if i was going to be in town, i would most certainly be at this gig. in fact, i am pretty upset that i am going to be missing it. filastine is amazing, and after catching him at loda in September, i can guarantee that his live set will be pretty amazing.
his TheirSpace. more show details. listen to some tunes and see what you think.
a little unnerving to find that the online voter registration database in DC didn't have me registered, and even more so that when i called and they entered my address as additional information, i popped up. why would that matter?
this provided an odd parallel to the FBI fingerprinting process that i had just completed.
when this all started, i intended to have a series of posts about my neighborhood (see for example the title and URL), several of which are still mulling around in draft form here in blogger. i published a couple about columbia height, but not many.
well today i got sucked into reading a bunch of random posts about my locale via the Prince of Petworth, which is the kind of website i avoid for various reasons (time suck, triviality).
but i had been wondering about some restaurant goings-on the other day, and i found my answers, sort of. and i found out we're getting another crappy chain, this time a restaurant.
i can't really get into all of my sentiments about DC, columbia heights, gentrification, etc., but i will say that so much about this process is baffling. not so much how it happens, but how seemingly clueless people are about it. the ramifications are always glossed over or unacknowledged. but that seems to mirror so many things in our contemporary society.
but then again, the comments here left me with the feeling, as is often the case, that people are pretty clueless in general. so maybe this isn't the exception that proves the rule, just another example of the rules in action. at least part of it, in retrospect, is the audience of the blog, gentrifiers all and proud of it it seems.
oh, and PS, seems there was a big shooting three blocks from my house last month. who knew?
so apparently dc law has it that you have to clear the sidewalk in front of your property. of course, the dc government hasn't managed to do that quite yet for a lot of city properties or areas with ill-defined property rights, a week after our "big" snowstorm. but that's not what we're talking about here.
occasioned by my running loop, i head down massachusetts avenue down embassy row. the only delegation on my route that has yet to clear the snow from the sidewalk in front of it's embassy is venezuela. you'd think a country that gives out free/discounted heating oil as a sign of it's goodwill towards the poor could manage to shovel off the sidewalk. after all, the people walking skew poor. power to the people indeed.
since i've moved to dc, i've been talking about changing the height restriction. now it looks like some scholars from the brookings institution are saying the same thing.
for those who don't know, buildings in dc can't be higher than 130 feet (which i believe is the height of the capitol building). now, some people have told me that this makes dc more aesthetically pleasing. while i do like the row houses, i'm not sure if i totally agree with that sentiment. i certainly don't agree with that sentiment in the face of skyrocketing rents and home prices.
i usually think of this issue in terms of the effect of the policy on home prices and apartment rental rates, but the brookings scholar Christopher B. Leinberger was talking also in regards to the price and supply of office space, which seems also to be an issue. all the more reason.
dc is such a low density city, and the height restriction is one of the problems. if you've ever travelled out to NOVA or seen the MD suburbs, you've seen some of the consequences. concentrating the region's growth within the district has any number of advantages, including reducing driving (with the reduction in road construction outlays, pollution, gas consumption), reducing sprawl, and making the city more affordable, among other things.
unfortunately, for the expansion in housing supply to have the full impact and to attract families with kids, the dc public schools need to improve considerably. the leadership of the city, however, is well aware of this and how it factors in to the city's ability to retain the high tax base young couples (read: yuppies) who have moved to the city in recent years. whether or not they can actually achieve anything in the schools remains to be seen.
some sort of sensible policy that keeps the restriction in place for the areas around the mall and the capitol seems like an appropriate solution. this would allow the historic areas to retain the gravity they have now, while allowing larger development in other areas of the city. with so much of the city's row houses designated as historic, you'd save large portions of these homes while still allowing for larger development on fallow or underutilized land. the key here is sensible, which sometimes is a foreign term for the dc bureaucracy. and some upgrade in the architectural designs of the new developments (compared to what we're getting now...yeesh) would be nice, and might help dispel dc's image as an unimaginative cultural wasteland (which isn't entirely untrue).
i couldn't finish this without commenting on the quote at the end of the wapo piece.
"Rosslyn has tall buildings and views of the city, but if you change the height limit and someone builds in the air rights above the Watergate then you've blocked that view," said Don Kreuzer, a dentist who has lived in Foggy Bottom for 35 years. "D.C. is beautiful because of the height limits. If you change that you're going to ruin the view."who cares what the view from rosslyn (i.e. virginia) looks like? i'll agree that the height limit does make dc somewhat more pleasing and manageable, but a maximum 12 stories for buildings is just ridiculous (in our nations capital no less!). for the most part, people who live in dc don't have a view of dc, it's only there for the people in the suburbs. i suspect that this guy lives in one of the few high rises in foggy bottom that actually have a view of the lincoln memorial, and he's just phrasing it in a manner that seems less self-interested. furthermore, if you keep the restrictions in place around the mall, the capitol, and the monuments, then this wouldn't even apply.
so i started this more just as an outlet, so if it ends up being a tree in the woods kind of thing, then so be it. but i'd been meaning to start a blog as a place to collect my thoughts, and this is the result. the other day at work i got a snappy idea for a title, and for the URL, like i mentioned, and i then spent 5 minutes on blogger and got it running.
of course, part of it is that humans like to hear ourselves talk (or think), and i guess this is the 21st century equivalent. and obviously we perceive our insights as important. and partly because i've got a lot of random crap on my mind.
so we'll see what comes out of that combustible mix.
smart people of course can deduce quite a bit from the title and URL of this blog (assuming you know a bit about washington, dc) , and may in fact come to some additional conclusions that may in fact not be unwarranted.
the title and URL came about as my lamentations about my neighborhood have grown greater. just something that had been on my mind, and served as a snappy title and whatnot. needless to say though, this will not be some lame neighborhood blog about all the random crap that annoys me, or something that will be full of NIMBY-esque proclamations about what should and shouldn't be going on in columbia heights.
rather, this will just be a lame blog generally (aren't they all these days. especially those that are started in 2007!); general interest i guess would be a category, and by general interest, i mean my interests.
that being said, i do have some forthcoming posts about columbia heights related stuff. so stay tuned.
