It's a well-known fact in commercial real estate circles: Tenants are doing more with less. Gone are the days of law firm associates doing cartwheels in their offices, and getting a secretary as soon as they made partner. The floorplates of the future squish dozens of offices into spaces that before held just handfulls, and some companies have forgone offices altogether, throwing their employees into a sea of open desks (sometimes, they don't have desks of their own at all).

Here's a particularly dramatic example: Last week, GlobeSt.com reported on a study showing that only 60 percent of the General Services Administration's space in D.C. was being used at any given time. The phenomenon was perhaps most pronounced at GSA's own headquarters at 1800 F Street NW, which the study found could accommodate 6,200 employees, up from the 1,800 that work there currently. That worries landlords, since they're in the business of leasing more space, not less.

What could this mean for D.C.'s office districts? Potentially a lot, as tenants move around and spaces get re-configured. The Office of Planning has been studying the potential impact of increased employee density, and there could be an upside: More people working downtown means more activity on the street and business for ground-floor businesses. On the other hand, it could also mean less opportunity for outlying areas that could use some daytime activity and office tenants to jump-start stalled projects, like Congress Heights or the Capitol Riverfront.

I'm betting that the benefits outweigh the costs, though. If businesses and non-profits figure they get more for their money in D.C., they might expand when they otherwise wouldn't, or keep people here instead of starting a satellite office in Virginia. Meanwhile, those Class B office buildings that nobody wants could be redeveloped as condos or apartments, continuing the trend of a more mixed-use downtown.

Something to think about when you get booted from your cushy office into a cramped cubicle, at least.

Floorplate layout of PNC Place, 800 17th Street NW.

Through all of it, though D.C. has an interest in keeping Georgetown's operations local, the city hasn't been much of an ally. Most problematically for Georgetown, the Office of Planning requested that it be required to house 100 percent of its undergraduate population by 2016, which by then will be capped at 6,652 traditional students. The university currently has 5,053 beds on campus, so that's a lot of housing to build over the next ten years.

Why did the city take such a hard line? Councilmember Tommy Wells, in speaking to a student group Monday night, had one theory:

I asked the person who’s head of the Office of Planning, why did you say Georgetown needs to do this—this isn’t realistic, no other universities are being asked to do this in terms of the number of students to be housed on campus and she essentially said, we just don’t like their attitude. And I said, well you don’t get to have that opinion, this is about planning. You can’t change based on attitude.

Did Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning really say that? 

Not in so many words, she tells me. But overall, Georgetown's approach does add up to something of an attitude problem: In response to neighborhood concerns about more students living in off-campus rentals, "they've essentially said, they're Georgetown University and the benefits of their presence are obvious," Tregoning says.

The way the zoning regulations read now, it's the neighbors who determine what is and isn't allowed. "They have to demonstrate that they're not doing something that is objectionable to neighboring property owners," Tregoning said. "It's their burden to show that they met the requirement, and in our opinion they had failed to meet the requirement." *

I've been sympathetic to the university because even when it did attempt to build off-campus housing—even for less-rowdy graduate students—the neighbors objected, and the plan got killed. Neighbors even proposed limiting the amount of property Georgetown could own in the 20007 zip code, so the university couldn't own more student housing if it wanted to. That makes the new housing requirement difficult: Columbia University in Manhattan, for example, can house 100 percent of undergraduates because it owns large apartment buildings in Morningside Heights, as well as 20-story dorms on campus.

But Tregoning thinks Georgetown could house more students within its walls too, if it tried hard enough. "When you're thinking about doing your 10-year campus plan, those are the things that you would want to tee up ahead of time," she says.

On the one hand, I think students should be allowed to live wherever they can afford to live—they're people too. And it's understandable for the university to want to preserve on-campus space for academic and research buildings, which are harder to locate in surrounding neighborhoods. On the other, it's fair to encourage Georgetown to more densely populate its own campus, just as D.C. is asking of developments around the city, and the university might magically come up with more space where before it seemed like too much trouble to build.

