Okay, just two days of your life wasted in traffic, awesome. [Post]

Washingtonians have pretty good access to parks. [Examiner]

More taxes for better transit in MoCo. [Post]

Novel short-car parking solution. [PoP]

Union Market has 11 restaurants signed up. [DCmud]

The U Streetification of Florida Avenue. [L4L]

Did ABC Board overstep its bounds in Hank's case? [BLT]

Honestly, why is it so hard to install good bike racks? [GGW]

Developers lop a floor off office building across from a Metro stop. [EMMCA]

Today on the market: Building in an office forest.

Last week, former mayor Anthony Williams gave a talk before a bunch of history and geography geeks about the executive's role as city planner, in which he articulated his understanding of the meaning of D.C.'s monumental core.

"In my view, the capital is in the center, and the vision here is to show a repudiation of the private realm," he said, pointing to an aerial shot of the National Mall. "This is a public realm now, a realm of inclusion, a new capital of an empire of liberty stretching from coast to coast...It's like your identity, it's how you think about yourself, it's how you present yourself to the world."

Quite true. It's interesting, though, how very different nations can end up having similar designs for their capital cities.

Take Versailles, for example, which served as the capital of France under the very imperial Louis XIV. L'Enfant was influenced by that design, but America's founders were trying to get as far as possible away from the example of the government it hosted. (Below is Versailles as planned; the real thing is pretty similar).  Read more L’Enfant, the Hunger Games, and the Imperial City

In the current issue of Time, Andrew Ferguson takes a crack at that most overdone of "local" Washington stories: How separate and apart the regional economy is from the rest of the country, how difficult it must be for us to feel the nation's pain. Using the popularity of the pricey personal cab service as an indicator of the wealth coursing through D.C.'s leisure corridors, he terms these new young things "Uber-Washingtonians":

The young fill entire neighborhoods with an undergraduate air. On a warm night in Clarendon in northern Virginia or in the H Street NE corridor, with the crowded sidewalks and lines outside the door-to-door bars, you might think you've landed on fraternity row in Chapel Hill, N.C., or Charlottesville, Va. They've brought the college lifestyle with them—group houses, hookups, late-night cram sessions and lots of drinking. The local drugstores seem to devote more shelf space to condoms and pregnancy tests than diapers and formula. (Another big seller at pharmacies: Pedialyte, used as the ultimate hangover cure.)

Et cetera.

I'll point out a couple things. One: The trend of increasing wealth in the Washington area is true enough, but the activity he notices downtown is more than that. It's also the result of a gradual move to cities, D.C. in particular, as they've become more attractive places to live. Those young folks wouldn't necessarily be having as much fun as they are without the city investment and planning that helped bring neighborhoods back from ruin.

And two: Ferguson does recognize the stark divide that marks the city, quoting Danny Harris talking about how little his young professional cohort seems to understand what's going on a few neighborhoods over. But he cites the region's unemployment rate of 5.5 percent, well under the national average of 8.2 percent—not unemployment in the District itself, which stands at 9.5 percent. That's lower than it has been, which could be because the long-term unemployed are getting jobs, or because they've just stopped looking. In any case, it would seem to disprove the idea that it's hard to find people still struggling in the midst of the recession. You just have to look.

Tomorrow I'll be doing a Housing Complex Q&A with David Berns, director of the Department of Human Services, which deals with homelessness and public assistance. If you've got a burning question, let me know: @housingcomplex / ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com

Gallaudet University is well on its way through a 10-year campus planning process, and one of its priorities is opening up the campus to the surrounding neighborhood, especially what will develop at Union Market directly to the west. Here's a preliminary rendering of the 6th Street entrance:

Meanwhile, pictures are starting to emanate from the International Council of Shopping Centers shindig in Las Vegas, where District leaders are pitching big projects to retailers. Here's a model of what developer EDENS has in mind for Union Market—just a vision, mind you, considering they only control a small portion of the site.

Now why does a 16th Street office building need to be two stories shorter? [GGW]

Bloomingdalians deal with crazy racist who thinks he owns their park. [Post]

Come on, Claire McCaskill, pay your taxes. [DCist]

Condo associations going solar. [GreenDCDaily]

Regional airport economics. [2030group]

Complicating density. [CityBlock]

West heating plant auction taking longer. [Patch]

D.C. transportation in global perspective. [WAMU]

Big office blocks coming to National Harbor, viewed from the air. [CityBiz]

Today on the market: Used book store.

