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This month marked the one-year anniversary of the Mayor’s submittal of the Comprehensive Plan Update to the DC Council, which sought to bring the 2006 document up to date with major updates around housing, equity, resilience, public space, and COVID-19 recovery. It also marked the DC Council Committee of the Whole’s markup of the document. This is an important milestone that numerous stakeholders have been working towards for over five years. The Council will hold two more votes, the first of which is scheduled for May 4th. Once approved, we look forward to moving on to implementation beginning this summer.
Another one of the DC Office of Planning’s top priorities of 2020, the 2020 Census, also reached an important milestone this month. On April 26th, the Census Bureau released population counts from the 2020 Census that reported DC’s population growth nearly tripled compared to the previous decade. The 2020 Census reports DC’s population at 689,545, a 14.6% increase since the 2010 Census. This increase represents the seventh highest growth rate in the nation. While we celebrate this tremendous growth, we also know residents of the District are more likely to be undercounted than other states. Given that that this was an unprecedented Census, with operations being challenged by a global pandemic coupled with a tumultuous federal process, we will be reviewing the numbers carefully and the factors that may have contributed to an undercount. You can read more about this below.
Stay tuned as future newsletters promise to be full of milestones and planning news. Please feel free to share with others, who can sign up here. In addition, you can follow our work on Twitter under @OPinDC.
Sincerely,
Andrew Trueblood
Director, DC Office of Planning
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Press Release: 2020 Census Data Shows DC's Population Growth Nearly Tripled Compared to Previous Decade (April 26, 2021)
On April 26th, the US Census Bureau released initial state-level counts from the 2020 Census that reports DC’s population growth nearly tripled compared to the previous decade. The 2020 Census reports DC’s population at 689,545, a 14.6% increase since the 2010 Census. This increase represents the seventh highest growth rate in the nation. During the previous decade, between 2000 and 2010, DC’s population grew by 5.2%, or just under 30,000 people, from 572,059 to 601,723; between 2010 and 2020, the District’s population grew by nearly 88,000 people.
“Our population has exploded over the past decade as more people recognize DC as one of the hottest places in the nation. People know that DC is a welcoming and diverse hub of opportunity – a place that has something for everyone,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser. “Of course, even with more American citizens living in DC than in two other states, the one thing we still don’t have is a vote in Congress. Today’s results confirm what we know, what the US House of Representatives knows, and what the White House knows – it is past time to make Washington, DC the 51st state.”
For over a year and a half, the DC Census team, comprised of government and community partners, engaged with residents in all eight wards to complete the 2020 Census. Even with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team turned to new and creative ways to reach residents, particularly those considered hard-to-reach. These efforts were complicated by not just the pandemic, but also other unforeseen disruptions to Census operations that may have interfered with the count.
“While we celebrate this tremendous growth, we also know residents of the District are more likely to be undercounted than other states,” said Andrew Trueblood, Director of the DC Office of Planning (OP). “We will review these numbers carefully to make sure everyone who calls the District home was appropriately counted in this unprecedented Census and ensure we receive the representation and federal funding we deserve for schools, housing, health care, and other programs that help us thrive.”
The federal government uses Census data to distribute more than $6 billion annually to the District for vital programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Section Eight Housing Choice Vouchers, Children’s Health Insurance, and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance. Accurate and complete census data is critical to COVID-19 recovery efforts as well. Census data plays an important role when making budgeting and planning decisions across all District agencies. Additional 2020 Census data will be released over the coming months and will be used by the DC Council to update ward and ANC boundaries.
For more information on 2020 Census data, please visit www.census.gov
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The COVID-19 public health emergency has severely disrupted the District’s Central Business District and has created intense pressure on the retail, hospitality, and arts and entertainment sectors and caused widespread business closures. Decreased employment and revenue resulting from COVID-19 have further exacerbated the existing challenges of high office vacancy rates and limited vibrancy stemming from few residential opportunities in the area.
