Photo by choofly
There’s a new salvo against the forces of NIMBY that many of the District’s more recent arrivals sometimes find themselves pitted against in their desire for livelier neighborhoods. Reacting to a recent request for a liquor license moratorium that would affect a wide swath of the U Street NW corridor and the vicinity, a Columbia Heights resident is hoping to recruit likeminded residents to the cause of encouraging more development.
Michael Hamilton says he was spurred on by a proposal submitted to the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration last week by two neighborhood groups—the Shaw-Dupont Citizens Alliance and the Residential Action Coalition—for a ban on new liquor licenses within an 1,800-foot radius of the intersection of the U Street landmark Ben’s Chili Bowl.
The affected zone would include parts of three city wards, four police service areas, and four advisory neighborhood commissions, in addition to putting the dampers on a part of D.C. in which a new restaurant or other kind of business seems to open every other day. Sick of seeing such proposals, Hamilton started a website, In My Backyard D.C. to organize against the groups he sees as limiting the growth of his neighborhood and others.
“The NIMBYs come out of the woodwork,” Hamilton, 26, says in an interview. “They can either vote something down or hold something up. My goal is to get a group of those people and be a counterpoint to the NIMBYs.”
Groups like the Shaw-Dupont Citizens Alliance, he says, are reactive to the idea of any new business or residential development and use a “heckler’s veto” to grind things to a halt, whether it’s a new bar, new apartment building, or someone remodeling their home.
“When people want to open a business or remodel a home, there are always people who want to shut things down or kill things that don’t belong to them,” he says. “They’re trying to say, ‘No one can come to this neighborhood anymore.’ That’s not their decision to make.”
But Hamilton, who says he moved to D.C. about two years ago, says this project isn’t just to secure a more ample supply of eateries and nightspots on U Street and in Columbia Heights. He adds that the efforts to throw up roadblocks to residential construction or improvements helps fuel D.C.’s constantly rising housing costs. “If you hold the housing stock constant and a bunch of people want to move to a neighborhood the prices jump,” he says.
He adds on the In My Backyard website:
It’s my opinion that D.C. will be better off with more options for consumers, not fewer. Residents currently face increasingly unaffordable housing, and the only solution to easing this problem is to allow the supply of housing to expand. Allowing developers to build new homes and buildings will lower rents and increase standards of living in the District.
Hamilton says he is not overtly promoting gentrification, though: “I am sympathetic to people who have been in the neighborhood for a very long time and are getting priced out. I wouldn’t say we’re pro-gentrification.”
Hamilton’s position is consistent with other groups that have popped up in the past year or two. Last March, Washington City Paper reported, a group of Glover Park residents banded together in an attempt to overturn that neighborhood’s liquor license moratorium. The restriction remains in effect today, but the YIMBY movement is afoot, and Hamilton sees himself as organizing for the modernization of D.C.’s increasingly popular neighborhoods.
So far, he says about 200 people have signed up on his still very new website, most of whom hail from ZIP code 20009—in which a large portion of the area targeted by the proposed moratorium sits. Soon, he says, he expects to organize his new subscribers into an actual lobbying group that can counter NIMBY-ism.