To help Georgetown along, though, they ought to be allowed to build taller dorms than might otherwise be allowed—there's unlimited space in the sky.

—-

* CORRECTION, 10:43 p.m. - Revised to reflect the fact that Georgetown has, in fact, stayed under its 2000 enrollment cap of 6,016 undergraduate students.

J. Peter Byrne, the new Mayor's Agent. (Historic Preservation Office)

In particularly contentious historic preservation cases—mostly when property owners wants to raze their historic buildings and the Historic Preservation Review Board says they can't—the mayor is formally the person who's supposed to decide. Recent cases of note that have gone to that next level of appeal (and sometimes even higher, to the District's Court of Appeals) include the Takoma Theater, the Third Church of Christ Scientist, houses on New Jersey Avenue, and the Heritage Foundation's building at 227 Pennsylvania Avenue SE.

But the mayor usually doesn't know much about historic preservation, so he appoints someone to make the determination for him, called a "mayor's agent." For the past few years, it's been Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning. Several preservationists–from the same quarter as those who demanded that Mayor Vince Gray replace her—have been upset about that, grumbling that Tregoning isn't a lawyer and comes from the city government's economic development agency, prejudicing her in favor of development rather than preservation.

I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive, and I'm not sure I'd disagree with many of her decisions. But the rankled preservationists are at least correct in one sense: the Office of Planning director has a lot on her plate without rendering voluminous legal decisions in historic preservation cases, and it makes sense to have someone more independent.

That just happened, with the appointment of J. Peter Byrne, who has just about the most impeccable qualifications one could ask for, including having started the excellent database of District historic preservation decisions—to which he'll soon be able to add.

Maybe. This morning, Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning briefed a panel of bigwigs from the Urban Land Institute who are supposed to gift us with their wisdom on what to do with the Martin Luther King Jr. Library at the end of the week. None of them are D.C. residents, so she went over basics, but also provided some hints into how the city is thinking about future employment. One of them is relying on manpower, not mechanization—countering a civilizational trend that's left us with more people than jobs to occupy them. "We are starting to reconsider some of those choices," Tregoning said, and "might choose a path that has a lot more labor."

What does that mean? In D.C., for example, all fareboxes are electronic. In St. Louis—where Tregoning is from—the Metro operates on an honor system, but employs people to spot-check tickets. It's probably unlikely that WMATA would switch from the Smartrip system to human fare checkers, or re-hire all the people who were surplused as Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant moved towards automation. But there are other major infrastructure upgrades that could go in a different direction, like a waste management system that sends less garbage to landfills (a waste-to-energy facility has been mentioned). As much as D.C. wants to move towards a knowledge-based economy, Tregoning said, "we also know we're going to need more jobs that are suited to every level of education."

Interesting thought. Likely, the ongoing cost of salaries for human labor would eventually exceed the up-front capital cost of high-tech mechanized systems. But bolstering the blue-collar workforce through building labor into services—rather than trying to make work where none is needed—might also be a good way to create a more equitable city.

Since then, Tregoning and DDOE director Christophe Tulou have been barnstorming around the District to get people to participate through a website where people can submit their own ideas and comment on or vote for others. At a recent gathering of landscape architects—who had already come up with their own recommendations—Tulou made an impassioned request not just for run-of-the-mill ideas like planting more trees and doing better at recycling, but transformative ideas that could take D.C. to the next level of sustainability.

So, how are we doing?

