Calling all booze purveyors: Glover Park just lifted its liquor license moratorium!

Well, a tiny bit at least. Last night, Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3B voted to allow two more liquor licenses for beer, wine, and spirits into the little commercial strip, going from 12 to 14—the first increase since 2008, when three new licenses were snatched up by the already-existing Surfside, Breadsoda, and Rocklands.

Even that bit of breathing room, though, required some major debate.

Faced with a row of empty storefronts and a less-than-dynamic array of establishments—a Chipotle is pretty much the most exciting thing to open there lately, and retail is scarce—Glover Park residents have been debating how best to manage its revitalization. Getting rid of the 16-year-old moratorium would bring in more bars and restaurants, but the Adams Morgan bogeyman is strong in these parts, and half the neighborhood fears becoming an unmitigated party scene on the weekends. It’s a familiar debate: Places like H Street, Barracks Row, and U Street have all flirted with the idea of turning off the taps.

In Glover Park, the spectrum of opinions is as broad as any. Resident Joe Kildea wanted to the neighborhood emulate West Dupont in tossing the moratorium on restaurant-class licenses altogether. “We’re getting smoked by other neighborhoods, and it’s painfully obvious when you come to meetings to see why,” Kildea said. Commissioner Brian Cohen conceded that allowing more restaurants would help fill neighborhood vacancies, but asked, “the question is for whom.”

The sole commissioner to vote against the motion extending the moratorium, Ben Thielen, sees the rise of nightlife in other neighborhoods as a good omen for Glover Park—with destinations like H Street and Adams Morgan making a name for themselves as nightlife hotspots, clubs aren’t likely to overrun the Metro-less Glover Park area. Furthermore, he thinks that even without a moratorium, “We can distinguish between good places and bad places like Third Edition,” a reference to the Georgetown bar recently in the news for serving minors.

Glover Park’s wariness of the Jumbo Slice aesthetic goes back to the 1980s, when the neighborhood spent some time as a nightlife destination. “It left people with a bad taste in their mouths,” said Commissioner Jackie Blumenthal. Several years after Georgetown established its own moratorium, Blumenthal said Glover Park followed suit in order to prevent the nightlife from moving a few doors up Wisconsin Avenue. “It was an effort to protect ourselves, based on bad experiences.”

Since then, the ANC took a piecemeal approach to easing the moratorium. Beginning in 2001, they have gradually been expanding both the type and quantity of licenses available. “The key is management,” said Blumenthal. “And that’s what the moratorium allows us to do, is manage.”

It’s worth pointing out that there are other ways to manage the effect of bars and restaurants on a neighborhood: Voluntary agreements, as blunt an instrument as they are, force restaurants to play nice with the neighbors. And there are all sorts of strategies—like sound-proofing, garbage truck coordination, and best practices for responsible alcohol service—that make bars less of a burden.

So, best of luck to Glover Park in filling those vacancies at a time when independent retail isn’t doing so hot. Bookstores are disappearing from the rest of the city; maybe one will want to open there.

The new Walmart planned for South Dakota Avenue and Riggs Road NE might have been announced a year later than the first four, but it'll get rolling at about the same time as the rest of them, if all goes according to plan. Walmart and developer JBG submitted a large tract review application for the site yesterday, which pretty much gets a once-over by the Office of Planning before construction can proceed.

As I mentioned when we first got a look at plans for the site, it's definitely one of the better-designed Walmarts headed into the city, whatever you might think about the mega-retailer's business practices. Three hundred and fifty apartments will sit atop the first-floor Walmart, which will have a cafe and little plaza with outdoor seating at Riggs Road and 3rd Street NE, and the rest of the street frontage is reasonably interesting and varied. This, in an area that has not much multifamily housing or retail at all, only a few blocks from a Metro station (although it does have quite a bit more parking than it probably needs—775 spaces total, or 180 more than are required).

