The High Price of Keeping DC’s Skyline Low 

I'm not sure I agree about the job sprawl being worse than housing sprawl comment. I live in Berlin and office workers are spread quite well around the city. I really like it as it means instead of everyone commuting in one way in the morning and out the other, people are more spread out and just head in any direction. While it's still busier, it avoids the jams and big crowds on public transit/roads/bike lanes. It helps that the transit is also quite decentered and runs all over the city, instead of being a radial design.

it sounds to me like DC just needs a radial connection, something that has been extremely successful in stockholm and helsinki with their light rail lines that do precisely this.

DC is similar to a lot of European cities where the city center isn’t mainly for office zoning, but rather designated districts outside the downtown. I think why DC can’t compare as well is simply the American-style suburbs expected to use transit like a European city.

The stations of the DC Metro are a sight to behold! The flashing lights, the hexagonal floor tiles, the waffles...chef's kiss design. Many Metro stations were designed by Chicago architect Harry Weese, and they not only have aspects of Brutalist design, but also reflect the influence of Washington's neoclassical architecture in their overarching coffered ceiling vaults! Weese worked with lighting designer Bill Lam from Cambridge, MA on the indirect lighting used throughout the system. Weese and his employees visited European cities like Lisbon, Moscow, Milan, Paris, Rome, and Stockholm, hoping to take the best elements of each and combine them into the perfect system for DC. In Lisbon, they noted the design of the ticket booth and the attendant’s uniform, as well as the minimal interruption of the subway stairs on a typical street. In Moscow, they took note of the palatial glories of the underground stations, from cut-glass lanterns to marble paneling. In Milan, they took note of its Modernist design. Weese created a proposal with dozens of views for station interiors with a simple semiellipse, with a flat bottom and curved top. For cut-and-cover stations, the vault was proposed to have straight, vertical walls supporting a curved ceiling. In Weese’s first presentations to the US Commission of Fine Arts during the spring and summer of 1967, he attempted to assimilate his European travels into something Washingtonian, stations are shallow when possible, entered through cuts in the sidewalk, as in Lisbon, with minimal interruptions between street and platform. But the CFA wanted it to feel monumental, no exposed rock walls like Stockholm, and something like the inside of a thermos bottle. So he changed his thought. He felt the necessities of each station would produce the variety, that "You don't try to make them different for different's sake. We think it's very appropriate for Washington. After all". To Weese, the sweeping, swooping, floating lines of Metro's plazas, stations and mezzanines are the system's best feature. Once they were chosen, he said, the long, long escalators and the indirect, somewhat dim lighting in stations fell into step as a result.

It's worth mentioning when talking about DC that DC used to be bigger! Alexandria and Arlington were once part of DC. DC's shape is the way it is because it used to be a full diamond ceded by the states of Maryland and Virginia in accordance with the Residence Act adopted in July 1790. However, the Virginian side returned to Virginia in 1847. This is because of several factors. Alexandria went into economic decline because of neglect by Congress as members from other parts of Virginia fought to prohibit funding for Alexandria projects in favor of projects in their home districts. Legislation required that no Federal buildings be built on the formerly Virginia side of the District (part of the compromise that created the Capitol), so it gained nothing in government workers or buildings. But the main factor was legislation was in the works to outlaw slave trading within DC, and slave auctions were some of Alexandria’s biggest businesses. DC feels European because it was designed by Parisian Pierre Charles L'Enfant, and was based on European models translated to American ideals. The entire city was built around the idea that every citizen was equally important, with a street grid system and wide diagonal avenues named after states radiating from Capitol Hill, then known as Jenkins Hill! These wide boulevards allowed for easy transportation across town and offered views of important buildings and common squares from great distances. The National Mall was designed as open to all corners, which was the complete opposite of the gardens of Versailles in his native France where only royalty and nobility accessed. L'Enfant placed Congress on a high point with a commanding view of the Potomac rather than a leader's palace on a hill like in Europe. A century after L'Enfant conceived an elegant capital, Washington was still far from complete. In 1901, the Senate formed the McMillan Commission, a team of architects and planners who updated the capital based largely on L'Enfant's original framework. They planned an extensive park system, and the Mall was cleared and straightened. Reclaimed land dredged from the river expanded the park to the west and south, making room for the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Some of L'Enfant's plans, including a huge waterfall cascading down Capitol Hill, were still never realized.

Living in DC I already know raising the height limit would be very unlikely. Upzoning is slowly happening, and it's the reason Noma has transformed into a new population and office center but needs to be greatly increased.

