DC’s Office of ANCs says:
An ANC (Advisory Neighborhood Commission) is a non-partisan, neighborhood body each made up of locally elected representatives called Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners. They are a unique feature of the District’s Home Rule Charter…. The ANCs’ main job is to be their neighborhood’s official voice in advising the District government (and Federal agencies) on matters that affect their neighborhoods.
Each Ward of DC is divided into several ANCs. ANC 1B, at the southern end of Ward 1, covers the neighborhoods of LeDroit Park, Cardozo, U Street, southern Columbia Heights, and northern Shaw. Like many Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, ANC 1B has its own website, anc1b.org, where you can read more about the Commission.
The members of each Advisory Neighborhood Commission are elected from single-member districts, much like Congress’s Representatives. The districts within each ANC are known as….single-member districts, or SMDs for short. ANCs can have a wide range of SMDs, from as few as two to as many as ten. You can locate your SMD with DC’s Locate Your ANC tool or using the independent, but immensely useful, OpenANC.
The district I’m running in is 1B03, which covers an irregular swath of the hillside surrounding Cardozo Education Campus, in roughly three boxes: in the west, a trapezoid bounded by Florida Avenue NW, 14th Street NW, and Clifton Street NW; in the center, between 13th and 12th Streets NW, a rectangle bounded by W Street NW and Clifton Street NW; and in the east, a slightly larger rectangle stretching from W Street NW to Euclid Street NW between 12th Street NW and Sherman Avenue NW.
I became a transportation planner in order to serve communities by expanding safe places to walk, roll, bike, scoot, and ride transit. I’m running for Advisory Neighborhood Commission 1B because I want to do more to make my neighborhood specifically, and DC broadly, a better, more livable place, a place where all manner of people can live, work, shop, and play, and where they can do so without needing to own a car.
In 2023, my partner and I joined Greater Greater Washington’s contingent in the DC Pride march, and unexpectedly ended up getting to carry the banner. Together with the Washington Area Bicyclist Association’s banner-carrier, one of the chants we led people on was “More bikes, more homes, more transit, for all!”
It also happens to be a pretty good summation of my priorities: Collaborating for safer streets, abundant housing, and better public transportation, all of which should be for everyone. I also have worked and will continue to work for better, more responsive government services.
Collaborating
ANCs have a reputation of being toxic places full of toxic people. We need fewer egos and more community-minded commissioners working together, with their fellow commissioners, with their neighborhood’s Council representatives and other wings of District government, and with ANCs across the District, to move our community forward.
I already work across the District as the Ward 1 Representative on DC’s Pedestrian Advisory Council, and I look forward to working with ANC1B to do more, in more ways, for more of our neighborhood and the city as a whole.
Safer Streets
Our neighborhood has one of the highest shares in the city of residents who ride or walk to work, and even more people visit friends, museums, shops, and restaurants on foot or a bike. We both need to do more to protect those who ride and walk already, all well as those who are interested in starting but concerned for their safety.
We need more and better—more protected and more connected—bikeways. Ninth Street is great, but it just peters out when you get to Sherman Avenue. We need to make sure the Eleventh Street bikeway is built all the way through to Monroe Street, and we need more and better east-west connections that are harder to block with cars and delivery trucks. (We also need better short-term parking and loading space in our neighborhoods so that delivery trucks have more appropriate places to stop…)
We need sidewalks that are well-maintained, where the street trees that keep us shaded from increasingly-brutal summer sun have enough room to grow and not cause tripping hazards—and when DDOT or property owners need to do work on or across the sidewalk, we need them to provide safe, accessible, alternatives.
We need more and better streetlights, that not only illuminate the roadway for drivers but make sure people using the sidewalks can see where they’re going as well. And, again, we need to invest in maintenance to make sure they keep doing so—we should not need to depend on nearby stadium lights to use the sidewalk.
Abundant Housing
DC has been known for its difficult-to-find and horrendously expensive housing for decades. The best way to alleviate these problems is to build more housing.
In 2020 and 2021, I submitted testimony to DC Council supporting the revision of the Future Land Use Map to enable greater density — “as much…as can feasibly be added” — at public sites including the Reeves Center at 14th & U and the Police and Fire stations at 17th & U, and throughout Ward 1.
For a variety of reasons, we need most of the people moving here to live as close as manageable to work, their groceries and shopping areas, and so forth. Among other things, we are in a climate emergency, the world is burning, and we cannot keep driving hour after hour, day after day to work and school and errands and home again.
People are going to keep wanting to move to DC, and especially the inner parts of the District — after all, the same things that make our neighborhood attractive to those who live here now make it attractive to those who are looking for a new place to live. Even if we don’t build more housing, people will continue moving into the District, and into our neighborhood. But unless we build more housing, the price of what housing we do have will continue to rise and push out lower-income individuals.
Better Public Transportation
Over a third of DC residents—and closer to half of 1B residents—do not own a car. We need buses that take them where they need and want to go, when they want to go there. Our existing bus system, like many across the country, was largely inherited from the streetcar system that preceded it, and has been only lightly altered since. WMATA’s Better Bus Network plans are an important step in the right direction, and I look forward to helping the agency refine its plans, including helping communicate them to our neighbors.
We also need to restore or replace the Circulator, DC’s local supplement to WMATA’s regional service which the Mayor defunded in the 2025 budget. Especially as traffic issues on and around U Street have become so significant that DPW routinely closes off roads like 9th Street on weekend nights, we should be expanding transit access, such as with the long-fought-for extension of the Rosslyn-Dupont Circulator to U Street and Howard University.
Better Services
DC’s 9-1-1 center is melting down, and the 3-1-1 side of the house is also in trouble, routinely mis-assigning service requests and unable to revise them, or re-open those that have been closed inappropriately.
Our street-corner and bus-stop public trash cans are overflowing, but DC’s Department of Public Works has removed some and refused to place others because of “abuse” — people putting household trash in the public cans. Rather than try to determine why people do this (are they being charged for using the dumpster? is it just too inconvenient?), let alone try to solve the issue or provide more cans so there is room for that trash, the Department imposes a collective punishment on entire neighborhoods that leads only to more litter and more rats.
These are just a couple of the government-services issues we face as residents. As neighboring Commissioner Josh Jacobson says, “It shouldn’t take years to fix broken sidewalks nor should the city be removing public trash cans in areas that need them.”
These aren’t just 1B issues, these are systemic problems across District government, and residents here and across the city deserve a Commissioner who will work alongside fellow ANCs trying to solve them. I look forward both to helping 1B03 residents navigate them and to working with fellow Commissioners in 1B, throughout Ward 1, and across the District to fix them.