Yeah we did, baby. Much like the committee report’s interpretation of the REIA, we testified that amendments to the Comp Plan weren’t enough but that not passing it was worse (page 6 of the cmte print at chairmanmendelson.com/cow/compplan/)

https://twitter.com/PeakToil/status/1384620833641951233

My biggest ask, which no one seems to give a shit about, was improved procedures for the Comp Plan (included in staff draft), and a rewrite ASAP. CORE’s analysis IDs that most of what needs to happen won’t come from amendments but from a rewrite.

This is why our organizing on the Comp Plan has been focused on getting white people in Wards 1, 2, and 3 to support more housing in their already $$$ neighborhoods. We know who gets to wield “neighborhood character” to successfully oppose things.

https://twitter.com/actheresa/status/1377608726841024515

There’s a lot of good new stuff in the Comp Plan committee print on racial equity, but the actual policy rewordings are huge signal to white neighborhoods that have been exclusive for a century that they can keep on saying no and let everyone else bear the consequences.

Reducing the future planning analysis area in the whitest, wealthiest part of the District to pretty much just two corridors, out of the residential streets (page 98), kinda makes a mockery of the racial equity analysis that's also in the committee print: dropbox.com/sh/spty70s5oo5… Everyone gonna freak about the first line of the first graf here, about the racial equity impact analysis, when the first line of the second graf is, truly, the nut. The REIA is largely re: implementation. Removing the opportunity for implementation in Ward 3 is big bad stuff.

The revanchist school of urban policy has its latest installment and it’s a disingenuous doozy. vox.com/the-highlight/… Honestly the insane thing to me about Moskowitz, et al, is that they finally correctly IDed that governments make choices that shape land use, but their brains all seem to start revising history at, like, New York in the 1970s.

The earliest reference to "NIMBY" that I can find in the Washington Post is from Feb. 13, 1983, in a Jack Eisen MetroScene column. Helpfully, I also screenshotted, for you, the illo. This April 9, 1986 letter to the editor from a, uh, representative of the prison industrial complex?? lambasts D.C. for being NIMBY af about jails and suggests, literally, all eight wards.

Good evening. Seems as good a time as any to discuss D.C. and gentrification and change and biking, a thing I thought I wouldn’t have to talk about much at this point. But I realize I’ve been saying I’ve been doing this shit for a decade. I have. That feels significant. My big career breakthrough was this painstakingly reported City Paper story. It led to a job at WABA. More importantly, I heard that it quelled a good deal of intra-administration anti-bike politics; lots of people said this story was a neutralizer. washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/1…

I am not trying to dunk on this thread, which is good, but if we can talk big about universal healthcare we can talk equally big about abolishing sprawl and the fact that this is a normative reaction to our transpo future from my fellow leftists is Not Tight and needs to stop.

https://twitter.com/MattBruenig/status/1080298917361840128

I resolve to be productive and contribute meaningful policy suggestions re: the Green New Deal and land use in 2019 (thank you @HenryKraemer!), but gotta call this shit out when I see it.

I see that dunking on dorms has re-emerged as a fun way to spend our time as we fight for scraps of affordable housing. I defended them earlier this year: google.com/amp/s/amp.slat… I know it’s easy to be like, “Defending co-living is actually YIMBY fake-woke, functionally neoliberal bullshit,” but, frankly, the worst world I can imagine—the one that we live in—outlaws deviance by making things like co-living, or SROs, illegal.

Writing testimony for tomorrow's hearing is on my to-do list and it's the hardest thing because I'm too mad to string words together.

https://twitter.com/ggwash/status/1044949755313496065

Here's a thing that's continually fucking with me: I've been in the occupation of getting people to contact their electeds for things for a long time. For advocacy groups, this means: action alert page + click-to-send email, plus shoeleathery inducement of personal testimonies.

I don't think I've thought as much about something I can't vote for as Initiative 77. I would vote yes, though, and I am going to thread about why. I will be back in D.C. for good on July 3, so I am *just* missing this. As many of you know, I am going to work for a smart-growth advocacy organization. As many of you may surmise, said organization will be in the business of pushing for a better Comprehensive Plan in the fall.