Great video! One of the biggest aspects I felt was missing in the video was the political dynamic between DC, MD, and VA. Unlike most major cities, the DC metro area spans MD and VA (two states with representation in Congress -- each with their own tax structures, incentives, etc. for companies) and DC (a "state" with no representation where a congressman from Idaho can meddle with local legislation). For eg, the tech boom in NOVA (Northern Virginia) is primarily driven by low tax rates (compared to DC), subsidies from VA gov, and access to a large talent pool of highly educated workers in the DMV

Actually, all the development in VA is the main catalyst that's turning VA blue. The population in Northern VA is well educated and leans to the left. Seriously though, I had a friend with a condo in Arlington and there was a metro stop literally beneath his building. Even if it is one line (there it was 2), that's still well connected. Also, for anyone who doesn't live in DC, it is one of the most confusing places in the US to drive, and it is very easy to get lost making just one wrong turn. Everything is centered on The Capital bldg so a lot of the streets have the same names with "NE", "SW" after them yet they are on opposite sides of the city

This is a weak thesis. Treating Rossyln-Ballston, Silver Spring and Bethesda like they are some far flung suburbs in simply inaccurate. For the day to day DC resident Rossyln IS part of the urban fabric of the DMV same as DC. Skyscrapers can be a Quality of Life issue there is a reason why Europe has dedicated CBD's outside of their downtowns, like DC. I will take a dense, lively european style city center over a tall, dead, non-dense American city center every day of the week.

Soft disagree on this one. Fundamentally, polycentrism is good for a major urbanized area. It can be argued that Washington’s polycentrism is artificial, that Washington’s primary center is too weak, and that Tyson’s a prime example of the wrong way to do polycentrism. However, these are not good arguments against polycentrism itself. While polycentrism presents challenges for some systems, so too does the hyperconcentration of economic activity in a small area. It is precisely the challenges of a hyperconcentrated central business district that naturally induces polycentrism in the first place.

Completely disagree! The missing middle is more than enough, especially if pursued in areas with very low density like capitol hill. No need for giant skyscrapers as we can attain even higher density than NYC if we model DC after cities like Paris.

I'm mostly on the same page with you about DC (I live in the area & used to commute to downtown for years. My wife still does). You touched on it near the end, but not only are there large swaths of the city that don't even come close to reaching the height limits, there's a TON of potential for infill development. You don't have to get too far north in the city before you see neighborhoods that look like stereotypical, single family home with a lawn, North American suburbs. Not to say it would never be a good idea to remove the height limits, but there's so, so, so much that could be done before you'd have to. Especially considering that you've got Rosslyn, Crystal City, Silver Spring, etc. right next door. I mean, I think it's faster to get from Metro Center to Rosslyn than it is to get to U Street. It takes me an hour to get from my front door to my old job near Chinatown & I'm 20 miles out of town. I know folks who live within the city limits who have similar length commutes, because they're not served by the Metro & have winding, multi-bus trips. For convenience of travel, I'd rather live in Ballston than up by the Arboretum, for example. AND, there's tons of empty office & retail in the core of the city, because of terrible policy from a grossly inept mayor & council, federal meddling, and stupidly high rents. I get a chuckle out of folks blaming recent uptick blips in crime and COVID on the Downtown area emptying out, when the process started almost a decade ago. When I worked on F St, my options for lunch used to get smaller about once a month as places reached the end of their lease, couldn't afford to re-up it, and nothing moved in to replace them. There are storefronts within a couple blocks of Metro Center that have been vacant for a decade. Even the place I worked at, which employed a lot of people, left the area about five years ago, when its lease was up. Much of the building it was in remains empty. There is an absolutely mind-blowing amount of unused space in the core of DC.

I’d have to disagree on some of this. While Tysons is a good example of *bad* job sprawl, Arlington’s job centers are about as close to downtown DC as Cambridge and Boston, or Midtown NYC and Brooklyn or Hoboken are. Arlington has some of the strongest examples of TOD anywhere, and as long as more high rises are constructed there, it’ll absorb up the demand for highway-side business along the Beltway.

DC’s downtown is extremely strong and is one of the largest in the US by employment. The height limit has promoted uniform density and positive changes to the zoning code in the city. If the downtown were any “stronger” the transit system would be over capacity, during peak commuting days the metro was at standing room only in peak directions even with a train every 3 minutes during rush hour. The polycentrism is positive to the region and even the “suburbs” are extremely dense and not all the sprawling American suburbs people are used to. Lumping in Baltimore too you’ll understand why shoulder stations like new Carrollton are seeing tons of development and transit expansion. DC’s downtown can be thought to extend to places like rosslyn as it’s less than 10 minutes by train from metro center.

I feel like the solution is to work on interconnecting the entire area, making it easier to commute between all of dc's centers. Polycentrism is not necesarily a bad thing... if you look at european cities, most have height limits stricter than this, but also have more evenly spread out transit systems and more widespread density, and this is a good model imo

DC resident here - thanks for covering the District. The Height Act is fairly well liked by us in the region. While it may not produce a skyscraper-filled skyline from afar, it preserves the iconic view of the monuments from many different parts of the city. Many people also associate it with a less imposing feeling on the street level from the surrounding buildings, although in my opinion this is already not the case downtown where all the buildings are block wide and 13 stories. Repealing it would potentially open up the construction of more commercial real estate in the downtown core, but a lot of that is already struggling to find tenants. So I’m not sure repealing the Height Act would be nearly as impactful on the health of the city as reducing car access and combating nimbyism. It’s not a priority for me in my advocacy. Love your channel!