Many of the 308 ideas submitted so far are pretty mundane (which isn't to say they're not good—putting in more bike lanes and making bus service more reliable should obviously be on the city's to-do list). But a few would constitute a substantial improvement over the status quo. Herewith, a selection:

• City-wide composting: Now, only the crunchiest of souls put their food waste in a separate bucket for use on their own gardens. Having the city pick it up, especially from businesses like Seattle does, could substantially reduce landfill waste and generate delicious fertilizer for growing things in the city.
• Tax land instead of buildings: It's wonky, but assessing property values based on unimproved land, rather than the buildings on top of it, removes a disincentive to development that would be especially beneficial in areas of the District that are well-served by transit.
• Kick out the cars: Barring vehicular traffic on some streets would create great new plazas for pedestrians to eat, shop, and hang out. (On M Street in Georgetown, we should at least widen sidewalks and get rid of street parking)
• Tax cups: Rather than taxing caffeinated beverages, just disincentivize and derive revenue from the garbage associated with them. Worked for the bag tax, after all.
• Align alleys: Why should they be the province of trash cans alone? The District's miles of alleys could be much more useful public spaces, as well as transit ways for bikes and pedestrians, with better signage and maintenance.
• Track bikes: I know lots of people who won't buy another bike after one gets stolen—keeping one for very long, with the kind of thieves who roam D.C.'s streets, seems almost hopeless. Creating a system for tagging, registering, and tracking stolen bikes would help nail robbers and give would-be cyclists the confidence to get their own wheels.

Sure, it's a little gimmicky—one of those things cities do to make citizens feel like they're being heard, even if the authorities get their policies from the experts. There have got to be more good ideas out there, though, and Tulou wants the craziest. Hit them with your best shot.

A Czech-made D.C. streetcar, currently cooling its heels in Greenbelt. (DDOT)

It sure is a beautiful vision: For years now, District officials have regaled citizens with tales of light rail from other coasts and countries. They’ve commissioned studies that depict streetcars as economic-development fairy dust, brightening every community that they touch. And now that the city has completed roadwork on H Street NE, the newly track-inlaid roadway and shiny streetcar stops sure look like those cosmopolitan locales.

There’s just one thing missing: actual streetcars.

Those are still far in the future. The District Department of Transportation keeps revising their arrival date, most recently from mid-2012 to the end of 2013. The list of tasks yet to complete is long: DDOT only just put out a call for contractors who’ll bid to design and build the needed power substations, maintenance facility, and overhead wires, not to mention the beginning and end of the line. That last part is responsible for a large chunk of the delay, and may prompt DDOT to run the streetcar only to 3rd and H Streets NE until a final connection to Union Station can be established—which, by forcing passengers to hoof it blocks to the Metro, would undercut one of the line’s big selling points.

Meanwhile, the streetcar’s biggest champions have moved on. Mayor Vince Gray swapped out hard-charging DDOT Director Gabe Klein for his more mild-mannered deputy, Terry Bellamy. D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown relieved Councilmember Tommy Wells—whose ward stands to gain most from the first phase of the streetcar plan—of his command of the transportation committee. And the guy who ran streetcar planning for the past few years, Scott Kubly, followed Klein to another new mayor’s administration in Chicago.

All of that has made streetcar boosters more than a little long-faced. “It’s definitely a challenge to get people excited about something that’s getting more and more distant,” says Jason Broehm, who heads up the local Sierra Club chapter’s transportation committee. “What we need is some strong leadership.”

Streetcars will get done eventually; the District has already invested $48 million dollars (and committed $100 million more to the project over the next five years), and pulling the plug now would just mean that money will have been wasted. But things are definitely slowing down. In the first phase, using the city’s own cash, planners could throw down tracks before knowing where they’d end and figure out the details later—which may have been the right approach at the time. Councilmember Mary Cheh, who now oversees transportation, thinks that initial blitz was necessary to “put stakes in the ground.”

“I’ve been thinking about Julius Caesar lately, and there is a tide in the affairs of men. And if you take things at the flood, you’re better off,” she says, paraphrasing Brutus. “There could have been some better planning, but I don’t fault them ultimately for that, because sometimes it’s good to get a little bit of traction to get it started.”

Now, though, the District needs federal funding to finish the job. That comes with layer upon layer of new procedural steps—not to mention costs, because all equipment and materials have to come from U.S. sources. With the bumps in the road thus far, all the District can say is this: Trust us. Please.

