Advisory neighborhood commissioners in Chevy Chase eked out an approval Monday night of a resolution affirming the body’s support for some kind of redevelopment of the neighborhood’s library and community center. 

But much like the raucous discussion surrounding the Bowser administration’s plans to upgrade the public facilities – and more than likely turn the site into a mixed-use space with new housing – the resolution was scattered. It endorses some housing on the site, which is bound by Connecticut Avenue and McKinley and Northampton Streets, but also urges the city to cap building height at 60 feet, limiting how many apartments could fit. Add-ons run the gamut, from concerns over underground parking to green space and specifications over identifying which kinds of residents should be served by new housing. 

Even that passed 4-2. 

“It’s like a Christmas tree. Everyone has an ornament to add at the last minute,” commissioner Zachary Ferguson said during Monday’s meeting of the resolution, which he voted against. 

The vote capped months of often contentious community outreach about the project, which included a wide-ranging survey of residents’ attitudes toward the community center, as well as meetings between residents and officials from the Office of Planning and Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

Like many redevelopment projects of its scope, and particularly those that include the addition of housing renting at below market rate, it has become a lightning rod for debate: Debate about who the neighborhood is for, what commitments the ANC should require from the D.C. government, where new growth should go, and why it’s necessary at all. 

The D.C. government hasn’t yet issued a request for proposals from developers, which means there aren’t blueprints or specific proposals available to consider. But that hasn’t stopped debate from fomenting. Residents have argued about whether the site should have housing at all, and if so, how much of it should be affordable. They have argued about whether the city should upzone to accommodate more development. Some critics of the plan say it should have only a moderate amount of housing to preserve the character of the neighborhood; others believe the redevelopment isn’t worth it at all if developers don’t maximize available space. Others reject what they call the privatization of public land and fear the reduction of green space. 

“Change is coming to upper Northwest, and I think it’s incumbent on us to seize this moment… And we’re either going to be part of this discussion or we’re not,” says Elizabeth Vaden, from the Washington Interfaith Network’s affordable housing working group. Along with the Coalition for Smarter Growth and Ward3Vision, WIN is advocating for at least 100 new units of housing at the civic core site, with rents affordable for those making between 30 and 80% of the area’s median family income. “We don’t have the luxury of sitting this out,” Vaden says. 

The Chevy Chase civic core redevelopment comes on the heels of the neighborhood’s Small Area Plan, which the D.C. Council greenlit in July 2022 and outlines potential sites for development in the area. Of particular interest in the plan is added housing and neighborhood revitalization opportunities along the stretch of Connecticut Avenue south of Chevy Chase Circle, which could occur over the next 10-15 years. 

Another impetus for this redevelopment comes from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s goal to build 36,000 new units of housing by 2025, with those units more or less spread equally across the city’s eight wards. That goal preceded studies indicating that childhood hunger, housing insecurity, and rental costs have all spiked since the pandemic broke out in 2020, and its urgency has only become more acute. 

In Rock Creek West, Chevy Chase’s jurisdiction, the Bowser administration aims to build 1,990 of those units. Yet since 2019, that planning area has only seen 93 new affordable housing units – less than 5% of the administration’s target. Compare that with the Far Southeast and Southwest planning area, which more or less encompasses Ward 8, and has produced 2,090 new affordable units – close to double the mayor’s goal for that particular area.

Those data are a sticking point for the lawmakers and residents who argue that more affluent areas like Ward 3 – where 77% of residents are white, and 69% of that population own their homes – are obligated to help facilitate, if not expedite, the development of affordable housing. 

“I want every site [for affordable housing] that we could potentially get. The other sites are private sites. And whether people choose to develop those sites is entirely up to the owner. And we don’t have any control over that. But this one, the city does have a good deal of control over,” says Lisa Gore, chair of ANC 3/4G. 

Gore notes, too, the importance of righting the neighborhood’s history of exclusion and racism against Black residents. She points to the community of Black homeowners along Broad Branch Road that was evicted in 1928 to make way for Lafayette Elementary School – a school for white children. “We do have that legacy as part of our community. So it makes it even more important that we open ourselves up [to affordable housing],” Gore says. Only 6% of the Chevy Chase population is Black, and 81% of the area’s Black residents rent instead of own their homes.

Yet some residents who resist the Chevy Chase civic core redevelopment have argued in their neighborhood listserv and at ANC meetings that it is Ward 3 being unfairly targeted: that by ceding control over public land to a developer, the neighborhood will lose valuable public green space that doesn’t meaningfully exist elsewhere. During one meeting in December, some attendees asserted, incorrectly, that Ward 3 has the least available public green space in the city. (Wards 7 and 8 take that distinction by a mile.) 

“The only way to affordably build affordable housing is to use land that does not have to be purchased, because we all know we live in a neighborhood where land is dear,” one neighbor in favor of the development testified at a Dec. 6 meeting, responding to concerns about green space. 

