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The ongoing First Amendment demonstrations and calls for racial justice have caused OP to reflect on our longstanding work around equity and racial justice, which goes back well over a decade. Our more recent efforts include the Comprehensive Plan equity crosswalk, Mayor Bowser’s housing equity work, health and food equity, internal racial equity training, hiring a nationally-recognized equity expert, and applying an equity lens to each of our planning efforts. But we also know that we have more to do, and to be successful, we need to work differently.
Working differently means grappling honestly with the past. We recognize our city and the practice of planning have inherited approaches that were built around systems of racism. Not only was our city run by segregationists through the mid-twentieth century, but the planning profession itself is implicated in furthering racism, often even by “enlightened professionals.” Assumptions, “best practices,” inherited wisdom, and laws or regulations come from a default white (heterosexual, cisgender, upper/middle class, male, able-bodied) perspective.
While DC has made a lot of progress, our residents continue to experience the effects of this historic segregation. Today, Wards 7 and 8 are over 90% Black, while the District average is 47%. This segregation has been a root cause for many of the disparate outcomes residents continue to experience. White households in DC have a net worth 81 times greater than Black households. 55% of Ward 8 residents are housing cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of their monthly income toward housing costs, compared to 31% of residents in Ward 3. And the gaps are more than economic, there is one grocery store per nearly 40,000 residents in Ward 7, compared to 5 grocery stores per 40,000 residents in nearby Ward 6. These various inequities lead to significant health disparities, where Ward 8 residents have a life expectancy that is 15 years less than Ward 3 residents.
An example of grappling with the past and how it affects our outcomes today is the Mayor’s Housing for Equity and Growth report examined the explicit and implicit racism that underlined many past housing policies, which continue to play out in disparities we see in the District today. This work and the ongoing conversations speak to ways that we can begin to address these systems and right historic wrongs.
Working differently means ensuring our engagement overcomes decades of exclusion to public processes. When we began updating the Comprehensive Plan, we made this a top priority. We heard feedback from over 10,000 residents across the District through all sorts of channels as we had the intention of “better meeting residents where they are.” This outreach helped ensure that the Comp Plan update was broadly reflective of issues faced by various DC residents and communities.
Working differently means grappling with how our public and shared spaces must be designed and operated to be spaces for everyone. The planning profession has lots of shared wisdom about public spaces and the public realm but very little is from the experience of a person of color or a person experiencing homelessness or a person with mental or physical limitations. We must probe inherited assumptions and ask whether our designs and signage are intentionally or unintentionally exclusionary.
Working differently means we will consider not only the intentions, but the implications, of our inherited wisdom and work to ensure we dismantle the implicit and multi-generational barriers based on race, gender, sexual identity, class, and physical abilities and mental abilities, among others. We will continue to interrogate our past and present practices, surface where they are problematic, and determine how to change them across many systems and issues.
Sincerely,
Andrew Trueblood
Director, DC Office of Planning
Stay tuned as future newsletters promise to be full of updates and planning news. Please feel free to share with others, who can sign up here. In addition, you can follow our work on Twitter at @OPinDC.
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In April, Mayor Bowser submitted the District’s Comprehensive Plan proposal to the DC Council. This update to the Comprehensive Plan will allow the District to live up to its values of an inclusive and vibrant city while meeting long-term challenges and current opportunities in critical areas like COVID-19 recovery, equity and racial justice, and housing. The Council’s timely consideration and passage of this bill is critical.
The Comprehensive Plan presents a suite of tools and approaches that can be immediately applied to recovery from the economic, social, and public health impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The Mayor’s proposal includes new language, policies, and actions that broaden the frame of emergency and resilience planning, ongoing public health and economic monitoring, housing affordability and the equitable distribution of housing choices, and recovery methods. The long-term vision of the District contained in this update will serve as an important guide in the aftermath of this pandemic and beyond.
The Comprehensive Plan proposal, which is the result of unprecedented outreach and coordination led by OP over the last few years, was initially adopted in 2006 and last amended in 2011. The four major themes that are woven throughout the Comprehensive Plan update – equity, resilience, housing affordability, and public resources – were derived from community feedback. Public engagement began in 2016 with outreach and educational events throughout the city and an open call for proposed amendments in 2017, which generated over 3,000 proposals. OP conducted additional public engagement in 2019 that allowed both the public and ANCs to weigh in on the draft amendment.
This update reflects the best analysis, policies and actions that will prepare DC to manage the change ahead with an eye toward equity, resilience and shared prosperity. OP is committed to doing what we can to support the adoption of this Comprehensive Plan in 2020, so that District residents will have the support they need to seize the opportunities and tackle the challenges ahead.
For more information on the Comprehensive Plan proposal and amendment process, please visit plandc.dc.gov. As we continue to strive to meet residents where they are, we have updated the PlanDC site to make it more user-friendly and easier to find the most relevant information.
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In April, Mayor Bowser announced her plans to ReOpen DC. She said that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to not just reopen our city, but to build a more equitable DC. We will need to be measured, data-driven, and deliberate to ensure a safe and sustainable return. ReOpen DC is about working together as a community to reopen Washington, DC in a way that is safe and sustainable. To that end, Mayor Bowser established the ReOpen DC Advisory Group, comprised of national and local leaders and industry experts from restaurants and retail to education and public health, to help envision and plan for a sustainable reopening through community-driven guidance, in accordance Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s guidance for phased reopening.
In line with Mayor Bowser’s vision, the Advisory Group anchored their reopening recommendations on DC’s core values of “HOPE”— Health, Opportunity, Prosperity, and Equity. With widespread community input, the Advisory Group delivered recommendations to the Mayor in May.
Director Andrew Trueblood was appointed by Mayor Bowser to coordinate and lead the ReOpen DC Advisory Group through its 25,000+ hours of work across a team of over 250 government and leaders. OP, in conjunction with the Deputy Mayor for Education and DC Health, has implemented a reopening plan review process for colleges and universities. Members of OP’s team were also instrumental in the development of new guidelines as part of the District’s re-imagination of public space during reopening, including the buildout of “streateries” to expand outdoor dining.
OP is proud to contribute to reopening efforts and will continue to support Mayor Bowser in building a more equitable DC.
For the latest information on reopening, please visit coronavirus.dc.gov.
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It is not too late to complete the 2020 Census! It has never been easier to respond on your own, whether online, over the phone or by mail—all without having to meet someone in person. Even if you have misplaced the invitation with the unique ID, you can still self-respond by providing your address online or over the phone.
Completing the 2020 Census is more critical than ever. Being counted means political power and representation for DC residents. Accurate population data helps secure federal funding that DC will receive for healthcare, emergency services, education, housing, workforce development, transportation and community planning.
Follow @dccensus on twitter or visit 2020census.gov for more information.
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OP continues to find new ways to meet Mayor Bowser’s challenge to produce more affordable housing in a more equitable way across the District. Expanded Inclusionary Zoning (IZ) also known as IZ Plus is an important tool to help get more affordable units, especially in high-cost areas. On July 15, OP hosted a virtual roundtable to gather public feedback on the proposed concept, which expands existing IZ requirements of the Zoning Regulations to create higher affordable housing set-aside requirements for certain map amendments.
For more information on Expanded IZ and to view a recording of the roundtable discussion, please visit planning.dc.gov/inclusionaryzoning.
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