“We would like to ask the community to bear with us,” says Bellamy. “This is the first time we’ve built a streetcar in our lifetime. It’s gonna take a lot of help from a lot of people.”

* * *

Why is the streetcar so behind schedule? Blame much of the delay on the very heart of the system: Union Station, a bureaucratic jigsaw puzzle composed of separate entities that sometimes don’t communicate as well as they should.

DDOT’s original plan had been elegantly simple. The streetcar would punch through the Hopscotch bridge along H Street and go through an underpass beneath Amtrak’s tracks, emerging on 1st Street NE. Pedestrians could take a tunnel that had been started but never completed; it needed only 60 more feet of excavation to become a useful route into the main station.

That would have been only a temporary solution, until Amtrak needed the space for the addition of new tracks for its very-far-in-the-future high-speed rail service. Meanwhile, DDOT would reinforce the Hopscotch bridge so it could handle the weight of the streetcar and eventually run the line over the top.

The District proposed this idea to Amtrak early last year, and Kubly was still confident that they’d be able to reach an agreement a year later. As the mayoral transition ground on, though, Amtrak wasn’t sure how much the Gray administration wanted the option that his predecessor’s DDOT director had pushed for, despite Kubly’s best efforts to reassure them. (On April 1, according to emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kubly wrote to an Amtrak representative that Gray’s $99.3 million commitment to streetcars should “alleviate any concerns on Amtrak’s side about the political will behind the project.”) Meanwhile, Amtrak had started its own master planning process. It decided to hold on to the cavernous area underneath the tracks for its own future use.

“Amtrak had certain rights they felt would be violated,” says David Ball, president of the Union Station Redevelopment Corporation, which holds the lease to the federally owned parts of the station. “Both organizations saw a use for one piece of real estate, and if they were communicating, they weren’t understanding.”

Earlier this summer, DDOT officials admitted they had lost the struggle with Amtrak. So now they’re back to the drawing board, looking at three options (map here).

(1) Run the streetcar up on the Hopscotch bridge and stop there, forcing riders to walk through the garage and down into Union Station. Walking briskly, taking no wrong turns, it took me 4 minutes and 26 seconds to walk from the bridge to the Metro fare gate. A planned elevator could make the trip faster, though.

(2) Turn the line south on 2nd Street NE and stop at F Street NE. That puts you a block away from Union Station, which Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning thinks is the best option. On the wintriest of days, however, that three-minute walk could still prove daunting, especially for tourists who aren’t sure where they’re going.

And (3): Heading north on 3rd Street NE to stop at the New York Avenue Metro station, turn the streetcar west on M Street NE, and come down 1st Street NE to deposit passengers right outside the Union Station Metro entrance. This option has two direct connections to the Red Line and could be a great opportunity to integrate NoMa, but it would increase the time it takes to get from H Street to Union Station.

All of these options would make for a more complicated connection than the original plan of running the H Street line directly under Amtrak’s tracks. But it could be even worse: The District might pick none of the above and just end the line at 3rd and H Streets NE. That’s because to get federal funding for a second line, which is supposed to run from Union Station along K Street to Washington Circle, officials have to complete a formal environmental study that, by law, explores various options for that line without leaning toward any of them. Officials worry that study will eventually require them to choose a different Metro connection than they prefer now for the H Street line—so they might just stop the line short, instead.

But ending the line at 3rd and H would mean the streetcar is only barely connected to the Metro when it opens—and that’s the problem. Initial impressions are important. If riders don’t find their first experience with the streetcar to be particularly impressive, excitement for the rest of the 37-mile system could dissipate—which would undermine the political will for an enormous project that requires a lot of taxpayer dollars. That’s what worries David Tuchmann, who's managing Akridge’s gigantic mixed-use project planned to go over the tracks behind Union Station.

