Looking Past the Capital City

A rendering of PN Hoffman's vision for the Southwest waterfront. The plan includes a mix of residential, office and commercial development. (Pn Hoffman)

"When you go to London, you don't just go there because it's the seat of power, you go to walk on the Thames or take the Underground or go shopping," said Eric Price, former adviser to Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) and now an executive at Abdo Development.

He said the same expectation should exist for Washington. "It's a place, a world-class city that you go to for all it offers," he said. "You go for the parks, the ballgames, the waterfronts."

Aspirations aside, the District faces hurdles on its path to a more multifaceted identity, not the least of which are the ebbs and flows of economic cycles that can slow even the most ambitious projects.

Then there are matters of scale. Unlike Paris and London, which have millions of residents and have evolved over centuries, Washington is a younger city with fewer than 600,000 inhabitants.

Neil Albert, deputy mayor for planning and economic development, acknowledged the substantial progress the city made over the past decade. But he said that the District remains "a long ways away from the mature cities like New York and Chicago."

"We would not say the city has arrived," he said.

The Fenty administration, Albert said, hopes to prod developers to invest east of the Anacostia River, where he said historic areas such as Anacostia, Deanwood and Congress Heights are ripe for what has been built downtown: a dense mix of residential, commercial and retail.

But to achieve that vision, Albert said, the District probably will have to reconsider one of its main tools for controlling development: a height-limit law that bars virtually all city buildings more than 130 feet. Lifting the cap in areas east of the Anacostia River, he said, could mean taller buildings and the chance to create the kind of population density necessary to attract retailers and create thriving neighborhoods.

"There's nothing that would develop Poplar Point faster than if investors saw it as a place to build high-rise offices," he said. "We hear a growing drumbeat from planners and developers that it's the right thing to do."

That drumbeat does not include all of Washington's civic and community leaders, such as Dick Wolf, president of the Capitol Hill Restoration Society. He predicts that new neighborhoods along the waterfront and elsewhere will be indistinct "condo-villes" with largely identical buildings and retail. "A mall-like effect," Wolf said.

Turning Washington into anything but the government center that it has always been "is an impossible vision," he said. "You have to be what you are, and what you are is a national and international capital."

Unlike other national capitals that evolved around commerce and culture, Washington was created for a single purpose: governance.