Interestingly, Montgomery County is trying to figure out how to get this level of urban design at the new Walmart planned for Rockville Pike: As County Council president Roger Berliner explained last week on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, they just want to make sure it fits in with the White Flint Sector Plan, which is going to require some re-zoning to make sure Walmart gets incorporated into some larger mixed-use project. A caller who manages a shopping mall across the street said all his tenants were excited about their new neighbor. Such are the times!

Full package after the jump.

Washington's cut of the foreclosure settlement. [Examiner]

Could you get some of it? [WhereWeLive]

New uber-fancy real estate agency. [Curbed]

D.C.'s terrible new street signs. [Post]

Boozy Brightwood. [Brightwoodian]

Will the civilian BRAC make property disposal easier? [WBJ]

Azerbaijan is going to have the world's tallest building??? [Architizer]

All the ways in which D.C. residents are near homelessness. [P&P]

I'm late on this one, but: Manhattan's disappearing parking lots. [NYT]

Norton: Post Office deal could still fall apart. [WBJ]

First Nations get sprawly. [AtlanticCities]

D.C. zoning update doesn't go far enough. [GGW]

Alexandria plans to lock in affordable housing around new transit. [GGW]

Americans like urbanism, but also privacy. [CityDesk]

Today on the market: Six bedrooms in Cleveland Park.

Why? I dunno (at least on the record). Officially, DMPED doesn't comment on personnel matters. Jenkins was reasonably popular among the citizen members of the formal body set up to manage Walter Reed's transition. "It was a shock to everybody," says Alice Giancola. "It was uniform among community members that he was doing a good job."

Jenkins, in response to an inquiry, sent over a statement. "While there could have been a smoother shift for the project, my transition away from the project has been in the works for quite some time," he wrote, before launching into his achievements and accolades (to wit, 2011 Washington Business Journal Top 40 under 40 Professional and 2010 EnVest Foundation Top 40 under 40 Professional). Jenkins says he'll "take these experiences and achievements to the private sector where I will focus on large master plan developments and energy and sustainability solutions."

The palace intrigue probably doesn't matter much to you, dear reader. Especially since DMPED had someone ready to take his place: Martine Combal, who's run the Department of Housing and Community Development's property acquisition and development division since 2008, and before was a project manager with DMPED. So there won't be much disruption to the process.

To me, it's interesting because Combal will be one of the highest-ranking women within the city's economic development agency. Real estate is a very dude-heavy discipline, and although 27 out of DMPED's 52 employees are women, all of its leaders—Deputy Mayor, three Directors, chief of staff, communications director—are guys. (Even under the last director, Valerie Santos, most of the top staff were men). In that environment, any infusion of estrogen is welcome.

Not gonna happen, soon.

Developer Jim Abdo's lawyer tells me that he's withdrawn the zoning application for his planned 70-ish-unit building in the empty space between 14th and 15th Street on Rhode Island Avenue NW, and declined to give a reason for the reversal. It's not an unprecedented thing for Abdo; he's proposed building on top of his office and the Caribou Coffee building on 14th Street, and not moved forward there either.

D.C.'s budget thanks the weather gods. [DCist]

De-occupy? Re-occupy! [Examiner]

Co-working scales. [GOOD]

Harvard tries to evict Cameroon. [Legal Times]

Preservationists scramble to save historic tax credit. [PreservatioNation]

Housing nadir keeps getting further away. [WSJ]

Don't raise the gas tax just to build more roads. [GGW]

You know where people can afford to buy houses? Maryland. [Gazette]

Dunno if $1,600 a month for one person counts as being "on a budget." [Urbanturf]

Today on the market: Spot in the Logan School.

And they seem to expect some altercations.

From the right-wing Media Research Center:

A view of Lorton Landfill's LEED recycling area.

Last month, the District got one of those rankings that it knows is meaningless but celebrates anyway: It has more building square feet per capita certified by the U.S. Green Building Council as enviro-friendly than any state in the nation. Win!

It’s meaningless in part because D.C. is a city and can’t realistically be compared to bigger states, with rural and urban areas and everything in between. Still, D.C. does have one of the strongest green building laws in the country. Starting in 2012, all new private buildings are required to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards.