“We think it’s essential that the city’s first streetcar line include a smooth and convenient connection point to Metro and other modes and amenities at Union Station,” Tuchmann says in an email. “We are committed to the H Street line’s success, not only because of our investment in Burnham Place, but also because demonstrating this transit mode’s efficacy in its infancy will be crucial to building broad public support for its future phases.”

So the question could come down to this: Get streetcars moving faster, even if they stop at a bad location? Or build a temporary connection that might have to be ripped out later? Richard Bradley, who’s watched the streetcar planning process from his perch as head of the Downtown Business Improvement District since 1996, leans towards the latter.

“I just think that it has to be done right,” he says. “If this first segment doesn’t work, what’s at stake is the system. You’re talking about a $2 billion infrastructure investment. There’s a huge upside here. But there’s also a great risk.”

Photo via DDOT's Facebook page

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

Tregoning's beloved Brommie. (Twitter)

Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning is one of the most stalwart bike commuters in District government, making the trip from her Columbia Heights rowhouse to 1100 4th Street SW most days on a foldable Brompton bike, wearing a helmet and sensible shoes. So far, she's gone without major incident, except for catching her wheels in some of the metal ruts that run down 9th Street.

But accidents happen to the safest of cyclists, and one struck around 9:00 a.m. this morning as she was heading south around Mt. Vernon Square, in the form of a Maryland driver who sideswiped her while running a red light on Massachusetts Avenue.

"She was shaken up and very apologetic," Tregoning says. She flagged down a police officer, but decided not to press charges. "I basically told her, never run a red light in the District again!"

Tregoning ended up unscathed, but her bike came out of the altercation much the worse for wear. Fortunately, she was right near BicycleSpace at 5th and I Street NW, which happens to be the only place in D.C. that handles Bromptons. They gave her a loaner bike—a prudent choice for a bike shop in D.C.—and she rode right on into the office.

Even more of a case for making the Office of Planning's vision for Mt. Vernon Square a reality!

Tentative boundaries from March, which may be out of date.

Over the last few weeks, the District and the Army have been hashing out a final agreement about who gets what on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after sketching out new boundaries back in March. Over the next few months, D.C. will re-start meetings to decide what should go where on the land that it gets.

But the District isn't the only one moving forward with plans for the site. The State Department, which will be getting the northwest corner, is working on putting together a new center for between 10 and 20 chanceries, similar to the one on Van Ness Street NW just west of Connecticut Avenue. That secluded enclave was created in the 1960s, and leased to the American outposts of 22 nations including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan. The U.S. required each country's building to reflect its native architecture, which resulted in what the 2006 American Institute of Architects Guide to the Architecture of Washington called "dreadful pastiches of pseudo-vernacular forms."

Neighbors aren't just worried about ugly buildings. And they aren't even just worried about traffic. This time around, they fear the creation of another closed-off compound that won't benefit the surrounding community—a "bunker," as one citizen member of the Local Redevelopment Authority Committee put it last night. State is already talking about having a 50-foot setback between its buildings and the District's property, which made Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning raise her eyebrows.

Of course, the level of security will depend on the requirements of the countries that opt to locate there. In response to a question from D.C. City Administrator Allen Lew, the State Department rep said that most would be relocating from elsewhere in the District—many of them from Embassy Row on Massachusetts Avenue, where some buildings just don't meet a modern chancery's needs. But most people don't require the kind of fortification that a foreign country's physical presence in America does these days, which means that at least a dozen or so of those buildings could become available over the next several years to interested parties, substantially weakening the area's statist character.

I'd take Estonia, myself.

Higher-ups in the District government love to brag about their city’s environmental credentials: D.C., they’ll tell you, has more certifiably green buildings and more acreage of green roofs than any place besides Chicago, not to mention more Energy Star-approved buildings than anywhere besides Los Angeles.

“We’re a city that has nearly 30 acres of green roofs on its buildings already,” District Department of the Environment Director Christophe Tulou boasted last month. “We don’t have any business being in that position as a city of 600,000 people, and yet we are...It’s just so incredibly exciting.”

