Thursday, April 19, 2012

Washington DC’s Planned Unit Development Process

Josh Barro writes in “Height of Folly: Why Housing in Washington DC is so Awful” that it is awful because Washington DC is a “swamp full of dumb rules and jumbled zoning laws.”

He cites 102 year old law to limit height of most buildings to no more than 130 feet as one example. He says that DC’s planning and zoning rules are arbitrary, unevenly enforced and overall hostile to new development. He gives an example of a Wisconsin Avenue supermarket which applied for a special zoning approval in 2005, and just got an approval. The Wisconsin Avenue area is characterized by six to eight story buildings with FARs as high as 12.0, while this supermarket asked for an FAR of 2.0. A typical Planned Unit Development takes 3 to 4 years and costs a developer $500,000.

A short video on New York Avenue Gateway



Reference: Height of Folly: Why Housing in Washington DC is so Awful, The Atlantic
 
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