Hard to get internet where I went. (Lydia DePillis)

Did anything actually happen in Housing Complex world while everyone was busy recapping the last year and ringing in the next? Not much, but a few stories of note. Herewith, a review.

• The Czech company that made D.C.'s first three streetcars has appealed the District's decision to award a contract for the next pair to a Portland-based company, saying that the winning bid was technically inferior, even though it came in $800,000 cheaper. That's in spite of a built-in advantage for streetcars manufactured in America, which scored United Streetcar an extra five points, per the request for proposals. Even if the District wins out in the end, the appeal could take years to resolve, potentially meaning further delays for full service along H Street NE.
• The normally-staid Greater Washington Board of Trade was upset enough about the effect of Congressional dithering on the area's economy to pull an old-fashioned stunt, sending bags of coal to every U.S. Representative for Christmas. And the business group is right: It's inevitable and probably fitting that the federal government will downsize, but uncertainty makes a bad situation worse. Their fears were born out today, with the news that foreign investors are shunning the once-coveted D.C. real estate market in droves. Damn the feds!
• Looks like the Old Naval Observatory—which sits behind a gate to your right as you go down 23rd Street past the State Department—will soon belong to its neighbor across the way, rather than the Navy, which hasn't really needed it since hospital operations were transferred to Bethesda in the 1940s. The 13-acre campus has been closed to the public for security reasons, and the Northwest Current reported in August that it'll stay off-limits under its new management, even though the D.C. Preservation League had hoped to push for greater access by designating the whole thing as an historic district (not just individual buildings, some of which are already landmarked). The feds are about to start accepting bids from contractors to renovate four buildings for State Department swing space, but there's been no mention of opening it to the public yet.
• Salon, which has a new-ish blog about cities, rehashed the chatter about gentrification in D.C. The author concludes, as have many before him, that the phenomenon need not be a net negative if managed correctly. Richard Layman complicates the discussion.
• The campaign against a women's shelter on Good Hope Road got political, with a Ward 8 Council candidate using a rally against new social services in Anacostia to bludgeon the leadership of Marion Barry, who has made no bones about his support for the facility. Calvary Women's Services has agreed to finally meet with the community this Thursday.
• The Department of Employment Services finally found tenants for its downstairs retail space on Minnesota Avenue (why it didn't issue the solicitation sooner than 10 months before the building was completed, allowing the Metro-proximate location to remain empty for a year longer than necessary, remains a mystery). The winner is District restaurateur Paul Cohn, who proposed a culinary training academy, as well as the erstwhile owner of the Bagel Bakery, which closed early  last year.
• Reuters economics blogger Felix Salmon took a hard look at the Bank on D.C. discount for new Bikeshare memberships, and found that it's still likely to be prohibitively expensive, considering the hold placed on your account when you sign up and the replacement cost of lost bikes. He suggests that the unbanked should be able to pay for their memberships in monthly installments, and that churches and nonprofits would do well to back the $1,000 financial hit of losing a bike, in order to insure newbies against the risk of taking a ride.
• Under cover of an omnibus spending bill, the Architect of the Capitol has snatched control of Union Square—an 11-acre parcel that includes the Capitol Reflecting Pool and the Grant Memorial—from the National Park Service, citing "security concerns." Although I daresay the AoC tends to take better care of its grounds than the Park Service, civil liberties advocates are concerned because the area will now fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Capitol Police, who are even more empowered than the Park Police to keep a damper on disturbances. It's also a big deal for reasons that I'll explain separately.

Mr. Barry holds court. (Lydia DePillis)

It was a conversation that promised to be interesting, with this headline: DOES GENTRIFICATION MEAN ERADICATION? The office of Councilmember Marion Barry convened a panel of Ward 8 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners and community members last night to chew over the question, and at his behest, a group of interested citizens will continue to chew it over and maybe even come up with some recommendations.

Without quoting soundbites from the many speeches—which ranged from the platitudinous to the pointed and impassioned—let me break out the major takeaways.