A survey commissioned this year by the ANC asked residents what they thought of plans to redevelop the site, and more than 2,600 people responded. About 40% of respondents said they support the addition of affordable housing to the site, while 47% said they only want D.C. to renovate the existing facilities, without adding any housing. Nine percent of respondents don’t support any kind of redevelopment at all. 

“Significant majorities, by wide margins, are opposed to what the city is proposing to do,” says Bruce Sherman, a commissioner who believes the ANC acted against its mandate when it endorsed housing at the civic core site. “We are to represent our neighbors. We’re not to impose our judgment on our neighbors. We are to do all we can to educate them and inform them about the issue, which we have all done for the entire year. And once our neighbors speak, we have to heed what they have to say,” Sherman says.

Responding to the notion that commissioners have a responsibility to consider the merits of the plan aside from how their constituents feel, Sherman says, “That’s [Ward 3 Councilmember] Matt Frumin’s call. That’s [Ward 4 Councilmember] Janeese Lewis George’s call. That’s not the ANC’s call.” 

“Those decision makers who are elected on political party platforms are the ones that are responsible to say, ‘We think, despite what the public believes, that this is in the best interest of the city.’ [It’s a] fundamental distinction, right? ANCs are meant to be as close to participatory democracy as you can get,” Sherman says.

Sherman introduced a resolution on Monday calling for a pause on the project until residents had more time to form a consensus about the project. He was the only commissioner who voted in favor of it.

For the people who don’t want housing on the site at all, the ANC’s decision to pass a resolution supporting it was a betrayal.

“We suffer in [D.C.] from lack of voting representation in the national legislature that sits in our downtown,” says Andrea Rosen, a resident of Chevy Chase’s Barnaby Woods subdivision in Ward 4 who is opposed to building housing at the civic core site. “What does it say about an ANC that designs its own survey and then ignores the results of it? Does doing so make the community irrelevant, or the commission irrelevant?”

Even the survey data wasn’t safe from the ideological tug-of-war that has permeated much of the discussion over redevelopment. In a more than two-hour ANC meeting in early December, commissioners were gathered to vote on whether, and how, to convey the results of this survey to city planning and development officials. Like each step of the process, it wasn’t without discontent: commissioners and neighbors debated whether the data accurately reflects neighborhood sentiment. (The overwhelming majority of respondents – nearly 79% – live in detached single family homes, while 90% say they own their homes.) They debated how much to characterize the results of the survey rather than letting the statistics speak for themselves. 

At public meetings, Gore parried with residents who accused the commission of acting anti-democratically, and against the spirit of the ANC’s charter, by throwing its support behind housing at the site. Gore, who is running for a seat as Ward 4 councilmember, endured more personal jabs, too, from people who accused commissioners of showboating because of aspirations for a higher office. 

Gore calls it “dangerous” to argue that a single point-in-time survey should dictate a legislative body’s action toward any particular policy item. “At no time did we ever say we were going to use the survey as a deciding barometer on what we were going to do with the project,” she says. For her part, Gore believes that if the ANC had treated the survey from the outset as a primary metric in dictating the ANC’s response to the civic core redevelopment, more people might have been motivated to respond, broadening the feedback. 

And for all the neighborhood’s conflict on the merits of redeveloping the site, most seem to agree that the tenor of public engagement has tipped into dangerous territory. 

“I haven’t seen the community, ever, on an issue this divisive, react with the level of divisiveness and anger that we saw,” Gore says, and calls the criticism that the ANC doesn’t take their role as representatives seriously enough “extremely troubling, I think, for a lot of the commissioners. There’s been a lot of back and forth between us personally. And commissioners are, you know, they’re upset by that [accusation].”

Vaden, from WIN, says she’s “never seen anything like this,” at ANC meetings, which have more often than not seen audience members shouting down those testifying and interrupting commissioners as they vote. Vaden, who lives in Ward 3, was recently redistricted from her former commission to ANC 3/4G. “It’s a completely different ballgame over there,” she says of her former ANC. 

WIN members, who have knocked on more than 640 doors this summer as part of a public engagement campaign on the redevelopment, has taken its fare share of flack, too, from people at community meetings who accuse the group of being paid off by developers to promote housing at the site. 

Sherman calls the heat of recent public meetings on the subject “just the tip of the iceberg of people in the community who think, ‘This ANC is not listening. This ANC doesn’t care.’”

“The small area plan is going to have… affordable housing galore on Connecticut Avenue in the four blocks [between] Livingston St. and the Chevy Chase Circle. The issue is just about the community center/ library, and because they don’t feel heard on this, there are deepening divisions in the community,” Sherman says. “It’s a much longer term problem.”

The ANC has wrapped up its business for the calendar year and, like residents, is anticipating the release of D.C.’s request for proposals from developers. Until then, onlookers are left to wait it out — and then, in all likelihood, debate the project some more.