by Drury Tallant
In the circles I travel as an Environmental Planner, I hear a lot about sustainable development. Seems I'm always going to a forum or workshop on smart design, green buildings, low-impact development, smart growth, and so on.
Whenever I get a chance to introduce myself to the audience, I relish talking about my hometown, Capitol Hill. My neighborhood, I tell them, is racially and economically mixed and has an architecturally rich assortment of buildings--from shotgun houses a few rooms deep to the wedding cake domed Capitol of the United States. Our shops and services are integrated into the community, and we have some great focal points like Eastern Market and Union Station. It's also well served by transit, and close to jobs and schools, theater and dining. In fact, I bike or take Metro nearly every place I go.
Then I tell them about my corner row house, and the yard that I've landscaped with iris, phlox, foamflower, goldenrod, aster, violets and ferns, all flowers and plants that are native to the area. Out front, I say, there are neatly bricked sidewalks, and fine old trees, natives too, that spread a broad leafy canopy in the summertime, naturally cooling the air and filtering pollution. Know it or not, these are all aspects of sustainability: spaces that maximize the ability of water to penetrate the soil either through yards that minimize lawn with plants, or sidewalks of bricks and sand; walkable, bikable neighborhoods with enough people living closely enough to support the services.
Capitol Hill already meets many of the benchmarks for sustainable development, no matter whose standards you use. The Hill is testament to the fact that we once did far better at building neighborhoods than we do today. And in the face of issues such as the polluted Chesapeake Bay, failure to meet air quality standards, and perhaps the worst traffic congestion in the nation, we need to build on the wisdom of our forbears.
The Hill is now in demand. We might use that position to carry on the sustainability traditions of our predecessors with some demands of our own. With each application that comes before our ANCs and neighborhood associations, we could ask what each proposed development will do to restore the Bay, improve air quality, and reduce gridlock--or at least make them no worse.
Taking Charge
Quite a number of neighbors, many of them "smart growth" professionals, are leading the way.Katrin Scholz-Barth, an engineer with Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, is developing a regional reputation for her advocacy of green roofs. "A roof doesn't have to create runoff," she says. "Most of Germany, where I'm from, taxes storm water runoff. So most new buildings have green roofs."
"So what's a green roof," you may ask, "a roof deck with a hot tub surrounded by potted palms?"
Actually, that would go some way towards capturing the water that runs off our roofs when it rains. But the most effective are roof meadows composed of low maintenance hardy plants in a lightweight medium that substitutes for soil. They're better at capturing rain and moderating temperatures. The only feet they're meant to support are those of birds. You can see one at the Earth Conservation Corps' Matthew Henson Earth Conservation Center at 2000 Half St, SW.
Another neighbor, Doug Siglin, has taken up the banner of bio-retention areas for storm water, also known as rain gardens. "We could be using our tree boxes and our planting strips, even our lawns and parks for rain gardens," says Doug, whose consulting business, Capitol Hill Partners, has a contract to do a demonstration rain garden at the1st District police substation at 5th and E, SE. Doug plans to show that storm water doesn't have to go straight into our sewers, taking pollutants with it. Instead, this water can be filtered through the ground first and released more slowly.
Yet another neighbor, architect Jim Schulman, through his non-profit Sustainable Community Initiatives, promotes economic development through teaching nearby residents to recycle buildings. Items as diverse as window frames and doorknobs can be recycled in deconstruction projects. When buildings on the Hill are to come down, they could be deconstructed and recycled.
SCI's broader mission is to develop collaborative community projects and public education programs that promote community sustainability in the Mid-Atlantic. Some of SCI's graduates in the Ivy City and Trinidad (ICT) neighborhoods formed the ICT Dream Team/Deconstruction Co-op. Jim and ICT have helped to popularize the term "deconstruction" throughout the city.