1. Given that white people aren't really moving into Ward 8 to any measurable degree, the discussion didn't dwell on race. Though that was an undercurrent, the fear of gentrification—helpfully defined on the meeting's agenda in terms of displacement—centered more around the potential for investment to price older residents out.
2. Also given that wealth isn't exactly flowing east of the river yet, displacement doesn't seem to be an imminent threat. But H Street Main Street director Anwar Saleem, along with several longtime H Street business owners, were there to remind the crowd that the new people can come before you realize it, and you may not be able to expect help from elected officials (they're none too happy with a new retail incentive program that excludes barbershops, hair salons, phone stores, and liquor stores*).
3. The most raw split is between those who see poverty as something that's almost impossible to escape and in need of substantial government investment, and those who focus instead on the need for residents to bootstrap their way up. ANC Commissioner Ab Jordan, frequently referencing the deterministic Markov chain, excoriated fellow commissioner Darrell Gaston—a younger guy who's after Barry's seat—for calling black people lazy after Gaston argued that gentrification could be a good thing and that the government makes it too easy for Ward 8 residents to live off public assistance (Clarification, 12:56 p.m. – Gaston did not call black people lazy; that was Jordan's interpretation).
4. Of course, people spend their time fighting about the causes of inequality and who to blame for it, but mostly agree that the answer is more and better education for all ages.

Barry himself, naturally, stole the show. Without referencing his proposal to actually outlaw new apartment buildings in the ward, he admonished the crowd that those areas with the most renters were most vulnerable to gentrification, and advocated preparing more residents for homeownership. Before leaving, he called upon the room to stay involved—because goodness knows the gentrifiers are.

"We have a lot of gentrifiers who are blogging, who are tweetering," he said. "Those who are gentrifiers want to justify what they do. And some of what they do is not right."

—-

* Corrected from an earlier version; nail salons are not excluded from the grant program.

Not according to longtime D.C. writer Harry Jaffe, now with the Examiner. Jaffe leads this morning's column:

Change is coming in Washington neighborhoods. It's driven by natural, cyclical shifts that have remade cities even before the Romans set up camp along the Tiber River. It's coming quickly; it can't be stopped.

Then he describes Ward 8 activist Ab Jordan's criticism of white families moving their kids into neighborhood schools, and continues:

Change is coming to Anacostia. The city has relocated offices to Good Hope Road. Homeland Security is setting up on Martin Luther King Boulevard. New condominiums and apartments are rising. No doubt some white folks might move in. Memo to Jordan: Anacostia was white until the 1950s.

True, when white students choose public schools, on Capitol Hill in particular, some black families from other neighborhoods might get pushed out. This is difficult and painful and can create conflict. But it's the inevitable byproduct of change.

But wait! Jaffe wasn't so sanguine about that kind of change last week, when he bemoaned the 14th Street NW "riot corridor" becoming "condo canyon":

The riots of 1968 that burned 14th Street started a half-block north when a brick went through the Peoples Drug store, then spread to the corner of 14th and U. The neighborhood declined for two decades. The Metro came in 2000. Pioneers moved into apartments. Artists and writers took up residence over small bars and restaurants.

Now there seems to be a condominium going up on every corner. A developer has dug a huge hole across from the Black Cat indie music hall for 100-plus condos. Buildings are rising behind chain-link fences everywhere.

There are still plenty of storefronts that remind us we are in an urban village: Yum's Carryout, a check-cashing store, Sam's Pawn Shop, an empty lot here and there. They give the place that lovely, disheveled look and edgy feel. I fear the street will be sanitized soon.

Jaffe expresses a wish for the city to put the brakes on neighborhood retailers like Ruff & Ready and Pixie's being displaced.

If the city would enforce district zoning rules that seek to protect local flavor, landlords might not be able to stuff their retail spaces with bars and restaurants. Otherwise, developers looking to make a buck will make 14th Street just like the nightly free-for-all that has made Adams Morgan grimy, dangerous and less livable.

But isn't that just another form of the change Jaffe says today is inevitable? Displacement from more expensive neighborhoods is often what causes less expensive neighborhoods to develop, after all. Midcity retailers even asked for those very zoning rules to be changed to allow for more bars and restaurants, figuring they'd help the shops that now don't have daytime traffic.

You can't try to stop the later stages of gentrification in one area and tell another to accept its beginnings.

Given only 30 seconds, the candidates either took one of the questions and ignored the other, or weighed in briefly on each. And granted, it was a pretty random pairing that needn't have been taken together. But the thing is, gentrification and statehood are correlated–positively. Here's how I wish a candidate had answered:

"Thanks for your question. First of all, 'gentrification' is a really complicated term that people throw around like it's an entirely negative phenomenon. But that's too simplistic: How can you tell a neighborhood that it shouldn't have higher quality retail, better parks, and nicer houses? That may attract higher-income residents, but there are tools to keep housing affordable for those who might otherwise be pushed out, like inclusionary zoning, low-income housing tax credits, tenant purchase, and simply increasing the supply of new units.

