Community leaders in Columbia Heights and Pleasant Plains are asking the District to rezone blocks of properties to head off the conversion of row houses into multiple-unit condominiums.
Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1A was scheduled to take its rezoning petition before the D.C. Zoning Commission Thursday evening. The request seeks to restrict multifamily dwellings across 11 streets in an area generally bounded by 14th Street to the east, 16th Street to the west, Spring Road to the north and Monroe Street to the south — within a few blocks of the Columbia Heights Metro Station.
In the resurgent Northwest community, a hotbed of development, longtime residents fear the culture shift toward condominiums will obliterate the block party atmosphere from their family-friendly neighborhood.
Shifting the zoning from the R-5-B to R-4 designation would limit building heights to three stories, down from the current 50 feet, and restrict the number of units to, generally, two per home.
Developers, neighbors said, have been tearing up roofs to add one or two floors to century-old row houses. Now those homes are experiencing settling and cracks, and “it could very possibly create further problems putting the weight on top,” said ANC Commissioner Jacqueline Arguelles, a resident of Perry Place since 1952.
ANC Commissioner Anne Theisen, the leader of the rezoning effort, said she was motivated by the desire to preserve family housing. At least 11 homes within the proposed rezoning district have been converted in the last couple years, she said, limiting parking, increasing traffic, diminishing the architectural integrity of row house blocks and affecting the “cohesion of the community.”
“If we start subdividing row houses then there’s really no place for families to go,”Theisen said.
Opposition to the plan has been limited. Uzikee Nelson, a Columbia Heights resident since 1974, said the rezoning — what he called “downsizing the neighborhood” — is patently unfair to longtime homeowners who might want to sell their properties to developers. Nelson, who fears his property value will be slashed, lives just outside the petition area.
The rezoning has the support of Ward 1 D.C. Council Member Jim Graham and the Office of Planning, which argued in a Jan. 29 report that the row house additions are not in character with existing homes, and formerly unified streets “are now interrupted by buildings of varying heights.”
