there is the concern that the higher buildings would take away from the prominence of the historical monuments that the city centers on.

A good example of this is the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. It appeared prominent and even formidable when it was built in the 18th century but modern construction has surrounded it on all sides and it's not even really part of the skyline anymore[1]. That's ok, but we have to decide whether the loss of emphasis on history is worth it.

[1] http://www.deseretnews.com/images/article/midres/315661/3156... (You can just see the six spires over an office building in the left-hand side of the frame).

The only reason these short buildings are considered historic is that important things happened in them before we learned how to make rebar, and before we rediscovered concrete.

We can build tall buildings now. Some of those will become historic, if we build them. Many of them will be very nice-looking, like the new WTC towers. Don't let old building methods stand in the way of progress. I'm not one of those growth-at-all-costs people, but there's a lot of benefit in finding ways to put a large number of people in a small space comfortably.

New building methods create ugly, uncomfortable, temporary environments. If you've ever lived in, say, Paris or New York, you may understand the feeling of living in the hollowed-out shell of a once-great city.

The Freedom Tower is incredibly boring, not to mention dated, and will have the oppressive atmosphere of any modern office space inside.

This is very subjective. I live in the hollowed out shell of a once so-so city. I've also lived in a lively city with big buildings. I liked the latter much more.

I live in the most skyscraper-crazy city on earth - Hong Kong - and I can attest that if done properly and with care, building skyward doesn't have to lead to a dystopian Fifth Element-style future.

> I generally agree but there is the concern that the higher buildings would take away from the prominence of the historical monuments that the city centers on.

Most of the monuments are within 0.5 miles north or south of Constitution Ave, while the business district centers around K street a mile north of that. In fact, I think it would look quite amazing, the way Central Park does in Manhattan.

How do you read this as a hit piece...? Nowhere that I saw do they even allude to the various proposals being bad ideas.

Also, DC has a decently sized tech community and industry, a lot of which is not related to the federal government. I'd venture to say it's the largest in the country after SF, NYC and Chicago.

If you look at the photos, you can click the right arrow (or top buttons if not on a phone) to see what the neighborhood would look like with eased height restrictions: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/lifestyle/magaz.... Rather than photoshopping in nice buildings, they've put in windowless concrete slabs of uniform height. Sometimes the best way to get people to agree with your side isn't to argue for your side, but to "push-poll" people: do you like the way DC looks now or do you want massive concrete blocks with no windows dominating everything? In photo mockups, it comes off as subtle, but it can shape the opinions of many.

I'm not saying that's what the WaPo is trying to do. I think they just didn't put in the time to do a good job creating a hypothetical new DC with realistic buildings of varying heights. However, if you support increased heights for buildings, their mock-ups make something you consider positive look bad. I mean, I'd hate to live in a city with imposing concrete blocks with no windows. It would look like some dystopian future world. But the photos of what I think is Chicago that were linked to don't look oppressive and don't have uniformity of height - there's plenty of sky that you can see through the buildings since they aren't connected beige blobs. Now, one can still dislike tall buildings (they can change the nature of the area), but they wouldn't have the same oppressive feeling.

So, the mockups from WaPo look oppressive (on purpose or on accident) while proponents of eased height restrictions would insist that it would look a lot more like the Chicago photos than some concrete dystopia.

Right. Chicago looks great because of the set back requirements. Buildings either have to be further back from the street, or taper as they rise. That lets plenty of sunlight to street level. The mockups are straight vertical additions onto buildings that extend right to the street.

it's also where the nih and nasa are located. I had 3 technical jobs there that had nothing to do with politics, and my 2 friends who live in the area work on technology things which have nothing to do with politics. Rent in DC is exorbitant and making demand higher by not allowing tall buildings seems silly to me.

NIH and NASA get a Google's worth of funding from the federal government. With employees in DC, that funnels a ton of cash into the local economy. But why DC? It has no top medical school. Shouldn't NIH be in Baltimore near Hopkins? Why isn't NASA in a city with a university with a top aerospace program, or closer to aerospace equipment manufacturers?

> The city has no finance industry

Right, because that gives a place substance...

I wasn't aware that this was even supposed to be a hit piece. I kept scrolling down, increasing the building height limits, and always preferred the tallest variants with the largest footprints...

Limiting housing supply in desirable locations is the new redlining. I understand liking the character of a place, but it seems morally problematic to use the police power to enforce that character at the expense of those who will no longer be able to afford to live there as demand increases while supply doesn't. Those same people are often the first to support affordable housing mandates without recoiling at the inefficiencies of the Rube Goldberg machine of policy they've constructed.