I'm not sure if you meant to imply that demographic change and the fight for statehood are related. But they are: As people return to the city, invest in neighborhoods, and see D.C. as a place they might stay for a long time and maybe raise a family–rather than doing their five years on the Hill and then high-tailing it to Montgomery County–they start to understand and care about the ways in which disenfranchisement has a real effect on their quality of life. When you've put money down on a house and gotten your kid into a public school she likes, you're much more willing to fight for the future of the place where you live. Often, these new residents are less willing to let things stay the way they've always been–and are connected to the powerbrokers who will ultimately have to be convinced. If they can make common cause with the people who've lived here forever, then D.C. has a chance."

You can movement-build all you want, but it helps if economic and social trends are on your side.

1. This might seem like a cop-out, but I didn't mean the map to be exhaustive, by any means. There could just as well be dots around the Tenleytown and Van Ness Metro stations, which would be excellent places to boost heights. Further in, you start running into historic districts, which could pose problems from an practical standpoint—crazy that we're even talking about this from a practical standpoint!—although Smith rightfully points out that a 200-foot-tall dorm might solve a lot of Georgetown's problems with the neighborhood.
2. The really wealthy areas, like Palisades and Spring Valley, aren't necessarily great places to put residential or office towers: They're not served by Metro, and they're not terribly attractive for the types of people who might live in a tall building, whom I generally think of as more cosmopolitan and wanting the kind of street life that the owners of palatial estates haven't tried particularly hard to attract. Wisconsin Avenue—which I identified on the map—is the most logical location for tall buildings anyway.
3. What's the harm in bringing tall buildings to poor neighborhoods, exactly? If they attracted people of diverse income levels, that would bring retail investment, which Marion Barry yells about wanting every chance he gets. There's enough land east of the river to build housing at a rate that could keep prices stable, even with secondary displacement caused by rising property values. I don't buy the argument that "allowing condo towers along a streetcar route on Benning Road will price blacks out of the neighborhood": Inclusionary zoning rules require a certain percentage of their units to be affordable, so more condo towers—or nice rentals—mean more affordable housing, not less. In fact, the only way to avoid poor people being displaced from along streetcar routes is to build as much as possible. With this in mind, the city has been buying up land along these routes in order to foster the preservation of units within reach of families that don't make lawyer/doctor/lobbyist salaries. And finally, lots of people in Ward 8 will tell you they welcome housing for higher-income folks, because it'll help businesses that employ residents and allow the area's economy to grow.
4. Am I trying to be politically palatable? I guess I'd put it this way: I'm trying to bring this whole discussion from vague theorizing into the realm of the possible.

But then, my colleague Alex Baca–who just recently defended her thesis on gentrification and displacement in Anacostia–went ahead and did it anyway, which gives me cover to snipe just a little bit.

Alex's beef is basically that by rehashing these tropes that we all know to be true, and grapple with every day–Columbia Heights has both modern retail and poor folks! Gays hang out on U Street now! Sometimes people can't afford to live where they used to!–the project further divides the city instead of illuminating how we often face similar problems and need to think about city-wide solutions. I agree.

But what bothers me most isn't the potential effect on how people think about the city. Mostly, it's journalistic practice. The writers start out with this idea of Gentrification ("the G-word") and use it as a shoebox to hold all their stories, like this one about a church in Anacostia, where the pastor's fairly standard message of personal uplift is characterized as "fighting gentrification through faith"–without going into whether "gentrification" is even happening around them, and if so, what it looks like. Does it mean the mixed-use megaproject at Sheridan Terrace that will replace dilapidated public housing? Or efforts by local businessowners to fix up their storefronts and attract customers from across the city? Are these really things to be feared and fought against?

I don't want to be discouraging, but it's depressing how much this looks like a precursor to the sort of pieces that annoy me most–emotion-heavy, substance-lite reiterations of the conventional wisdom, all wrapped up in new media without the innovation (this roundtable looks all ready for CSPAN).

I'd really love to see journalism school students digging into these issues on a daily basis, instead of with one fluffy package that they can show off to potential employers. This city needs more reporters who follow development issues, because God knows there are dozens every day I can't get to, and TBD won't be interested in. It doesn't need journalists who start out with an preconception of what's going on and find talking heads to paint it over with a broad brush.

There are some people in D.C. for whom landscapes  have two levels: The current level that they actually inhabit, and a subterranean historical space long covered over.

