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Vince Mareino e-mails a smart counterargument:
The original reasons for the limit were silly, yes, but the modern-day effect is not to suppress growth in DC. Rather, the height limit encourages spreading the high-density zone from downtown to around all of DC. Neighborhoods like U St, Mt. Vernon, and even Chinatown might have never happened if developers could have just kept building up Dupont and Downtown.If you want to encourage smart growth, ignore the height issue and focus on the more insidious problems: (1) Backwards parking laws. As I'm sure you know, DC has a minimum number of parking spots for any new development, a law that stopped making sense the day that the Metro opened. It should be a parking maximum. (2) Single-use zoning currently chokes development in more than half of the city. A lot of prime real estate around the Red and Green lines goes wasted because developers aren't allowed to build even a 10-story office/retail building, let alone a skyscraper. (3) Historic preservation run amok. Just off the top of my head, I know that the city preserved the Church of Christ Scientist against the Church's wishes, preserved the MLK Library (which was built on the cheap and doesn't even try to pay tribute to MLK) for being so ugly and unusable that it is the "only structure of its kind" in DC that hasn't been torn down, and is days away from preserving the loading dock of the Washington Hilton. (4) Lack of funding for subway and streetcar expansion. WMATA has plans to more than double the city's rail network, but they've had to sit on them for 10 years because the federal government won't give them one cent. If built, the new rails would make high-density development possible in dozens of neighborhoods that simply lack the proper transportation network otherwise. I really think tackling these four issues will do more to encourage DC's development than removing the height limit would. If we make these changes and DC still has a real estate shortage, that's the time to raise the height limit. In the meantime, I'll be encouraging my councilmen to think big instead of just thinking tall.The original thread is here. Some further comments are here. On some level, very little of this seems either/or. You could relax the height limit and encourage mixed use zoning and fund transit more fully. The argument that a skyscraper option would encourage vertical rather than horizontal development is an interesting one, but it's hard to imagine that, at this point in the city's history, increasing the height limit to 25 stories would choke off Columbia Heights. Rather, you'd probably see the benefits of increased density and more land supply on the margin, and in the aggregate, things would continue on as they've been. At the same time, you'd be getting more in property taxes, in sales taxes, in income taxes, in local business receipts, and that would help fund other initiatives like transit.
