DC Blogobrawl

Confirming my oft-repeated gripe that DC is a company town, that no one moves there for the lifestyle but because of work, a fit has erupted in the Washington politico blogosphere, ostensibly about coffee shops, but really about oh so much more. Ezra Klein, a writer for The American Prospect, the wonky liberal periodical, recently noted in his blog that Seattle and Portland seem to have a lot of "awesome coffee shops and bookstores and generally nice features" that DC kinda seems to lack. Expanding on his theme, he wonders why Washington shouldn't have such amenities, considering that it's a city with "lots of young, computer savvy white people . . . but nary a coffee shop to serve them." With tongue slightly in-cheek, he decries the situation as "barbaric."

Speculating on the reason for the city's uncivilized lack of upscale Caucasian salons, Mr. Klein casually notes that although DC "has a lot of white people working in it . . . [it] is actually only 39% white." This is accurate enough. According to the last Census, 58% of the city's population is black, with the difference made up mainly by Asians and Hispanics. Leaving aside his implication that there aren't any dark-skinned latte aficionados, Klein does seem to have stumbled upon a fundamental flaw of the nation's capitol, one that has little to do with race and everything to do with the federal government. "The white people [in DC] basically have to be there. You don't move to DC because it's awesome, you move because it's where your work is. So there's little need to construct an affirmative agenda to attract residents." Anyone with even a glancing familiarity with the city's reputation for monumental blandness will accede the point here. Unfortunately, couched as it was in racial terminology, Mr. Klein's post did not make a very good landing among the city's laptop cognoscenti, and before you could say "filibuster," a cyberiffic firestorm ensued.

Faced with an onslaught of vitriolic posts by, one speculates, computer-savvy white people (with a healthy measure of rhetorically-savvy white guilt), Klein responded the next day with a hangdog retraction. Klein's excuse, more or less, was that he was writing late at night and that his point was "not that 'black people don't like coffee shops,'" but that DC just didn't seem to have many coffee shops "and other fun stuff." At this point it didn't really matter, though; the damage had been done. Eager to feast upon a fellow blogger's exposed entrails, Matthew Yglesias, associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly observed in his blog, that from where he lives on U Street he sees "lots of black people in coffee shops." DCist blogger Ryan Avent wondered, "Is he saying that black people don't like coffee shops and bookstores? What would they prefer?" Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The American Prospect, musing further on the coffee shop theme, asked about "that Starbucks on 13th and U Street--certainly that couldn't be a product of the Starbucks-Johnson Development Corps. effort to put coffeeshops in urban communities normally overlooked by retailers who are afraid to go into minority neighborhoods?"

All-in-all, the whole "blacks don't like coffee shops" O'Reilly-esque slip managed to get a lot of play. Fortunately, it didn't overshadow entirely Klein's more pertinent, if clumsily worded point: that, for a city of its size and stature, Washington displays a downright scandalous lack of urban amenities. After taking issue with Klein's racial insensitivity, Media Consortium blogger Brian Beutler said, "But I cannot possibly fathom why D.C. lacks the number of book stores, record stores, coffee shops, night clubs, 24-hour restaurants, etc., etc. that you'd expect based on it's [sic] relatively large population of wealthy, single young people." Well, well. Responding to this charge, Ryan Avent stuck up for the District and suggested the reason for the city's lack of fun stuff is that it's all "in Arlington (or Silver Spring or Alexandria.)" This has the ring of accuracy, and it's definitely true that the Washington metropolitan area is devilishly sprawling, with the effect that, for many, the District is only a peripheral "center."

But the real, and unmentioned problem is-and always has been-the tragically misguided 1899 height restriction law enacted by Congress. This is the law that arose from an uproar over the "soaring" 13-story height of the Cairo apartment building in Dupont Circle. Eager to squelch such architectural hubris, Congress decided that no building henceforth would be taller than their own, thus enshrining their own hubris forever into Washington's urban character. The fear was that DC would lose its "European" feel, the Parisian model which Thomas Jefferson admired as "low & convenient, and the streets light and airy." Thus the restriction of buildings to a height lower than the Capitol was enacted, ostensibly, for aesthetic reasons. The law was later modified to limit heights to the width of the street a building fronted, plus 20 feet, a devilish equation which damned any building that aspired to size to immediately negate the density which would have been its virtue by surrounding it with a sea of empty asphalt.

DC's height limit is a nefarious law, its implications much further reaching than most people realize. Its most obvious effect over the years has basically been to enforce sprawl. Businesses that might have located in the district are instead in Rosslyn. Residents who might have lived in the city chose Bethesda. More pertinently to Klein's point, office buildings that might have had ground floor retail have none because, with a height limited to about 8-10 stories, and with office space selling for more per square foot than retail, who wants to build a Gap?

There is an almost tragic irony here. The law that was meant to preserve a European character in the nation's capitol has actually resulted in entirely precluding one of the most appealing aspects of European cities: their street life. New York's urban vitality is America's only rival to the street life of European capitols and that city is a model of density. Furthermore, the low-rise charm that Jefferson found admirable in Paris still produced--as so many European cities do--an invigorating urban messiness and energy because it was erected on a narrow, haphazard European street grid. In Washington, as in most American cities, our streets are far too wide for easy pedestrian flaneurism. This is to be expected, of course; they were designed for cars, not people.

Despite Ezra Klein's racial misstep, forcing people to live on top of each other is the issue here, more than race or anything else. Washington forces its residents, and its would-be residents, to sprawl. All of the admirable development in the Penn Quarter, in the up-and-coming baseball district, and in other vital Washington neighborhoods, has been the result of resisting the urge that the 1899 law encodes. As Ryan Avent notes in his blog, "Residential density is growing across the city, and a more diverse retail base will follow." Well, let's hope so.

Of course, density alone can't counteract the dullness of a city where eccentricity is matted down by the caution of the khaki-pants belt-buckle Blackberry-clipped politico standard-bearers--but it'll help. The more people, the more likely there'll be some weirdos in the bunch. Maybe even some black people who like coffee shops.