The Washington Times today features this quote, from a lawyer with an organization planning to oppose parking enforcement, “The law shouldn’t be applied in a way that unfairly burdens churches…This double-parking law is unconstitutional because it puts an unfair burden on the religious institution.”
It’s often the smallest issues that expose deeper rifts within a city, and the growing imbroglio over illegal church parking threatens to grow into a full-scale exposure of Washington tensions. This, at a time when political transition has reduced the stabilizing forces that have guided D.C. through its recent renaissance. The chief architect of that rebirth, Mayor Anthony Williams, has himself contributed to the difficulties by disregarding ANC discussions and granting a rather confusing edict of executive clemency for church parkers, while some sort of new “compromise” can be worked out.
Parishioners rallied yesterday against neighborhood pressure to enforce the rules, and their remarks escalated the class and race rhetoric that’s been a part of the growing fiasco, but it’s unlikely that irate homeowners will back down now. Yesterday, Lorraine Miller, president of the local NAACP chapter, said, “We want to do something the gentrifiers don’t want us to do: join together.” Meanwhile Todd Lovinger, of the Logan Residents for Equitable Enforcement of Parking Regulation, was calling Mayor Williams’ move a “disgusting cop-out,” noting in press releases that:
…more than 50 legal Sunday-only spaces recently provided along the median of Rhode Island Avenue … a mere two blocks away from these churches … remain completely vacant and unused (i.e., not one car is parked there) [at 11:00 a.m., after church services had begun)]…The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Dee Hunter, a neighboring ANC commissioner, parked his car (DC license plate 338) on a striped, no parking zone (right below a large no-parking sign) at the corner of 12th Street and Vermont Avenue and then placed an “Official Government Business” sign in his window before going to church services!
No one really wants to see an argument take place over whose city this is, who deserves it more, or who has lived here longer or lives here now. No one wants to see this issue in the court system, giving the city another national black eye over a seemingly insignificant disagreement. Above all, no one wants a parking issue to turn into a full-on racial conflict that undermines the city’s progress.
What’s needed for the mess is leadership, but that quality appears to have vanished as elections loom. There are uncomfortable truths on both sides that need to be aired, and no one has the courage to say them. Too often new residents are willing to shove aside old institutions in the name of higher property values. At the same time, those who left the city to fend for itself owe new residents the right to shape their neighborhoods, and those that remain need to be reminded that neighborliness is not a one way street. Above all, this city that has known lawlessness and disenfranchisement all too well needs to show that it can respect the law and the voters, even when it’s uncomfortable or politically inconvenient. Washington’s next mayor ought to be someone with the courage to acknowledge and address these divides. At the moment, none of the candidates appear ready to do so.
Picture taken by truenotes.