Sandra Butler-Truesdale, whose family has lived in the District for five generations, is one of those people. She went to elementary school at Garnet Patterson, high school at Cardozo, and college at Howard University. Now, at 70 years old, she curates the Emma Mae Gallery in the Reeves Center, named for her mother and dedicated to the memories and memorabilia of the greats who walked U Street in decades past.

I stopped into the Emma Mae on a Sunday morning. Butler-Truesdale wasn’t there yet, so Greg Gaskins opened the door, and I listened to his jazz rehearsal while poking around in the slightly musty interior. The walls are covered with framed photos, the floors stacked with records, overstuffed furniture, even a birdcage. A picture with a much younger Gaskins standing with Elvis Presley holds pride of place.

When Butler-Truesdale arrives, resplendent in denim and decked in purple jewelry, the tour immediately commences—or at least a preview of the walking tour that will follow. She identifies all the people on the walls, and the venues where they played, and sometimes her memories of going to see them.  “It’s so funny how you can remember,” she says, pondering a photo of Lena Horne. “I remember she was this beautiful lady, with these long legs."

Soon, we step out into the bright sunlight and bustle of 14^th Street. One after another, she identifies what the buildings across the street used to be: Busboys and Poets was a place called Zanzibar, which was owned by a Jewish man (like many of the properties on U Street) but served Chinese food, a favorite of the post-church crowd. South of that, where Mila and Jin are now, stood the D.C. Donut Shop. In the Reeves Center, there was the Peoples’ Drug Store, where Butler-Truesdale recalled that black people couldn’t even sit down at the counter to have lunch. “Right in the middle of a black neighborhood!” she exclaims. “It was a trying time.”

Standing on the Reeves Center plaza, Butler-Truesdale gives an overview of the local economy during the neighborhood’s heyday, pre-1968 riots. The nightlife scene was an oasis of integration, as white people would come up from downtown and enjoy the jazz clubs—and, after the clubs closed, the “after hours joints” opened. Jewish merchants supplied the liquor, since black people couldn’t get liquor licenses. Those who wanted to make real money, though, became number backers. Before the lottery, capitalized hustlers would employ runners to collect numbers from players, and then pay out when there were hits. “They were kingpins in the community,” Butler-Truesdale says. They even all celebrated their last rites at the same place, Jarvis Funeral Home, which is now CityFirst Bank.

Butler-Truesdale grew up at 1458 Corcoran Street NW, but for much of her life lived in a house in Petworth, which she has since sold. After a stint in the Campbell Heights Apartments, recently the site of a Jair Lynch-backed tenant purchase, she moved to an apartment complex in Southwest—which is now less diverse (i.e., more African American) than the historically black neighborhood with which she identifies most closely.

Butler-Truesdale has a multifaceted take on gentrification. On the one hand, she mourns the loss of African American cultural dominance on U Street. When developer Chris Donatelli—whom she calls “my good friend”—built the Ellington apartments, she asked him whether anybody who looked like the building's namesake would be able to live there. At the same time, however, she doesn’t blame white people for black displacement.

“People say a lot of stuff, and half the time they don’t really know what’s happening,” she says. “You have to look at the fact that most of this is about the economy. It’s about the fact that we live in these neighborhoods and did not actually buy property…When you do that, you have no real anchor, and people can do what they want to do to you.”

Crossing back east across 14^th Street, we pass more buried landmarks: The Cricket storefront was You and Me Coffeeshop, where kids came to get milk shakes and hot dogs. Peking Express was her aunt’s beauty shop, called Lovely Ladies. The Rite Aid was a black-occupied office building, where her father had his accounting business.

As we squeezed past sidewalk cafes on the crowded 1300 block, Butler-Truesdale expresses annoyance that tables and chairs were crowding the pedestrian right-of-way. But she remarks favorably on Ulah Bistro’s arrangement with Suntrust Bank, which lets the restaurant use its sidewalk space for outdoor service on the weekends. “Can we sit down and do that about race?” she asks.

Further east, the memories keep coming. The current home of the Affinity Lab, at 918 U Street, was a business school. The newish wine bar Dickson’s housed the offices of the Capitol Spotlight, which reported on black communities when the Washington Post saw fit only to write about them when someone got killed. Turning down Florida Avenue, the CVS was North Carolina Market, where transplants from the deep South got their collard greens and fatback. “Those of us who were born here, we thought we were a step above those who went to the North Carolina Market,” Butler-Truesdale says.