I'm not sure DC's maximum skyline height is really to blame, so much as the large expanse of detached houses/low-rise townhouses less than a mile from the core. High rises have a significantly cost per square foot for construction (there is no such thing as an affordable high-rise condo), so if you can zone your city to stay under 20 stories and prevent suburban sprawl within the city-proper, that's ideal. Also, job sprawl is a good thing because it ensures that cities don't devolve into a hierarchical urban configuration, in which poor commuters end up commuting much longer distances than wealthy residents. A polycentric city tends to be a lot more affordable than cities with a single core. It doesn't have to be at odds with walkability (Netherlands is a good example), and allows for arrangements where denser transit oriented forms of development can still be close to nature.

DC is denser than the surrounding area, despite having a height limit. Rather than building high rises in the district I’d rather have Fairfax and Montgomery county build to DCs density.

I'm glad y'all did a video on DC. I think it's one of the best metro areas for TOD. I wanted to also notes that Fairfax county is developing Tysons into a walkable neighborhood with the goal of 100k residents and 200k jobs over the next 30 years. Also, Prince George's county in Maryland (majority black) wants to develop TOD around the blue line.

But there's Arlington, just over the river, basically in the city, way more density in development last 20 years than Tysons Corner. It's a city with so many really charming walkable historic neighborhoods, with fantastic architecture that is rare in North America outside of the north east, Its a great town, DC deserves way more love from you guys (and I'm a New Yorker saying that)

The low skyline really does give DC a bit of a "stately" feeling, which is more than fitting.

This video misses the mark, as Mr Martin’s diatribes often do. It shows you don’t understand Greater Washington. Jobs don’t ist sprawl like peanut butter on bread. They cluster. More importantly, they cluster by industry: astronomers cluster around NASA in Maryland, defense contractors around Chrystal City, Networking jobs along the Dulles Toll Road corridor. Each of these clusters are the size of a Canadian city. My friends working in different industries live near their own clusters. Given that most of them prefer to live in low-density sprawl, it is better to have them sprawl closer to their cluster rather than having to commute all the way downtown. Having these satellite cities consequently lowered the demand and cost for land downtown. Higher average density is better, but high rises become bottlenecks. Outsiders don’t realize much of the District of Columbia is low density with poor transit access. Areas such as the Massachusetts Ave Corridor can be developed with much higher density before DC has the need to reconsider the height limit.

I hope DC never repeals the height act. It’s my most favorite thing about the city that it never became a measuring contest for skyscraper obsessed architects

DC resident here, and at the moment, downtown DC actually has plenty of open office space. Thanks pandemic. The main issue we have is a lack of housing, though that is slowly changing.

As a DC/nova resident who frequently uses public transit here, I think raising the DC skyline is impossible. People are way too attached to it, and to be honest, I am too. I think 80% of the problems mentioned could just be fixed by making TOD less car-friendly. Aka, not the problem with TOD, but with Tysons. There is a HUGE gap in walkability and transit share between somewhere like Tysons and Ballston. The remaining 20% could be solved by building out ring lines.

In many American citys, downtown jobs development is limited because of parking lots talking all the space ....

Philadelphia used to have an unofficial height restriction until it was broken by Liberty Place. I think if the height limit were removed in downtown DC (which it wont) there would immediately be proposals for very tall towers on the the scale of Chicago or NYC. Fun to think about. Philly has its own suburban job centers though, the tallest being Conshohocken, which is accessible by SEPTA's Regional Rail. I'd be interested to see your take on Philly's successes and failures.

DC proper still has a lot of land available for commercial development that is free or not being used to it's max compacity. For instance, office buildings that don't reach the full height limit they are allowed, along with areas being used as parking lots where a building could exist instead.

Another problem with Tysons is the multiple stories of parking at the bottom of high-rises. Looking at you, Capital One (McLean station), and Adaire (Spring Hill)...

I think this entire video would be perfect if the word office was just replaced with residential. Downtown DC has massive office vacancy rates since covid and property values are plummeting, severely affecting tax revenues for the city. It's just not a place where a height limit is what's limiting growth in office space-but absolutely for residential/retail commercial

What's the fascination with creating central congestion? Decentralized Paris is lovely. In centralized cities, the area around central train stations is usually fairly dire. City Nerd just posted a video rating DC as one of the top ten cities that balance affordability with transit and walkability. Maybe its decentralization helps achieve that; certainly didn't prevent that.