“I think we’re about to kick Chicago’s butt,” adds Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning, making note of the 179 buildings now certified to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard by the U.S. Green Building Council. Some 600 more such LEED buildings are in the pipeline.

To a large extent, the honchos actually deserve their self-administered pats on the back. Yes, the federal government now requires its buildings to become LEED-certified once they’re built or substantially renovated. But that’s only resulted in one certification in D.C.—the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms building on New York Avenue NE. The rest of the prodding came via the city’s own Green Building Act of 2006, which expedited reviews and will soon require all large existing buildings to report their energy consumption. The law also forces all new developments to meet LEED standards.

But there’s one green metric you don’t hear as much about: The newest rating system, LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND). D.C. has already had more projects sign up for the certification than any city in the country.

As it happens, LEED-ND is the kind of certification that Washington—or any other similarly dense and transit-served city—can easily use to run up the score: It’s the first system to recognize that location, rather than the technology of individual buildings, is the major factor in reducing carbon footprints. It’s not much use building a 4,000-square-foot single family home that uses no net energy if it’s in the middle of an exurban field you need to drive to.

The District doesn’t have many empty exurban fields. But it does have a robust Metrorail system and relatively compact neighborhoods—meaning LEED-ND points rack up without a developer even trying.

Take Constitution Square, for example. Developers weren’t even planning on getting LEED certification for the 404-apartment residential portion of the massive mixed-use project in NoMa. Two-thirds of the way through construction, they realized that they could meet LEED-ND standards without much extra effort. So they filed the paperwork (and paid the $20,000 fee) for that extra seal of approval.

“The thing is with LEED-ND is, it’s just good urbanism,” says Matt Steenhoek, a development manager at PN Hoffman, which had a hand in Constitution Square. “A lot of it’s just stuff you’re going to do anyway because it’s the way you want to build a successful project.”

—-

In some ways, LEED-ND wasn’t meantfor urban areas in the first place. It’s most useful in suburbs where smart-growth principles like density, narrow streets, less parking, and access to transit are not only uncommon, but made illegal by zoning restrictions. In those places, registering as a LEED-ND candidate early on can help a project win approval from jurisdictions concerned about traffic, trash, and noise.

In at least some places with less environmentally friendly regs, the Green Building Council—which hands out the certifications—has worked with local governments to improve their codes. In Cleveland in 2008, LEED-ND pilot projects prodded the city to revise ancient ordinances designed to send all stormwater into sewers.

But in D.C., there’s not much daylight between the Green Building Council’s ideal and existing regulations. LEED-ND projects are springing up either at the city’s insistence or of their own volition—especially at the big public-private partnerships that are good candidates for certification anyway.

At the Southwest Waterfront, for example, the city’s land disposition agreement with the developers requires both LEED Silver certification and ND certification for the whole project. Other projects, like CityCenterDC and Forest City’s The Yards project near the Ballpark, opt for LEED-ND as a way of distinguishing themselves in a world where green building certification is already par for the course.

“We just realized that this was going to be a great way to reinforce through the market what The Yards was going to be,” says Ramsey Meiser, Forest City’s senior vice president of development. “I wouldn’t say that there was one overriding thing that we did from a design standpoint for ND.”

It’s a useful marketing tool for developments in areas the public isn’t used to thinking of as residential—like, say, Constitution Square, which sits in the middle of a thicket of glassy, blocky office buildings. “The people at the company felt that it would help it to have an ND plaque and certification, especially for marketing of the residential flats,” explains Laura Watchman, a consultant who helped craft the guidelines and now works for companies that want their developments to comply. “Especially in a neighborhood like NoMa that’s up and coming and revitalizing, it’s really helpful to have that third-party validation. It helps to rebrand the neighborhood, and to provide that incentive for people to feel like it’s a hip and green place to live.”

So what’s the point in a certification that urban developers can get without doing much beyond what they were required to do already?