But there’s another problem, one that doesn’t just boil down to a problem of geography: How does anyone know builders really follow the LEED checklist?

Some of what goes into a rating is self-evident, like how many bike parking spaces a building has, and whether there are low-flow toilets and a green roof. Other stuff is much harder to track.

Take trash. Under the 100-point LEED system, projects get one point for diverting 50 percent of their construction debris from a landfill, and two points for recycling 75 percent of it. The vast majority of projects apply for at least one point, and virtually every building that applies gets the credit. But unlike low-flow toilets, there’s no way of telling where the remains of buildings actually go: Contractors simply report that the debris got recycled, and USGBC never checks it out.

If they did, they’d probably find that much more of it simply gets dumped in the ground than contractors claim.

Bill Turley, executive director of the Construction Materials Recycling Association, says “sham recycling” is a problem all over the country—but that it’s particularly acute in the Washington area, in part because demand for LEED-quality recycling is so high, and traditional landfills know they can say they do it without fear of inspection.

“Most of the legitimate recyclers are [association] members, and so they’re complaining, ‘I know there’s no way that guy down the street can be doing that recycling rate, he is just claiming that rate so that his customers can get the LEED point,’” Turley says. “This may come as a surprise to you, but there are people in the waste industry who will lie.”

* * *

There is money to be made in recycling, if you actually sell all the material you separate out, along with charging “tipping fees” on the front end.

Five years ago, Kevin Herb saw the LEED wave coming, and invested $12 million in a state-of-the-art recycling facility called Broad Run in Manassas, Va. Enclosed in a massive warehouse, it looks like a giant Rube Goldberg machine. Raw construction waste is dumped in one end, gets filtered through shakers, blowers, magnets, and screens, and spits out in neat piles of rock, cardboard, wood, paper, and metal. The stuff that’s totally unrecyclable—about 23 percent—goes to an incinerator, where it’s burned for electricity.

Business has been reasonably good, Herb says, especially since he worked out a contract with Waste Management, which nine months ago started collecting waste from LEED projects in D.C. at its transfer station on Queens Chapel Road NE. Trucks come in from construction sites and dump their trash, which is then reloaded onto trailers that head out to Broad Run. But he’s only doing about 360 tons per month out of the 1,500 tons he’s permitted.

Some of Herb’s competitors aren’t quite as high tech.

Around the corner from Waste Management’s transfer station is Rodgers Brothers, which separates material into piles outside, and has some screens and magnets inside a large brick warehouse. The 40-year-old outfit is a minority-owned certified business enterprise, which helps general contractors on public projects that have to work with small and local businesses. One client is Clark Construction, the region’s biggest contractor, which is working on St. Elizabeths and CityCenterDC, and refused to answer questions about their recycling practices.

George Rodgers, the plant’s owner, says he’s lost most of his LEED business to the Waste Management transfer station, because he can’t get the kind of recycling rates developers want. But he also doubts that sophisticated operations can recycle 100 percent of waste that comes from construction sites if it’s all mixed up to begin with. “We never claimed that, and never will claim it,” Rodgers says. “The new guys, they need to build their customers, they’re pursuing, and they’re giving them what they want. They’re giving reports saying 80 or 100 percent, but it’s just not possible.”

Then there’s Lorton Landfill, now a tall mound of compacted trash, which has been handling LEED waste alongside regular garbage since 2007. Trucks from LEED jobs are directed up to the top of one mound, where a handful of workers pick over a pile of trash in the whipping wind, dragging out pieces of metal and cardboard with the help of an excavator. What doesn’t get put in the few visible bins of recyclables gets dumped in the landfill, just a few yards away. On the way out, the truck driver picks up a ticket certifying that his load got properly recycled, which he’ll pass on to the contractor, who uses it as part of the LEED application.

They don’t care much about what’s in your load, though. I rode in on a truck that had 100 percent post-separation garbage. The driver told a gatekeeper it was metal and cardboard, and on the way out, was given a ticket saying 75 percent had been recycled.