Americans can't understand why europeans have circle lines: Berlin (S41/42), Paris (6+2, tram T3a/b and line 15 under construction) and so on. It's fine to put jobs outside of downtown while having REALLY good transit. Look at RER A line, its just 10 mins from the center of Paris by 100 seconds frequent train from the center pf Paris (that goes 100 km/h, I don't know how much is it in miles) anyway, next level of good transit is actually building orbital transit lines

I love this channel, but there are too many problems with this hypothesis. People LOVE the height limit, with the Washington Monument and Capitol being dinstict standouts, just like the Eifffel Tower and Sacre-Coeur in Paris. Despite being the 3rd largest office market in the USA after Manhattan and Chicago's Loop, essentially all buildings and streets and downtown parks have equal exposure to sunlight, which is amazing. The city's scale is also a big part of its tourism draw -- a gigantic economic driver for the city. Finally, as an architect working in DC: DC is not a great place for high design. A LOT of very mediocre office buildings are built downtown, but because they're short, you don't see them until you're directly in front of them. This is a great thing! ALSO: The height limit doesn't reduce residential density. In the 1950s, DC housed nearly 1 million residents. In 2024, we're closer to 650k residents. So, DC can reasonably house up to 50% more people without building towers, as the height limit existed at DC's population peak. (Regarding the Cairo hotel: local lore posits that it was the fact that the Cairo was a hotel for blacks, and whites didn't like the idea of blacks "looking down on them" that further codified the height restrictions.)

The height limit is a red herring, other reforms around land use and regional coordination are much more impactful. The increase in density to many of the DC neighborhoods and better coordination with close-in MD and VA suburbs would do much more to decrease sprawl. The fractured self-interested governments drive so much of the sprawl and this dynamic should be more of a focus rather than the much over-hyped height limit. MD, VA, and DC compete rather than coordinate we are all worse off for it since the competition comes in the form of massive subsidies to billionaires.

Just looking at the footage, I'm not sure height limits are the issue, sooo many single family homes

Setting the bar for a commute to 1 hour is INSANE. That is 2 hours of day spent in transit. A commute should be no more than 15-30 minutes. It should be illegal to expect a worker to commute more than that and not pay them.

We should allow high rise buildings in the Metro Center and Gallery Place districts with up to 20-25 stories.

Paris' skyline doesn't hurt its transit network, and it's even shorter than DC. I say build up the surrounding burbs, and then argue about what buildings can suitably be larger than twelve stories near the hill.

I agree with your comments about making centers more dense. However, I think people are afraid of how a change to D.C.’s density might change its character and livability. I live in Bethesda, 12 miles out, and there’s been significant infill here in the past 40 years. The density is higher but the connections via transit from my house, which’s 5 km away are difficult. This is exactly what ‘Oh, The Urbanity’ is talking about. The most dependable way is by bicycle, but there’s no place to securely lock up. Other methods include the J2 bus, which runs every 10 minutes. However, I need to walk .5 mile (1Km?) to get to it. A closer bus is a 3 minute walk but doesn’t run on weekends. Public transit is not seen as a necessity, and cars on roadways are seen as a necessity. The point is that downtown D.C. should have much taller buildings, which would enable the Metro (subway) to be more viable, and this would allow for more support and better service; in other words, we would have a much better, more reliable network.

As some one who lives car free in dc and has switched to a job in the far off suburbs nearby, I can say that it does kinda suck to be car free and commute out there. Especially with the recent changes to the fairfax connector, it can take 1 hour and 50 minutes to get to my work with transit, and that includes being a block away from my nearest metro station. Many jobs that I looked at were all decently far away from transit and oftentimes I ended up needing to use an infrequent bus to finish the connection. Although not awful, it can be really annoying at times

This is my favorite channel for transit and urbanism. No talking head, no stock footage, memes or distracting appeals. I heard that the soil conditions in DC made tall buildings uneconomic, at least in earlier times.

Every US city has residential and office/commercial development in their suburbs. This is the norm, not the exception. Claiming that height restrictions is causing this in DC is quite a jump - Prove it with statistics. I believe that DC's current office vacancy is about 20%. If so, it would be false to state that height restrictions are preventing enough office space in the city. Furthermore many of the suburbs where office buildings have congregated are well served by public transit and are very walkable. You chose to discuss Tysons, which is the overwhelming exception. Tyson's is notorious for being car centric. (It should be noted that there is an effort to change this over time.). The answer is not to allow tall buildings in DC. The answer is to provide a metro line that rings the city and connects the outer suburban office nodes. This would provide better transit suburb to suburb as well as from the city. OH! that's right, that would be called the Purple Line.