In November 2020, OP and DC Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) partnered with the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Foundation to host a virtual Advisory Services Panel (vASP) with professional experts to explore strategies that would enhance an equitable economic recovery from the COVID-19 public health emergency in the Central Business District (CBD). Over 2.5 days, the expert panel led by ULI Global Chairman Marilyn Taylor met with nearly 50 stakeholders in the District to understand the unique opportunities and challenges of an equitable recovery for the Central Business District’s businesses, workers, and residents.
In April 2021, ULI published a report with the recommendations from the expert panel, encouraging the District to:
- Diversify the Downtown Economy
- Build Equity, Ownership, and Asset Value
- Support and Elevate Small Businesses
- Advance Workforce Training with Downtown Focus
- Create an Inclusive and Vibrant Identity for Downtown
OP and DMPED created a Briefing Book for the expert panel to distill the key challenges in the CBD – both longstanding challenges and emerging challenges stemming from COVID-19 – and highlight trends, existing District and partner efforts, and current challenges and potential opportunities within key focus areas. The Briefing Book provides important and additional context for the recommendations from the ULI panel.
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While the District of Columbia prioritizes providing universal barrier-free access to all buildings, OP recently realized that the city’s wide streets and raised landscaped (parked) areas along some of them can make this challenging. This is because these parked areas are regulated by public space and safety and building projection regulations, which oftentimes conflict with accessibility standards.
Because all residents should be able to provide accessible entrances to their homes, and these parked spaces are a regulated defining feature of the city, OP partnered up with the District Department of Transportation and engaged various stakeholder groups and District agencies to issue the Guidelines for Access to Terraced Residential Buildings. This document can be referred to when compliance with all applicable regulations and standards is not feasible due to site, building, or other constraints. This document thus serves as a guide for permit applicants to create design solutions that are compliant with accessibility standards and the underlying intent of public space and building projection regulations. It also ensures a consistent approach from application reviewers. This will allow applicants to move through review and approval processes more efficiently, and hopefully increase the pool of accessible homes in the District.
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On April 21st, the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board approved 11 small planning projects that will help build and enhance vibrant communities where it is easy to walk, bike, and take transit. The Congress Heights Pedestrian Access Study, proposed by OP, is one the FY2022 Transportation Land-Use Connections (TLC) Program Projects with an award of $60,000. The study will review the existing pedestrian transportation infrastructure in Congress Heights, with a focus on four areas including:
- Community serving businesses on Martin Luther King, Jr Avenue (Malcom X Boulevard, SE to Esther Place, SE)
- The Giant Shopping Center
- Congress Heights Recreation Center
- Parcel 15 @ St. Elizabeths East, which is being redeveloped to feature restaurant retail, hotel, and community space uses
The TLC study will examine existing barriers to pedestrian access and will identify where safer pedestrian crossings, more accessible bus stops, and enhanced access to green spaces and community services are needed. The project will build upon a TLC-funded Metrorail Walkshed Improvement Project conducted in FY 2017 and the ongoing Small Area Plan being led by OP.
The study is anticipated to start in Fall of 2021 with recommendations being published by June 2022.
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Lead Planner for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships, Joshua Silver joined Dr. Benjamin Stokes, Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University on a podcast to highlight OP’s efforts to bolster its community engagement practice using “playful engagement” – a pioneering approach that uses games to foster real-world change and impact on communities. The podcast highlighted OP’s recent efforts using playful engagement techniques to encourage diverse voices in agency planning efforts and to promote healthier neighborhoods and stronger communities. The podcast is a two-part series, hosted by GovLaunch, a free resource for local governments globally to share and discover innovative projects and tools to help break down barriers to innovation and empower local governments of all sizes to look at best practices to better serve their community and make government work better. Part-two of the podcast will be released in early May 2021.
Listen to Part 1 of the two-part podcast.
Innovators Melissa Bird, Executive Director District Census 2020, Stephanie Reid, Executive Director Philly Counts 2020, and Michael Baskin, an advisor to the Foundation for Civic Leadership, team up with Govlaunch to share strategies for effective census engagement and how this process may be the gateway to establishing robust citizen engagement overall. The two-part podcast is available now.
Listen to the two-part podcast.
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Learn more and get involved in our community planning projects:
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