South along 7^th Street: Dragon Express was a cocktail lounge, where Butler-Truesdale remembers being a waitress when there were a lot of single men around (she gave me a knowing look). Wanda’s Hair Salon was Dean’s barber shop, which trained ex-convicts. Waxie Maxie’s vinyl shop, where you could listen to records before buying them, and where DJs spun in the windows. As we walked, Butler-Truesdale, always attuned to racial interactions, noticed that loitering black men looked at the pair of us—a white reporter and an older black woman—with suspicion. “You know what they’re thinking?” she asked. “First of all, ‘what is she talking about?’ And ‘is she giving away our secrets?’”

Finally, we reached the place she really wanted to get to: The Howard Theater, finally beginning to come back to life after decades of decline. She not only went to shows, but interacted with the performers in her work as a cosmetologist—she’d done James Brown’s comb-outs, she said matter-of-factly. The Howard, for Butler-Truesdale, is the most solid sign of the neighborhood’s rebirth.

Walking back, we passed Ben’s Chili Bowl, which Butler-Truesdale talks about in the video clip below. It’s one of those institutions that she’s lost. But she’s learned to move on. “Listen, it’s progress,” she says. “No matter how much I like or don’t like it, you can’t stop progress.”

(Photo by Darrow Montgomery)

On a breezy Saturday afternoon, the only sounds in the Big Bear Café at 1700 1st Street NW in Bloomingdale are the tapping of laptops and some hushed conversation, with the occasional shout of a finished sandwich or coffee order from the counter. Ceiling fans whirr overhead. Large open windows make it feel like an open patio, with people spilling out of the café onto the sidewalk.

Shortly after 3 p.m., a group of teens poke their heads in, scoping the serene scene. Suddenly, three of them dart to the counter. One grabs the tip jar. All three race out the open door and down the street. Two patrons jump up and give chase, but no matter; the boys are faster and quickly disappear around a corner.

The pursuers walk back, frustrated. Lenora Yerkes, working the register, hugs them, and is consoled by other patrons. It’s not so much the money in the jar as the feeling of shattered peace and trust. Because that’s the kind of place the Big Bear is: Staffers lent out shovels to neighbors during February’s snowstorms. Since opening in 2007, the café has hosted poetry readings, friendly barista competitions, and champagne breakfasts for people who want to watch the sun rise.

But the tip-jar snatching was a reminder that the Big Bear is still very much alone in the immediate neighborhood, where even after a decade of steady gentrification, the retail landscape remains largely defined by liquor stores and carry-outs. And, in recent weeks, something else has upended Big Bear’s tranquility. Owner Stu Davenport decided to apply for a liquor license.
For all the fanfare that followed the first bonafide sit-down restaurant to open in Ward 8—an IHOP—the fact that Ward 5 is similarly underserved has gone largely unnoticed. Davenport’s plan for an expanded Big Bear menu, including beer, wine and specialty cocktails, would finally pop that cork.

Naturally, the neighbors are worried about getting drenched. “You open up Pandora’s box,” complains Ed Jones, who lives across the street from the cafe. “You open up one bar here,” he says, strolling past several empty storefronts along 1st Street later that afternoon, “and you have a whole lot of bars along this strip here. I’m sure that Adams Morgan wasn’t like that originally. It doesn’t take much to interrupt the pseudo-peace of the neighborhood.”

Davenport, a general contractor who purchased the two-story painted brick building for $400,000 in 2006, has been running the gauntlet of local community groups in recent weeks, campaigning for their support of his expansion plans.

“The idea is to create an environment that’s responsible, that I would want to live next to, and have it be financially viable to stay open,” he calmly told members of the Eckington Civic Association on Tuesday. “And one of the main ways to do that is to expand our menu, and one of the things that we want to add to that menu is alcohol.”

Several elderly ladies in the audience exchanged knowing looks.

Davenport is getting used to the glares.

In early May, he formally brought his plans for alcohol service before the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission 5C. Since Davenport himself is a commissioner, Big Bear employee Yerkes made the case on his behalf, seeking a stipulated license that would allow the cafe to serve alcohol while its official application to the city’s Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA) is being processed.

The room in St. George’s Church that night was packed with Big Bear supporters. It was a central casting image of the new, comparatively white, Bloomingdale; many thumbing their mobiles throughout the proceedings. They spoke impassionedly of how going to the café had brought the community together, and all they wanted was to be able to go get a glass of wine in the evening, too. Someone in the back held up hastily scribbled signs reading “BIG BEAR YES WE CAN.”