This time I genuinely disagree. Sure it'd be nice to have a denser downtown, but instead DC should invest in a circle line to better connect people around the city. Comparing Sydney and Melbourne, one is a poly-centric city with many major business hubs, and a CBD. Another is a mono-centric city with only the CBD. With Sydney, it can easily facilitate many multidirectional trips and make better use of its infrastructure, as the poly-centric model allows people to "reverse commute". This is not the case with Melbourne; it's either CBD or none, meaning few people have a need to reverse commute and optimise the efficiency of the railway network.

The Height of Buildings Act is solely responsible for the lack or surface parking lots in DC and for the great neighborhoods that surround downtown. Look at every other US city that has skyscrapers surrounded by poverty. DC doesn’t have that.

Thanks for doing DC! I live on Capitol Hill, the walking and biking options taking you throughout the city are really incredible. Two airports on the metro lines. Lots of parks and open space. So much history and beauty. DC is an awesome city for public transit.

I do wish Tyson's Corner was less car-centric. All of Montgomery County in MD is basically endless suburban hell now too; the car-centrism in the surrounding suburbs and exurbs is the main culprit.

I live in a Dutch city about an hour away from The Hague, with around 130,000 inhabitants, growing. The city only has two real skyscrapers and they are outside of the inhabited areas (next to the highway), but the population density in our city center with only (old) 2-5 story buildings is the same as the job density in the city center of Oklahoma City, for example, where multiple ginormous skyscrapers stand. If you build with more density, but less height, your city (often) becomes more livable and less public transit is needed, because a walk of bike ride is more convenient than waiting for a bus or train, on small distances, like going to the supermarket. For longer distances that does not apply, obviously, and it does mean that you have to make it safe to walk or bike around, instead being obliged to take the car.

job density should be spread out in all part of the city, but it's the role of good transit that make it possible to get to destination without driving. we evey thing in centered in down town and suburb is only for houses, so this is exactly what we have now: a car infested city in which everyone drives

I don't think you get DC at all. It's more like Paris. It's downtown is a tourist destination, not a working hub. You could make a case that places like Tyson and Crystal are the "working" destinations. But I agree with getting rid of parking lots. I view those as potential infill.

Interesting video, thank you! I wonder if it would be possible to connect all those suburban office hubs to better public transit so they'd be just as easily accessible as downtown. Keep downtown a "culture and tourist" area, and dedicate other areas to offices or other industry, while making/keeping the whole city transit/bike friendly? Connecting the suburbs with each other seems like a good idea anyway. My (European) city also has a network that mainly connects everything to the centre, so if I want to get anywhere else I often have to go there first and change. Makes sense for some routes, but on others it's a rather annoying detour. And there's certain jobs you probably don't want right in the city centre (heavy industry mainly), but ideally those jobs should still be easily accessible from a wide area.

It's stations like East Falls Church that hurt the system more: major transit hubs that aren't adequately upzoned

I'm not seeing any actual data to back up the possible costs you're describing here. If anything, the great success of DC's urbanism and transit with its height limit is evidence against your ideological opposition to height limits. If you can have a city this great maxing out at 13 stories, maybe we should admit that huge skyscrapers are a product of bad policy, not good urbanism.

I don't like having skyscrapers and government buildings mixing. Skyscrapers and high rises should be built in Arlington and Alexandria.

Before I watched the video, I was thinking that they could probably even keep the height limit if only they changed the zoning in the city (which you brought up). There are areas within the city with huge detached single family homes, which is crazy to me when you have a strict limit on your city boundaries.

Please! Paris, Barcelona, London…. Improve US cities like Houston, Dallas, which leave much to be desired beyond the ubiquitous suburbs.

Important to note is that 13 stories really isn’t that short - realistically the majority of buildings won’t be much higher than that even if it were allowed. That being said, as someone commuting to a suburban office campus, it would be nice if my job moves in the city.

DC is one of the best cities in the country imo. Just make it easier to travel between different areas. The mayor has also gone hard on making it less car friendly. City is changing rapidly and I think it’s on a great path. And love that it feels distinctly different than most other US cities. In terms of downtowns it’s light years ahead of your typical “parking lot city” that plagues the US. Also think it’s worth noting all the government workers in the city and how much of the population they make up and are mostly all working in and around the same area so idk about thr need to prioritize office space so much downtown

This is misleading as many of the buildings in the city don't reach the limit they can. Many places have 2-6 story buildings which can go to 14 or 15 stories if they just tore down the old row houses or random 4 story buildings downtown, along 14th, 16th , H, I & K Streets and many of the major avenues in the city and built new buildings. Many of the buildings also have double height floors in the lobby which skews the floor limit. With regular 8-10 foot ceilings on flat land you could get a 15 story building in many places.

I think we are approaching this in too binary of a fashion. DC can increase its density AND preserve the sight-lines around the monumental core. The law could be changed to allow for progressively taller buildings as one moves away from the Capitol. In effect, that’s already accomplished across the Potomac, in Virginia Arlington and Alexandria. And there is SW and SE DC, unfairly maligned areas close to the central and ready for development.