This is never about housing. It's about corporations wanting to be pack in more and more lobbyists as close as they can.

It's about both of those things. Luckily, I don't think corporations and lobbyists are boogeymen. Why shouldn't they be allowed to work in convenient locations? The most successful, established firms already do work in those convenient locations, but since supply is so restricted, smaller firms can't afford it.

When you restrict supply, the folks with money win.

I don't think they're boogeymen either, but this will not lead to affordable or convenient housing and anyone who believes otherwise is a just a fool. This is from the experience of living in the city for 5 years.

If there was actual demand for denser housing or office space you'd see it sprouting up across the river in Virginia or outside the southeast of the city where land is dirt cheap. Remember the city itself is tiny and the areas outside the city do not have these restrictions.

"If there was actual demand for denser housing or office space you'd see it sprouting up across the river in Virginia or outside the southeast of the city where land is dirt cheap."

This is untrue. If housing desirablility is inversely proportional to the distance from the White House, then the area of equally desirable housing increases with square of the distance. You won't get dense nodes. It'll be spread around in a circle.

"this will not lead to affordable or convenient housing"

The more housing you allow, the cheaper it will be compared to a universe with supply restrictions. Do you disagree with that?

There is absolutely demand for affordable housing in desirable parts of the city. It's not that people want denser living, they want to live in a nice part of the city. Way out east of the river is not a great place to live or work for a variety of reasons.

(And, obviously, there are tall office buildings in Rosslyn just over the bridge from DC.)

Uh, do you not see the high rises right across the river in Arlington?

Do you have any evidence to support that? I think the push for ending the height restrictions was mostly coming from residential developers.

Lobbyists can live anywhere (I'm sure many/most live outside DC proper) and, if anything, I would argue that it's increasingly less important for a lobbying firm to physically be on K St or the Hill.

I actually really like the height limit in DC aesthetically. After living there and Bethesda for 6 years it's strange to think of anything else but the monuments physically dominating everything in sight.

I don't disagree, but when you look at the Arlington, Virginia neighborhoods of Rosslyn and Ballston, you can readily see how the height limit impacts DC. For those of you not familiar with DC's geography, the District of Columbia was originally a perfectly square diamond. The portion on the south side of the Potomac was given back to Virginia due to congressional lobbying in the early 1800's creating laws which mandated building all Federal buildings on the north side of the Potomac. This left the Arlington/Alexandria portions of the District of Columbia as poor, economic backwaters. No Federal money pouring in, and also no congressional representation. Virginia took them back.

The cities of Arlington and Alexandria now occupy the portion of the original diamond that is west of the Potomac. When standing in Georgetown, you look across the river and see 20 story office buildings. Arlington and Alexandria act as quasi-DC, in the sense that they are dense, are connected via DC's subway system (Metro) and separated from DC only by a relatively narrow river.

Lifting the height limit, I think, would be a great thing for DC. It is an overly suburbanized metro area due to the height restrictions.

Oh, so construction companies are running out of places in DC? And they need the location right next to the White House?

Please.

There is space right across Anacostia river in the South East. Metro goes there pretty fast.

Build the buildings there, just make sure to hire more police to make it safer for workers.

Sure, and that's sort of what happened around Navy Yard. But c'mon, it's not that simple and you know it.

I understand that it's not easy. One way to solve South East crime and penury problems is to move these people away. Building corporate offices there could make it happen.

Now I know that the approach of moving Anacostia people away has this problem: ultimately these people will have to go somewhere and the vicious circle will start again but at least we don't know that all these people will go to the same location, so these problems can be spread and be solved by different communities.

Personifying the companies that create buildings is a cute rhetorical trick, but people are the ones with the desire to live and work in those places. The height limit prevents them from doing so.

God forbid we create more housing so more people can affordably live in DC. Imagine the sight lines. Oh, the horror.

D.C. would look much more like a real city without the restrictions. This is a good thing!

Cities grow! The choice here is between upward and outward. You can keep buildings unnaturally short, which forces the city to spread out, increasing commute times (and a whole lot more). Or you can let things grow, and let the place be more livable for the people that actually live there.

As a lifelong DC resident, I have to admit I've thought about how DC doesn't look like a "real city" and how other places look so much cooler, but seeing this made me cringe. I really hope that the monuments in DC don't get blocked out by office buildings.

Paris is often seen as one of the most beautiful cities in the world and totally does feel like a real city despite the height limit.

In fact the new financial district off to the side with its skyscrapers and, I imagine, no height limit, while modern and fancy, just doesn't feel as city-like as the rest of Paris. It feels like a dead place where people only come to work.