Doug Farr, a Chicago-based architect and planner who helped put together the rating system, says that even in places where developers are already doing everything LEED-ND is supposed to incentivize, there’s a virtue in labeling and quantifying what that means. “What’s the Beyoncé song, ‘Put a Ring on It’?” Farr jokes. And besides, he says, there’s a lot beyond the basic certification level that would push a developer to opt out of dirty infrastructure—generating renewable energy rather than depending on the grid, growing food on-site, and processing sewage, for example.

But if they don’t, the organization argues that the fact that getting basic certification isn’t a problem, since building in cities can be more onerous than just plunking houses down on open tracts of land in the suburbs.

“They should be rewarded for picking that location,” says Green Building Council’s Dara Zycherman. “If it was really easy for you to get there, it’s not a bad thing to get recognized for it, although of course we want to push people in directions they’re not comfortable with.”

—-

For the District, though, there’s a downside to having a metric that’s inherently biased in favor of cities: All those impressive LEED-ND certification stats allow the city to avoid reforming those few developments that still adhere to the suburban-Arizona version of spatial organization.

Take the low-slung, big-box retail planned for the Shops at Dakota Crossing, in Fort Lincoln. Forget LEED: The project is as far from a Metro station as you can get in the city and surrounded by oceans of parking lots. And then, of course, the three single-use Walmart developments on Georgia Avenue NW, Bladensburg Road NE, and East Capitol Street—as much as the company might tout the sustainability of individual buildings, they don’t fit into anything you could characterize as a “neighborhood.”

Should the District mandate LEED-ND as a way of avoiding such monstrosities in the future? Tregoning would love to oversee a city that universally adheres to the standard, but it hasn’t been a top District priority. By way of explanation, she cites the city’s current record of environmental success. “It’s a little bit like overkill almost to require the LEED-ND certification, because our entire city, pretty much, we’re meeting that standard,” she says.

It’s a case where all those admirable green stats allow officials to let the few exceptions slide. Incorporating LEED-ND standards into “large tract review,” which governs projects over three acres in size, might have prevented some of those nightmarish building scenarios. At the moment, the Office of Planning can only intervene if it looks like there would be massive traffic problems or other disruptions. To squeeze as much walkability from these projects as possible, the only tool left to the city is persuasion.

With a little more LEED leverage, Tregoning could do more than nudge.

Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

The corner of New York and Montana is now slightly more interesting.

The Walmart-centric development planned for the triangle of land between New York Avenue, Montana, and Bladensburg–newly christened "The Point at Arboretum"–is not the best of the four planned D.C. stores, due in large part to the fact that fully half the land is taken up by parking lots totaling 1,339 spaces, including a three-level garage that will take up the majority of the Montana Avenue frontage. It's no wonder that Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning had "issues" with the large tract review application as originally submitted.

The plan still looks basically the same. But it does look like Tregoning might have been able to negotiate a few improvements around the edges.

For example, the public spaces got a little nicer. The glass on the restaurant building at the New York/Montana intersection has been wrapped around the corner, and the buildings pulled up closer to the street, with more greenery as a buffer with the sidewalk. On the top level of the parking garage, they've added a "sky park" with tables and chairs that will look out on the Walmart entrance rotunda. The smaller surface-level western parking lot got a pedestrian promenade, and developer WV Urban says they might be willing to host a farmers market there on the weekend.

It also got more accessible for people who aren't driving cars. They're designing a fancy Bikeshare station, and are also proposing to pay for the addition of bike lanes along New York Avenue themselves.

Finally, they're allowing for the eventual addition of more density on the surface parking lots and low buildings along New York Avenue–most likely office rather than residential, which is too bad, considering that the best way to mitigate traffic issues is to have people walk from their homes to do their shopping.

The sky park: Could be a nice thing.

Sure, you might still call it lipstick on an urban design pig (especially compared to what was planned for the site before). But given that it's not fundamentally changing, it makes sense to get as many public space amenities as possible.

Here's the whole thing.