I think there are a lot of good arguments in this video. However, I also have some different thoughts as well. As someone who was living in Stockholm, I was living in a suburb not far from the downtown area and my job was much further away from the downtown area, but well connected by public transport. My commute between home and my job was quicker than going downtown, and many other colleagues were in the same position. Companies may actually have a benefit when they are closer to employees in the suburbs. They may not attract people from other parts of the metropolitan area, but maybe that's not always needed. It also generates more money for the suburbs, if people hang around there to go for lunch, do shopping, etc. In Stockholm, a lot of people don't often go downtown because there are other hubs in the metropolitan area. Besides that, the office rents and housing prices are much lower in the suburbs.

Judging by comments, the solution isn't to move more jobs downtown and make it denser, but to improve transit to the other areas where jobs cluster. There also seems to be other more significant factors than the height limit for how things develop, especially with how much office space is available downtown as it is. So I'll have to disagree with the video. The so-called price seems absolutely worth it.

Cool to see my neighborhood featured in a video. I'm glad you mentioned the commute into Tysons, because I do it often. It takes me about an hour to Metro but only 25 minutes to drive. On top of that the trip costs me $7 in fare during peak times whereas I avoid the toll on I-66 because I'm going the wron direction. Every signal you recieve in NOVA is telling you to drive unless you happen to live and work on the same metro line. We really need better connectivity through the region between the orang/silver lines and the yellow/blue lines. Bring the purple line to NOVA!

When I lived in DC, I commuted out to Ballston, so this tracks with my anecdotal experience. Fastest way to commute was by bike even though my office was right by the metro station, although I never tried to drive (nowhere to park).

DC is in my Top 3 cities since my visits there. I would go all in on the "aesthetic" of it being a truly walkable American/European city.

I am currently living this exact life. Living in DC but my job is just outside of the beltway. I would love to be able to commute to work via WMATA but my office is not close to a metro stop and Metro+bus would be an hour each way (and $6 one way trip) vs a 20 min dive in the morning and a 35-45 min drive home. I think the big issue is not so much the height limitations themselves but the lack of proper zoning aspect. Places like Ward 3 desperately need to be up-zoned. It should also be noted that with the normalization of WFH much of DC's downtown is still empty while rent and purchasing costs for commercial properties have still remained artificially high due to corporate tax loopholes and policy mismanagement. Right now it is cheaper for many developers to sit on empty buildings and receive tax breaks than to drop prices reducing the value of their property to bring companies in.

Tokyo barely has a skyline same with most Japanese Cities. Mostly mid rise which is pretty good. Tokyo doesn't have a monolithic downtown, It has many many downtowns within the metro area. Marunouchi, Shinjuku, Shinagawa, Ikebukuro, Omiya, Yokohama, Shin-Yokohama, Chiba, and much much more. It can be time consuming but the metro ride is pleasant in Tokyo. So if you live in let's say Tsukuba in Ibaraki, it is easy to get to Akihabara and Marunouchi but harder to get to places like Shinjuku.

As a dmv native, it’s important to know that place (particularly D and V) LOATHES poor people

Id love a video on why do Canadian cities have much more well developed downtowns. Why is it the Calgary has a much more impressive downtown than cities like Denver despite being similar? What policies change how downtowns remain? Ive also noticed in Virginia downtown are covered in parking lots while Pennsylvania downtowns still contain most of its density and old architecture. Just curious about laws and policies that help make better downtowns.

hyper centralization of offices is why average commute times in Tokyo are some of the worst in the world despite being theoretically "mixed use" and having the best transit. Such extreme agglomeration is simply unnecessary, the value generated cannot possibly justify the destruction of people's time. Upzoning DC as a whole may be a good idea, but having some major job centers on the periphery is also a great outcome. Expanding transit by adding more loop lines will improve the availability of workers for the non central job centers

I don't think it is a problem. DC is a very compact city. The metro was built not for commuters, but for tourists, legislators and lobbyists. Building taller buildings will result in a capacity issue on the metro. Remember, the metro was built as a quality way to transverse the city. Not as a major mass transit system. It is all about presentation. So tall buildings are not the right way to go. It is also why they charge zone fees for using this system. Because it is a premium system, not a mass transit system.

Meh… i see a ton of people in EU cities that are far more dense than DC with similar height requirements and restrictions. So thats not an issue. Sprawl is an issue.

Cities need more housing closer to where the jobs are.

I live in Edmonton Alberta. I live on the NW side and work in the west. To take a bus is four transfers and over two hours each direction, that would be 20 hours per week of travel to and from a job, not a career, a job. I cycle year round instead and it takes on average 35-40 minutes depending on conditions. To drive is 20-25 minutes due to construction and being part of traffic. Better for me and Mother 🌎. 🚲

We should block only because I like my current view from the Cairo (/sarcasm)

I thought I read somewhere that ~30% of office space in DC was vacant so I'm not sure how well this argument holds up. Offices are likely not in DC for other reasons/tranist isn't a huge factor in office location calculus.