I've only spent a good week in Paris, so it might feel different when you're living there for a long time. But not-tall cities are totally cool.

Paris also was built with a fairly unified style giving it beautiful sight-lines. D.C. wasn't and it's not very pretty in most of the non-tourist areas.

> It feels like a dead place where people only come to work.

On that note, parts of Toronto like that feel the exact same way.

Height restrictions or not the new development in DC is mostly garbage. Planners do not seem to understand the formula for making pleasant urban neighborhoods with multistory residential buildings is that the ground floor must be retail. The building facade and retail must be flush with the sidewalk.

I don't understand why this formula is so hard for urban planners to accept. You see it in every thriving city. It simply should not be allowed to make a 5+ story building that is purely housing and is recessed from the sidewalk. When it is allowed you get the alienating Corbusier style housing project vibe. This crap has been thrown up all over the DC area in recent years.

I would argue that planners do understand the formula for making pleasant urban neighborhoods - it's usually the developers who don't get the placemaking concepts.

That being said, I'm interested in the neighborhoods/buildings you mentioned being so bad. Could you share which locations you're referencing?

Paris is also ~2000 sq miles while DC is only 60 sq miles.

I doubt Paris was anywhere near 60sq miles when it started out as a trading settlement in 250 BC.

DC is restricted to that 60 sq miles and can get no larger. It was actually a bit larger until they gave back all the land on the south side of the Potomac to Virginia.

There's an argument that forcing the city to "spread out" rather than "up" has been partly responsible for the rapid improvement in crime and livability in many parts of the city over the last decade. What would H St NE or Upper 16th St look like if one could just build huge buildings in Dupont and Adams Morgan.

Making it impossible for poor folks to live in a place does tend to reduce crime. Is it moral?

Living in a city has become desirable again. People who can't afford to live in the city are being pushed out into the suburbs like Prince George's county. Is that immoral? I don't know.

Displacement isn't inherently immoral in my opinion, but using those people's government to exacerbate the process is.

I don't think that dog will hunt. Some of the safest places in Chicago are also the densest (say River North with its towering residential skyscrapers). Same for New York (Manhattan is way denser than the Bronx).

The reason DC has gotten nicer lately isn't the sprawl. It's because it's become a major target for young professionals, which have driven the poor people out of many parts of the city.

It would make sense to ease restrictions near metro stations first, then later sprinkle restriction lifting throughout other neighborhoods once mass transit and infrastructure gets improved.

Key issues to consider: infrastructure (power, water, sewage, gas, internet, transit, roads) traffic impact walkability of neighborhood (are there food options, etc.)

I think pushing sprawl outward is the LAST thing DC needs, traffic there is already horrible (not as bad as mexico city or sao paulo, but awful by US standards).

Arguably traffic could improve if people were able to live closer to their jobs rather than having to drive in from a far-flung suburb.

To everyone complaining that companies just want to pack in more lobbyists: There are lots of non-lobbyists in DC, you know? Some of those people include blue collar workers, people on minimum wage, and even nonprofit employees trying to scale back what lobbyists are extracting from us via government. Higher rents (due to less housing) hurt all of those groups. High-paid lobbyists can live in Georgetown regardless. The poor cannot.

I don't understand why DC doesn't do a Parisian-style La Defense. The central historical DC core can remain at its current height, while skyscrapers and other high rises can be in a designated area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_D%C3%A9fense

Because this is about putting more lobbyists closer to the capital building.

Because the city itself is tiny. It's only 60 sq miles. According to Wikipedia the urban area of Paris is 2000 sq miles.

I don't understand why a city needs to keep "growing" to keep it alive. Keep the height restrictions because it keeps the city beautiful. Why don't we develop the parts that are run down before we screw up the view.

Because we live in a market economy. You build stuff where people want to be, not where you hope they'll go. Unless you don't care if your building stays empty.

I personally am fine with exemptions to the height limit, especially if they can be tied to a meaningful concession from the developer like a significant number of affordable housing units.

Some background from the WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/24/s...

Keeping the height restriction in place may be the only practical limit on the size of government.

What on earth are you talking about?

Check your sarcasm detector.

Maybe the size, but not the price. DC building restrictions just mean to pay more for less.

Great images, though I'd imagine in real life it would look a bit different from uniform beige boxes.

I too liked the technique, but noticed that if you photoshop in actual building looking buildings instead of beige monoliths it actually looks fine. That makes me wonder if they started there and switched to the monoliths when they didn't get the right impact for the story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com