Mark Shaener, who manages the recycling program for Lorton’s parent company ESI Waste, says this is all on the up-and-up: The manual system allows trash to be processed in batches, while a big machine like the one at Broad Run could break, leading to potentially days of down time.

But industry experts say it’s pretty difficult to achieve a 75 percent recycling rate with a manual system. “I’ve never see nor heard anywhere in the country that’s able to do that,” says Turley (while refraining from calling out Lorton, which just became a member of the CMRA). “If they manage to attain that, I’ll congratulate them on being unique.”

Waste Management, a national firm that takes its environmental reputation very seriously, doesn’t take any of its waste to manual sort facilities. I asked sales manager Christopher Pilzer whether workers aided by a few construction vehicles could possibly get the rates Lorton claims. “I think they’d be very tired,” he replies diplomatically.

* * *

Local governments keep pretty good track of the garbage that comes from homes and businesses, since there aren’t many haulers, and a lot goes to public facilities. But construction waste is much harder to track, because the industry is very regional and very fragmented: Small haulers take waste from different sites to different disposal facilities in Maryland, Virginia, and the District. What information the government collects is self-reported; in the District, it’s even kept confidential.

So it’s up to contractors to make sure their waste is going where it’s supposed to. Ideally, they separate it on site, since even mechanized plants have a hard time recycling commingled trash—but that takes effort, training, and space. A lot of contractors have bigger things to worry about, and simply take the tickets their haulers hand over.

“Once it leaves the job site, there’s not many companies that are going to go chase the trash,” says Matt Krstolic, a project manager with Hensel Phelps, which is building the massive Marriott Marquis at 9th and Massachusetts Streets NW. “What’s the standard on that? Who’s to say how much is getting flubbed and thrown out? I’m not sure.”

Ken Mogul, who owns a facility similar to Broad Run in Chester, Va., says even if contractors do visit the disposal facilities, without a real audit, it’s not always clear who’s up to the job and who’s not. “You’re now asking folks who are trying to do the right thing, they wouldn’t know necessarily how to make that decision,” he says. “You’re asking people to be their own experts.”

It’s no wonder that recyclers who’ve made substantial investments are complaining about those that haven’t: The construction industry is still anemic these days, and there’s only so much trash to go around. So lately, they’ve been pushing for legislation that would require trash on LEED projects to go only to certified facilities, which has been done in green-happy places like Seattle and San Jose, Calif. Councilmember Mary Cheh’s staff is mulling over the idea, while getting the Department of Public Works to do an audit that would tell us what’s going where.

But why hasn’t the U.S. Green Building Council set up some form of certification, like the one it’s got for sustainably harvested wood? When I first ask a USGBC representative about this, she sends me to Avi Golen, a recycler in Philadelphia who serves on the technical committee that oversees waste management standards. Golen is also upset about the amount of LEED waste that goes to landfills—which cuts into his bottom line—and says the Green Building Council’s been reluctant to take action.

“There’s no question they’re aware of it, but from a policing standpoint, I just don’t know if that’s the business they want to be in,” he says. “And it’s a problem not only in the waste disposal part of LEED. It’s rampant.”

When I finally talk to Brandon Owens, the USGBC’s vice president for LEED technical development, he explains that as the certification system has expanded and gone mainstream—it operates in 91 countries now—it’s become more difficult to ensure accountability. Plus, making it any more comprehensive could add to the cost of getting a building certified.

But Owens talks to people in the industry too, and is under no illusions about what’s going on. “It’s nice to believe that everybody’s doing the right thing,” he says. “It’s also incredibly naïve to do that.”

Ideally, the garbage problem will work itself out: Landfills are increasingly hard to find, and recycling gets more profitable as markets for reconstituted stuff develop. Until the traditional trash operations go out of business or invest in better equipment, though, D.C. should make sure that its old buildings are getting made into new ones, rather than simply patting itself on the back.

Photo by Lydia DePillis

Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 650-6928.

Taking the post-separation waste away at Broad Run.

One of the aggregate filtering systems at Broad Run.

Something missing?

Last night, Mayor Vince Gray gave a 5,700 word speech on the state of the District, laying out his priorities on public safety, sustainability, education, and fostering new and existing industries other than the federal government (especially tech). All great things!