I like the height restricted feel of DC but wouldn't mind raising the lowest height limits up to 100ft or so. I'm against skyscrapers in the core of DC though.

Tbh I wouldn't hate DC if the whole city would reach that building height. It'd be the American version of Paris (and add much much needed housing A lot of the issues with it would just be fixed with a better transit system (which, unlike pretty much every other city, DC seems to have at least some plans to fix that)

Hey you entered my wheel house. You missed some huge information. Reston and Herndon are building huge around the metro systems. They also just added 7 new miles of 12 foot wide on both sides of the roads. Atleast in Reston it's pretty easy to get around without a car. Between ok buses very good bike path and several metro stops.

What about the concept of a 15-minutes city? If we don't have a more balanced urban area, it's not possible to achieve it

It is 2024, why are we talking about physical office spaces when we can all work remotely?

Locating the airport next to Downtown like in San Diego also induces job sprawl. Though San Diego has very high transit ridership for how weak its downtown is.

Tall buildings are not necessary for good urbanism, just look at Europe. I would argue that DC actually has a more pleasant streetscape because the high limit made surface area a more valuable commodity, meaning buildings fill out the whole city and there is hardly any surface parking

At one point in time I was commuting from the Ballston-Rosslyn area to Tysons and once the novelty of taking the metro wore off, I would generally drive to work. Driving had a couple advantages, but the primary one being that it was faster than the metro, even in heavy traffic. But also, the "TOD" in Tysons is a joke, as shown in the video, it is primarily serving the people who have expensive cars over transit users. I mean look at where the exits of the metro stations take you. The stations take you directly to among other places a strip mall parking lot (I'm not joking), a car dealership, the mall, a sidewalk of a wide arterial street, or fucking nothing within a 5 minute walk.

I live in DC and can confirm that there are endless office vacancies downtown. There is not a shortage causing people to move out to the burbs.

Repeaing the height is unfortunately never going to happen as long as Congress has a veto over what local decision making. We see this constantly with other legislative priorities that get blocked by Republicans in Congress. Just this month they introduced a provision to strip DC's authority to install automated traffic enforcement cameras.

It looks way better without them

A great counter-example to this is Philadelphia, just up the NEC from DC. Until 1984, there was a gentleman's agreement to prevent the construction of any building taller than City Hall at 548 ft (167 m). One Liberty Place broke this agreement, and now the skyline has grown tremendously, with the Comcast Technology Center anchoring the skyline and being the tallest building in the US, outside of Manhattan & Chicago. There is currently a building boom in the greater Center City area, and it is the area of the region that is growing the most, both in terms of residential construction & in office space. DC could really use a similar breaking of the invisible ceiling!

As a counter example: Paris, which is incredibly dense, walkable, and transit friendly even though the height restrictions are even lower in most areas

New York City and Toronto have proper skylines but prices are higher than DC. The problem is not small skyline. The problem is zoning laws in the suburbs. In Europe they build mid-rise multi storey housing in suburbs - in US they love allow single family homes.

The buildings in DC may be short, but there are a lot of really ugly post WW2 buildings!

DC is more like several cities all pushed together. There's the NSA north east of the city, lots of biotech to the north west, various government contractors on the Virginia side, and all the data center operators further west. Each of these job markets tends to consolidate workers living nearby. To improve alternative transit, better long distance cycling infrastructure is needed. They added a cycling lane along I-66 which is a complete joke (good way to lose your hearing while suffering from an asthma attack). More alternatives to the beltway would make a huge improvement. And as others have mentioned, office space is not a problem right now. Lots of it is vacant. They are tearing down office buildings next to Metro stations, replacing them with condos, because the lack of affordable housing is a huge issue.