Fellow architect and neighbor, David Bell, of BellArc Architects, has been attempting to integrate his passion for historic preservation with his recognition that even our old buildings could be made far more energy and resource efficient as they are remodeled. David feels that saving energy saves everything: "Energy-efficient buildings reduce the need for coal-fired generating plants, a heavy contributor to air pollution, as well as the chief source of acid rain," he says. "Besides, they're far more pleasant for people to inhabit, reducing absenteeism and increasing productivity."
Neighbors on both sides of H Street are working with BP Amoco Corporation, owners of most of the square in the 300 block of H Street, NE, to get them to build something far more urban in character than the mega gas station they're proposing. The most outspoken are insisting that the developer give us more density, not less, and development that enhances the walkable neighborhood that we cherish.
Neighbors are also taking on some of the larger projects the city is proposing, like the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative and the Kingman and Heritage Islands. Instead of a highly polluting golf course on Kingman Island, they're suggesting trails through a restored forest. Similar suggestions are being made about the National Capital Planning Commission's "Memorials and Museums Master Plan," which has designated nearly two dozen sites around Capitol Hill as locations for future monuments. Since every bit of conventional pavement or rooftop we add is ruinous to the environment, while every tree we plant helps to clean up the Bay and bring back wildlife, "living memorials" are being advocated.
I recently testified to the National Capital Planning Commission on behalf of the Anacostia Garden Club that we should have only "living memorials" along the Anacostia--groves of native shade trees and shrubs that will make a positive contribution to the Chesapeake Bay.
Door to Door, Street to Street
While our neighborhood does not contribute greatly to the traffic congestion of the region, we are unduly the recipients of the air pollution, speeding, and parking issues caused by automobile commuters.Increasingly, applicants that come before our ANC commissioners are facing opposition to in-fill projects that bring more neighbors into our area. Sometimes these proposals meet with objections from neighbors who want more and better shops and restaurants, but do not want more people, though density is what businesses need to thrive. One of the major issues raised is parking--yet many newcomers might prefer walking or biking to work, or taking advantage of one of the four Metrorail lines that run through our area.
Dan Tangherlini, a Hill neighbor who happens to be DC's Acting Director of Transportation, was the guest speaker at a recent Stanton Park Neighborhood Association meeting. The audience peppered him with questions about alternatives to the automobile: What are you doing to make the city more friendly to bicycle riders? Will we be seeing more bicycle lanes going to places we need to go? How about a trolley going up Pennsylvania Avenue and maybe H Street?" Dan listened with enthusiasm, and even enlarged upon the trolley idea, envisioning it running from Barney Circle to Union Station. Washington, DC, he said, has the second highest per capita transit ridership in the nation, with more than 50% of our residents reporting that they use transit for getting to work daily. We're beaten only by New York. That number could be improved if we made more demands on developers to provide convenient, safe bicycle parking in multifamily buildings and bicycle parking and showers in office buildings. Metro could help by providing more and safer bicycle parking at subway stations, better bicycle hours on Metrorail, and bicycle racks on all of our buses.
Traffic and parking are real problems on the Hill. But here's a heretical thought: perhaps we should think of getting rid of some of our cars. Maybe we could recruit a car rental-by-the-hour company, or start a car-sharing program. One neighbor noticed that the 35 or so cars on her block are hardly driven. She figures they could be replaced with ten: maybe a nice little convertible for a drive in the country, a pick-up for firewood and trips to the dump, a mini-van to cart a pile of kids to the bowling alley, something formal, like a Mercedes for major occasions, a heap for teens learning to drive, and a small fleet of VW's for marketing.
Our forebuilders gave us the gift of a beautifully sustainable community, now it's up to us to come up with some solutions to traffic and parking problems, regional water quality, biological diversity, air pollution and congestion problems. What better place to test the leading edge in sustainable development.
Drury Tallant is an architect. He received a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of New Orleans, and Doctorate in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. He is currently Co-Chair of the Stanton Park Neighborhood Association..