Apologies for not getting this up yesterday. The rest of the week in vaguely real estate-related events:

Tuesday

6:30 p.m. - Tommy Wells answers questions on the redevelopment of Hine Jr. High School.

7:00 p.m. – Advisory Neighborhood Commission 5C meeting. Vote on McMillan historic preservation application on the agenda. All Nations Baptist Church, 2001 North Capitol Street NE.

7:00 p.m. – R.E.E.L. forum on opening restaurants east of the river. Department of Housing and Community Development, 1800 Martin Luther King Avenue SE.

Wednesday

5:45 p.m. – Meet and greet for newly selected Woodridge Library architect Bing Thom. Woodridge Library.

6:30 p.m. – Humanities Council of Washington D.C. panel on historic Georgia Avenue. Chez Billy's, 3815 Georgia Avenue NW.

Thursday

10:00 a.m. – Historic Preservation Review Board meeting. McMillan plan, other projects on the agenda. 441 4th Street NW.

11:00 a.m. – Forum on the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility. Convention Center, room 152.

6:30 p.m. – District Department of Transportation holds meeting on the M Street SE/SW Transportation Study. Capitol Skyline Hotel, 10 “I” Street, SW.

6:30 p.m. – National Building Museum panel on the quirks of the L'Enfant Plan.

7:00 p.m. – District Department of Transportation holds meeting on the Parkside Pedestrian Bridge. Neval Thomas Elementary School, 650 Anacostia Avenue NE.

See you tomorrow!

Everything is ephemeral these days, so why not a cavernous ex-streetcar tunnel beneath Connecticut Avenue?

The Dupont Underground, in fact, is one of those spaces that could use a boost of attention while it waits for a more permanent use. The Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground has had exclusive rights to the District-owned space for more than a year now, but hasn't nailed down either the financing to make the whole thing an arts institution or the tenants to commercialize it. In part, that's because of its decision to maintain control of the whole space.

"Early on there was within the board an ongoing debate about how to meet the exclusive rights agreement's requirements," writes Braulio Agnese, the Coalition's volunteer managing director. "One camp wanted to have a developer take the lead; although this would probably have made for much smoother sailing, it would also jeopardize what the ACDU hopes to accomplish: we would almost certainly not be able to match the persuasive powers of a developer's wallet and would thus get spent out of existence, likely, as the developer/partner sought more and more space."

So they've decided to run the thing themselves. But the Coalition's agreement with the city is expiring soon, and they're nowhere near negotiating a bona fide lease. Now, they're thinking about negotiating something smaller: A short-term lease to activate the space with performances, exhibits, and other events. Even that, however, is controversial. "The ultimate goal is creating a world-class design/arts/cultural institution, but there is some fear that activating part of the space early could brand us as a pop-up, here-today-but-maybe-not-in-a-few-months kind of place, something that might interfere with our efforts to get major institutional support and funding."

Ah yes, funding. The Coalition recently sent out a big fundraising appeal, but is really hoping for an infusion of public cash to get part of the way to the $30 million it needs to retrofit the space. "We'd like to convince the city that this is not just a run-of-the-mill project, that its potential long-term benefits to the city are worth their time, energy, and, yes, financial investment," Agnese says.

In a time when at least five big projects are fighting over the city's dollars, with neighbors crying out for investment in land they can actually see? Hm, long odds. In the mean time, you may see some pop-ups—if the city will even let them do that.

The Rappaport Companies' planned redevelopment of a shabby suburban-style mall on H Street NE between 8th and 10th Streets was one of the early big, new projects for the corridor (though Guy Steuart's Giant-anchored building got out of the ground on 3rd Street first). Since then, there's been no movement, even as developers buy up the rest of the street. What is Gary Rappaport waiting for?

Just like everyone else, he's waiting for the streetcar—but tracks and a promised start date from the District aren't good enough. Right now, Rappaport still has to negotiate termination agreements with the tenants currently in the mall, and doesn't want to lose that rental income before bringing in the kind of retail and restaurants that a functional streetcar would attract. Then, he has to find a joint venture partner to build and own the 350 or so residential units. Neither of those things should be difficult, but Rappaport says he needs certainty before making any moves.

"The most important thing in bringing those two thing together is knowing when the trolley's going to start," he told me yesterday. "I can't lease space now. I have to lease space when there's a few more buildings up, when the Giant's open, when there's a trolley running."

That's supposed to be in 2013, but given that the District hasn't even announced its selection of a firm to finish the design and buildout of a power station, overhead wires, and a maintenance facility, it's looking increasingly unlikely.