DC has both a housing shortage and a glut of underutilized office space downtown. The downtown area is relatively populated during the day due to office workers and tourism but most of it shuts down by evening, since nobody lives there. There are local businesses but not of the same density as somewhere like New York, and many of them are sort of "hidden" recessed into the massive block-long office buildings. Personally I don't love downtown DC because it is all gray concrete with none of the artistic pizazz or excitement as, say, Midtown Manhattan with its skyscrapers and numerous delis, bodegas, and restaurants. There are at least trees but they are mostly shrimpy looking gingkos so they don't help much with the 95 degree summer sun glaring down on you (at least in the Penn Quarter). Perhaps comparing any other city to New York is unfair but DC's main problem seems to be the fact that -- like many other American cities -- the residential and office areas are completely separate, meaning that some neighborhoods are dead during the day and others are dead after 6pm, and nowhere except a few locations are lively at all times. This makes it harder for small businesses to thrive and makes downtown less livable. The best solution would probably be converting some of DC's downtown office space into residential, but given the massive size of the office building floor plates and lack of height (where you have too much interior space and not enough street or courtyard-facing space for natural light requirements) reconfiguring the office buildings into housing could be trickier than in other cities. Tearing them down and starting from scratch where you can build structures with more people-friendly footprints would be ideal but this would take a long time and be very expensive. It might be wise for DC to eliminate the height restriction in a few localized areas, such as Metro Center, to allow developers to come in, tear down some of the offices and rebuild taller, thinner apartment buildings, which would free up housing stock in other parts of the city and help revitalize downtown. The only part of downtown DC that really feels "European" is the Federal Triangle which has ornate, Parisian-style government buildings; the rest of downtown was largely built in the 1940s-90s after the original 2-4 story brick rowhouse buildings there were razed to make way for enormous modernist/post-modernist office buildings. These buildings aren't all ugly but the area feels sort of generic, and the lines of sight to the monuments are all obstructed from street level unless you're on a major avenue, which sort of defeats part of the argument around the height limit. The Financial District at the southern tip of Manhattan has a similar issue in that few people are there (relative to other parts of the city) after working hours, but New York has been trying to make the area more residential to compensate, with some success so far.

Ottawa has similar height restrictions regarding building higher than the Parliament buildings. I'm not sure of the exact rules though, since there are several buildings taller now.

The big employer in the DC region is of course the Fed Govt. Their incentives for where people work is very different than what a private firm might want to do. There is this longstanding battle on where to locate new Federal worker office complexes anytime a big move is afoot. Right now the big battle is over where to move the FBI, who has a decrepit downtown 1970s brutalist building right on Pennsylvania Ave. MD and VA have been battling thru their congressmen who gets to get the new building and jobs. Still unresolved I believe. They also keep trying to poach sports teams. The crappy football team moved out of DC in the last 1990s for a MD suburb but the team’s HQ and practice facility is in a VA suburb (Ashburn) that is a long way from DC. All 3 entities have been battling to win the team’s next location. Still unresolved. The owner of the NHL and NBA team recently tried to move the team from downtown to that new infill station in Arlington VA but gave up after huge blowback. So they are staying downtown I. Exchange for the city’s promise to clean up and police the bums who have moved into the downtown area around the arena since Covid, which has wrecked the downtown experience.

As someone who lives in DC, I get why development is good, but I also think it’s important to keep DC’s history and much of the area in and around downtown is historic and personally really nice to look at architecturally.

Plenty of offices are in downtown DC - and plenty more are sitting vacant. This video really misses the reality that so few people are still going in to the office 5 days a week. Also, the transit system reaches all of the major suburbs with office space; it just needs to be improved so that it’s a viable option for people to get there. Why would I take a 70 minute train ride to northern Virginia when I could drive in 25 minutes?

How did you make a whole video about DC height limits without mentioning the can't-be-taller-than-the-Washington-Monument thing? Regardless, that is another great video. Perhaps there is some compromise to be made with the residential/job sprawl problem? TOD needs to have mixed use in mind, and we need to have "Campus" styled mix use so that we can have every neighborhood with the density, green space, and diversity necessary. Targeting renovation a Right-to-City makes good sense when you have TOD as the hub.

I love this channel but I have to agree with the vast majority of comments. This video makes me upset. I’m from the DC area and I think the city would be much, much worse without the height limit. That’s not what’s holding back urbanism in the region - not even close. Part of what makes this city beautiful and unique is its wide boulevards, long sightlines, and constant access to the wide open sky. It’s almost Parisian. The video seems to suggest that DC’s skyline is not iconic. What a joke. If people started building tall skyscrapers in the city, it would look more like other American cities. I seem to recall a certain Canadian urbanism channel remarking in a recent video that the diversity of American cities is what makes the country great. The worst part about this video is that much of the commercial office space downtown is vacant right now, and struggling to maintain tenants as it is. And take a look at the amount of housing constructed in DC over the past decade or two. Off the charts! My final point is that the current popular dense development in DC is a ~10 story apartment building. That’s pretty damn dense already! More of that is needed, not crazy tall buildings that block out the sun.

DC is different from the cities with skyscraping downtowns in that the ONLY mass transportation infrastructure to most points is transit. There are a lot fewer large roads within the city than normal, even for cities where transit is the norm. NY Ave, Connecticut Ave, and Pennsylvania Ave are the only true high-capacity through routes in town. If skyscrapers were permitted, it would be hard to get enough people to them. Crystal City is "easier" because it is ahead of the bridges, but historically it has been pretty much the equivalent of downtown Phoenix... daytime office and nighttime desert. The deliberate scattering of federal offices is also a locally unique feature. Most cities have seen their central business districts decline as jobs inevitably followed housing. DC has been stable because a lot was already located around the Beltway.

DC does have the best subway system in the US outside NYC. NYC's rail transit (and lifestyle in general) is in a league with Tokyo and Seoul