Under pressure from commissioners, Yerkes proferred 600 letters of support from nearby residents, and she claimed to have notified all of the immediate neighbors of Big Bear’s ambitions. But she apparently missed a few. Two detractors stood up to protest, arguing that an alcohol-serving Big Bear would make nearby parking impossible, bring trash and noise, and attract thieves seeking to take advantage of tipsy rubes. The commission tabled the vote, and Davenport began negotiating a voluntary agreement with neighbors that would potentially limit his hours of operation.

“There’s a misconception that if I get 600 people to sign, that constitutes a preponderance of support,” observes Bloomingdale Civic Association president Robert Brannum. “ABRA responds to protests, not shouts of hosanna.”

The quality of life concerns seemed to underscore a deeper fear: a sense that Big Bear’s alcohol program would drag the neighborhood backwards. Before the spot was a café, it was Big Bear Market, which dispensed alcohol just like Sunshine Liquors, still operating across the street.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s black people on a corner drinking beer, or whether it is young white folks on the corner drinking wine out of a pretty glass—it doesn’t matter who’s drinking it, or what it looks like, I don’t want it on my block” says Tracey Campfield, who moved to the area in 1998 (and, like nearly all Big Bear detractors, is African-American). “I have fought the good fight, with drug dealers, and dirty alleys, and rats in the alley, and people drinking on the corners...I don’t want to fight that fight again.”

ANC Commissioner John Salatti, among Big Bear’s biggest supporters, dismisses that fear as irrational. “Stuart turned that market, which was a hellhole, into something nice,” Salatti says. “Now, all of a sudden, him having that option turns us back into the drug-dealing, crack-smoking, 40-ounce land of 1990 or 2000?”

To some long-term residents, Davenport is only piggy-backing on their hard work to improve the neighborhood. “Efforts from people like me, when we came in, of getting rid of the drug dealing that was going on, and getting rid of the theft, made it possible for other people like the Big Bear owner to come along in 2004 and say, ‘Hey, this is a viable neighborhood for my home, as well as my business,’” says Eric Woods, who moved to the 100 block of S Street in 1995. “Coming here in 2004, I don’t see that being a pioneer.”

That’s what it felt like, though, to Big Bear co-founder Lana Labermeier. When she and Davenport moved to the neighborhood six years ago, she felt unsafe walking the streets, and got a dog to protect herself. The couple started the café to provide a place for people to gather, and even then dealt with accusations that they were gentrifying the neighborhood.

“A lot of these same old-time residents felt that this was a place in the neighborhood that seemed to be attracting these young white kids,” she says. “The Big Bear was blamed for being the cause of it. It was the easiest thing to point to.”

Labermeier says the couple had always planned on one day offering beer and wine. But liquor license battles in nearby neighborhoods provided a preview of what they’d have to go through, and she was scrambling just to keep the café afloat. When the former husband-and-wife team eventually split up last year, Davenport moved forward with the alcohol effort on his own.

“Providing liquor is almost like opening up a second business,” Labermeier says. “I was just too exhausted to think about a whole new endeavor.”

Pat Mitchell, president of the nonprofit group North Capitol Main Streets, worries how the Big Bear debacle may impact future development along 1st Street, which the Urban Land Institute recently recommended as a better corridor to cluster new retail and dining establishments than congested North Capitol Street.

“I think it sends a pretty bad message to the business community, really, whether it’s a restaurant or a coffeeshop or a flowershop,” Mitchell says.

A lot of the hullaboo has to do with the fact that the local ANC has never before dealt with restaurants serving liquor, just retail liquor stores (and, as Salatti points out, the ANC hasn't been particularly zealous in regulating those). Given Ward 5’s lack of eateries, and the large amount of expected development in the area, ANC Commissioner Barrie Daneker is currently collaborating with neighboring ANCs to draft common guidelines for evaluating future applications. As a model, he says he’d like to use the state of Rhode Island, where his father uncle was the state liquor commissioner.

Of course, there are working models a lot closer to home: Prolific restaurateur Joe Englert found the structure quite accomodating when pursuing his vast plans for nightlife on H Street NE.

“ANC 6A is a refreshing place to do business because they research a subject and applicants before they jump to conclusions,” says Englert. “Business owners are treated like adults not would-be criminals....Protestants have to substantiate claims and objections and are questioned just as vigorously as applicants.”

Even the arbiters of the process want to see ANC 5C get a proper sit-down restaurant. ABRA community resource officer Cynthia Simms was called to last week’s ANC meeting to better explain the process—but ended up giving her opinion as well: “I promised my director I was not going to say it, but I can’t help myself. I live in Ward 7, and I would die for a restaurant over there where we are! I just would.”