John F. Kennedy once said of Washington, “It has Northern charm
and Southern efficiency.” That, of course, was when it was a sleepy
place lacking much air conditioning and before the bureaucratic
explosion brought on by Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s many
new programs. These caused a building boom that only now is slowing
down.
Nearly every week, it seemed, an old building was being gutted
or razed for a new one. Ever since the mid-Sixties ever more
companies, trade associations and issue-oriented organizations have
flocked to Washington to set up listening and lobbying posts. The
city’s population, declining for several years as families fled to
the suburbs, has been growing since 2000. It is now over 600,000
with many young people moving in to be closer to work.
With the prospect of downtown Washington seeming to run out of
building space for new buildings, Democratic Mayor Vincent Gray and
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee, have been considering the unthinkable:
raising the capital’s century-old building height limit of 130 feet
(12 stories in most cases). Cheering them on are property
developers. The Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District thinks
that the central area will be built out within a dozen or so years.
That is, if trends of the last few decades continue. Such
predictions are being made against a background of steady talk on
Capitol Hill of curbing the growth of the federal government.
The Messrs. Gray and Issa are talking about possibly raising the
downtown height limit by 15 feet, allowing an extra story for
existing buildings. Ominously, though, outside the downtown,
there is talk of allowing heights well above that. Not so fast,
says George Clark, chairman of a preservation group, the Committee
of 100. He says the scale of Washington is unique among American
cities and emphasizes its monumental nature.
That’s what the current height limit is all about. It was
inspired by the open feeling of central Paris. It has kept the
focus on the city’s monuments and the U.S. Capitol (only the
Washington Monument exceeds the height limit). In Paris, when the
need arose for many new office buildings, a new area, La Défense,
was created about a dozen miles away for high-rises. Washington
already has its La Défense, right across the river in Rosslyn,
Virginia, where the high-rise office buildings provide a nice —
but arm’s-length — backdrop to the city.
For several years, I had frequent one-day business trips to New
York from Washington, always taking the train. While I like New
York’s tempo and scale, the best part of the day was stepping out
of Union Station back in Washington in the early evening and
drinking in the reassuring, comfortable human scale of the city. My
first thought was always, “I’m home.”
Will builders be the kings of construction in the capital city?
There is no certainty that office building demand of the last three
decades will continue indefinitely. Here’s a way to put the
Gray-Issa proposal to rest: Shrink the federal government, let more
office buildings go up in Rosslyn and leave Washington’s scale just
as it is.
Mr. Hannaford worked in
Washington for 25 years.