But for someone who covers real estate, something was obviously missing: Housing. Creating more of it, and preserving the stuff we have, is critical to both keeping people here who might otherwise leave and getting people who'll take all these new jobs to actually live and pay income taxes in the District—if they can't afford it, there are plenty of new apartments in Arlington. And yet, as housing advocates point out, the word "housing" appeared only twice in the mayor's speech, in the context of talking about how many development projects we already have underway.

There are a lot of cranes in the air, that's for sure. You might wonder: Shouldn't we just make sure people have access to good jobs, improve schools, and fight crime so that people feel comfortable investing in communities all over the District, and let housing take care of itself? 

Sure. Private market response is probably the most important element here; people will buy and renovate houses where they can see a future for themselves and their families, and developers will take advantage of that demand (like W.C. Smith is in Carver Terrace).

But right now, not all of the demand is being served. With the exception of a few, mostly church-led projects, nearly all of those cranes are for high-end apartment and condo buildings—it's the most lucrative sector for a developer to finance. This week, the Coalition for Smarter Growth put together a little paper demonstrating how the greatest need is actually among those making less than half the area median income, since that measure actually includes much wealthier suburban areas as well as the city itself.

The problem is, the city says it doesn't have the money to help developers interested in city-owned parcels keep the resulting units affordable; the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development hasn't even decided yet whether to follow up on its intention to subsidize low-cost units on top of the West End firehouse. So what's the plan?

Well, there is no plan, yet. The city was due to update its five-year Comprehensive Housing Strategy Task Force report last September, after Brookings published an update over the summer showing slow progress. But according to Department of Housing and Community Development director John Hall, that's been delayed; the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has only recently sent its nominees for people to sit on the new task force to the mayor. So there are no near term marching orders, and won't be for a while.

Meanwhile, the stuff that's already rolling will stay rolling. The city expects to issue a request for proposals for the redevelopment of Barry Farm this spring, and another for low-income housing tax credits issued by the feds. "We still have the same menu of services we've had for decades now," Hall says. The Housing Production Trust Fund is expected to come in at about $50 million in fiscal year 2013 due to higher deed recordation tax revenue [UPDATE, 4:16 p.m. – Although, as the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute's Jenny Reed points out in the comments, an ongoing cut of $18 million and bond funding for new communities brings it back down to $12 million).

But as far as a vision? Gray hasn't laid that out yet. Even if he thinks things are going well, it would've been nice to hear him talk about why.

A good little chart from the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

And the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute sent over this handy chart of how much the Housing Production Trust Fund is expected to get over the next few years. It's supposed to have $70 million every year.

Photo by Lydia DePillis

Percentage of population that's foreign-born. Red = 2000, Blue = 2010. U.S. Census.

People sure want to come to Washington from other countries—but not really the city itself. That's the takeaway from a rundown of the numbers by George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis, covered today in the Examiner.

The area gained 200,000 immigrants over the last decade, or 20 percent to the region's overall 9.6 percent growth rate. Most of that growth, however, came in places like Montgomery County, which now has about 313,000 foreign-born people, and Fairfax County, which has 328,000. The District's percentage showed almost no change.

It's a continuation of a longer-term trend in this region, where immigrant communities have settled in places like Falls Church, Virginia and Langley Park, Maryland. A very detailed Brookings Institution report using 2000 Census numbers showed how immigrant populations were mostly growing in the closer-in suburbs rather than D.C. itself, which was the only jurisdiction out of those listed at right to have decreased in population overall between 1990 and 2000.

It's also a loss for the city: Immigrants are often the ones who start businesses and revitalize commercial corridors (bringing the best food with them). Of course, it's not obvious how a city makes itself more immigrant-friendly; established communities create their own magnetism, and with places like D.C.'s Chinatown quickly atrophying, clusters in the 'burbs already have a head start.

But availability of jobs and affordable housing also has a lot to do with where immigrants settle, just like any other demographic. On that basis, D.C. should try to compete for its share.