Dear Washingtonians:
Liz Essley Whyte wrote an article in the Washington Post that
highlights how expensive the rent is for tiny apartments that are being
built in the newly fashionable neighborhoods of Washington, “Micro-Units
Help DC Renters Live to the Max,”
http://www.tinyurl.com/nve4knn.
This gives the lie to the fantasy of DC’s planners, who believe that
micro apartments will be affordable for the millennials who are willing
to put up with their inconveniences, as long as they can live close to
plenty of bars and street traffic. No, micro units will be as expensive
as the market will bear.
Fark.com links to Whyte’s article with the remark, “What happens when
you have a city fill [sic] of Millennial halfwits willing to pay
$2000 a month to rent an apartment the size of a shoe closet? Articles
like this, mainly.” What I’m worried about, and the reason I have
written many times about micro units and shipping container apartments,
is what happens when the city runs out of Millennial halfwits who are
willing to pay two thousand or three thousand a month to rent apartments
the size of shoe closets. Developers are perfectly willing to save money
by skimping on the cost of building new apartments and to pocket the
profits, but developers who are willing to do that are not likely to
spend the money required to maintain those apartment houses in shiny,
new, or even livable condition.
What our problem is, is that we are knowingly planning for our future
slums to be built in what are currently our newly fashionable
neighborhoods, and we have no plan to reclaim those slums once they have
deteriorated.
Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com
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Power Undergrounding Project Update
Dorothy Brizill,
dorothy@dcwatch.com
As I wrote in the July 20 issue of themail, Pepco and the DC
Department of Transportation are about to embark on a one billion dollar
construction project to put electric power lines underground in Wards 3,
4, 5, 7, and 8 in an effort to respond to the persistent problem of
electrical power outages. As part of its review of the Pepco/DDOT
undergrounding plan (Formal Case #1116), the Public Service Commission
is holding seven community hearings in the District to allow for public
comment on the first three years of the proposed undergrounding plan,
which will begin next spring, and which will require streets to be
excavated so that trenches can be dug by DDOT’s contractors and conduit
lines constructed by Pepco.
To date, civic participation and attendance at the hearings has been
essentially nonexistent. For example, at the PSC hearing at St. Columba
Church in Ward 3 on Tuesday, no resident or business owner testified,
despite the recurring problems the ward has had with power outages over
the years. This lack of interest and participation is due, in lage
measure, to the fact that Pepco, the Public Service Commission, and even
the Office of the Peoples Counsel has failed to provide the public with
basic information regarding the undergrounding plan, including which
Pepco feeder lines and streets would be impacted. Indeed, through
Tuesday of this week, the PSC was insisting that individuals needed to
read through Pepco’s voluminous case filing in order to find the
specific locations of the feeder lines and streets to be excavated. By
midweek, however, after a great deal of pressure and persistence by
DCWatch, the PSC made some of the information citizens and civic
organizations have been seeking available on its web site at
http://www.tinyurl.com/n89klymb. Specific information on all the
Pepco feeder lines to be placed underground as well as street maps are
detailed in Appendices C, D, and E of the Pepco/DDOT application in Case
FC #1116 on that page. In addition, the OPC has agreed to post
information on the implementation of the proposed undergrounding plan.
The web addresses for the user-friendly information on OCP’s web site
are
http://www.opc-dc.gov/index.php/consumer-topics-a-z/proposed-construction-locations
and
http:/www.opc-dc.gov/index.php/consumer-topics-a-z/publications-downloads
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It is simply unreal how the National Planning Commission (NCPC), the
House District Committee, and the US Attorney’s Office stick their heads
in the sand like ostriches and ignore the violations committed by DC
DDOT’s erecting overhead power lines within the city of Washington. DDOT
continues with its ridiculous plans to extend the streetcar lines into
Montgomery County believing that the elected officials of the county
will just stand by and allow them to do it. To show how little DDOT
researches the matter, when streetcars of years back started into
Maryland the elected officials placed strict requirements on their use
and how and where they were to operate. Little do they know streetcars
into Maryland were to have horns similar to train horns to warn people
at crossings. Cooler heads prevailed and the bells on the streetcars had
to be loud enough to be heard.
The basis for DDOT’s efforts is a transportation initiative signed in
1973 by the mayor that there was no way to power streetcars other than
by overhead wires and all would be all right as long as they did not
infringed upon any property of the federal government. This initiative
is the city’s undoing, because DDOT does not understand that only the
Territory of the District of Columbia is excluded from the ban on
overhead power lines and the City of Washington is the property of the
Federal Government.
The streetcars and the routes planned by DDOT will be a commercial
business killer. Ninety percent of the commercial establishments in
Washington, DC, are storefronts with no loading docks. How many
commercial establishments have gone out of business on H Street, NE,
since the city started building the streetcar line? A review of parking
on H Street, NE, revealed that there were many curb spaces available for
parking. Will small commercial establishments of the mom and pop type go
the way of high button shoes? Will commercial establishments move to
Maryland and Washington, DC, become a bedroom community, reversing the
roles of the suburbs and the present city? Who knows what evil lurks in
the hearts of men?
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