Chevy Chase historic district applicants admit what it’s actually about

In February 2024, I evaluated the recent application for a historic district in Chevy Chase, arguing that it fails to meet national guidelines for historic designation or the precedent of existing historic districts in DC.

In March, Chevy Chase residents Alan and Dana Marzilli made a similar, though far more exhaustive, case against the nomination in a comment they submitted to the Historic Preservation Review Board. Filled with historical research, maps, and architectural renderings, the Marzillis’ testimony goes even deeper than mine on some of the nomination’s ahistorical issues, around boundaries and timelines in particular.

The weakness of the application itself is only half the problem with the nomination to make Chevy Chase a historic district. The applicants who filed the nomination have made it clear that it mostly isn’t about history at all. A historic-district nomination, at this time, is simply their latest entree in a long-running fight to limit new housing in Chevy Chase.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try again

About thirty-five years ago, Chevy Chase resident Mary Rowse began organizing neighbors to start Historic Chevy Chase DC (HCCDC), which had an eye towards filing a historic district application for the neighborhood. The group was founded in 1991, but work on an application didn’t begin in earnest until 2004 after a high-profile fight over a developer’s plan to replace a house in the neighborhood with two new ones; the nomination was filed in 2007. (Rowse herself was involved with compiling information for the application, but ultimately left the HCCDC board before it was filed).

That nomination was ultimately withdrawn because supporters failed to secure enough support from their fellow residents. (In a sign of how much has changed since then, recent applicants who have faced similar opposition from their neighbors have simply ignored it, without consequence.) Much of that source material, however, has been repurposed for this current application, filed not by HCCDC, but by a new organization, Chevy Chase DC Conservancy (CCDCC), with Rowse at its helm.

Notably, however, the current board of HCCDC has come out against this new nomination. In their letter of opposition, the board says, “Nothing has changed about the nature of the neighborhood” since it withdrew its 2007 nomination, and that it supports neighbors organically “further develop[ing] the eclectic styles that have defined Chevy Chase since 1907” without need for “formal government action and oversight.”

The HCCDC board also alleges that CCDC’s nomination is driven by opposition to new development, more so than a legitimate interest in preservation’s merits, noting that “the timing and scope of the Conservancy’s proposal is at odds with the other widely debated and discussed improvements for the neighborhood.” HCCDC’s board is referring to a multi-year-, District-led plan to rezone parts of Chevy Chase to legalize more housing there.

Rezoning parts of Chevy Chase was made possible following council approval of amendments to the District’s Comprehensive Plan in 2021. Those amendments included changes to the Future Land Use Map (FLUM) to allow moderate-density residential zoning on Chevy Chase’s commercial corridor along Connecticut Avenue—a necessary precondition for helping the neighborhood meet the District’s housing goals for the Rock Creek West planning area, of which Chevy Chase is a part. While DC’s population has boomed in the last two decades, neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park have added almost no new housing, let alone affordable housing, forcing other parts of the District to shoulder a disproportionate share of growth. This lack of production has limited not just market-rate homes: income-restricted, subsidized (“affordable”) units are nearly nonexistent in Rock Creek West.

To be fair to CCDCC, exclusion is Chevy Chase’s character: It was founded by Francis Newlands, an avowed white supremacist, and included covenants banning apartments and requirements that houses there, depending on the subdivision, not cost less than $3,000-$5,000 (~$100,000-$175,000 in today’s dollars). Later, properties in Chevy Chase had explicit racial covenants on their deeds, in order to keep non-white residents from moving in, in addition to lower-income people.

Chevy Chase has become one of the wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods in the District. Though explicit racial covenants were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1948, zoning that prevents multifamily housing from being built by-right is a proxy to covenants and minimum purchase prices: It limits anyone who doesn’t make a certain amount of money from living in Chevy Chase.

The recently passed amendments to the Comp Plan barely loosened those restrictions. No FLUM changes were made in low-density residential zones, only on Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues. Even that, of course, was loudly opposed by some residents—including Mary Rowse, who participated in a lawsuit against the District over them. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, and the FLUM changes, which passed with unanimous support from the DC Council, are now the rule, and are being implemented by the Office of Planning (OP), which is proposing some changes to enable slightly more density on commercial corridors in Rock Creek West.

In December 2021, OP published the Rock Creek West Road Map. It outlines how the District will be planning for more housing in Chevy Chase, among other Rock Creek West neighborhoods, based on those amendments to the Comp Plan. The District then spent two years developing the Chevy Chase Small Area Plan, even more specific than the road map, which sought community input to “[lay] out a framework that will guide future growth in the area while remaining sensitive to the existing features that shape the neighborhood’s social and cultural character.” That plan, too, generated strident opposition—including some from Rowse—but was still approved by the council.

Now, in the wake of those losses, Rowse and CCDCC are specifically and explicitly framing CCDCC’s nomination for a Chevy Chase historic district as an attempt to obtain a veto over the typical planning process—one that’s been relatively democratic and transparent, but that has not delivered their preferred outcomes.

As noted on CCDCC’s website:

In an area where commercial building heights have generally been no higher than 25 feet, density increases approved by the DC Council last year for our commercial district permit new Matter-of-Right construction projects to be a minimum of 50 feet and large-scale Planned Unit Developments (PUDs) to be a minimum of 60–65 feet. Penthouses could add additional heights of 12–15 feet to any of these projects. Without a historic district, community residents and the ANC are not permitted any oversight over Matter-of-Right building projects. We are limited to reviewing only PUDs, which are heard before the DC Zoning Commission (ZC) and rarely denied. The ZC has no legal mandate to make new development compatible with adjacent lower density residential areas but a historic district does.

Such language is nothing new from Rowse, who also opposes adding housing at the current site of the Chevy Chase library community center because the site would then be shared “with hundreds of people who will now call it their home.” As an ANC commissioner in the 1980s, Rowse voted in favor of a downzoning of the neighborhood designed to bring the neighborhood into conformity with the aforementioned racially coded apartment ban covenants.

Still, it’s a surprise to see her explicitly state that a historic district will “make new development compatible with adjacent lower density residential areas,” because historic nominations are supposed to be judged solely by the architectural and historic merits of the nominated properties. Of course, when District residents raise equivalent but opposite concerns about the impact a historic district might have on housing production, preservation officials have been quick to dismiss them by citing their field’s popular talking point that zoning is a separate legal process—so there’s nothing to worry about.

But this has always been an insincere deflection. Our historic regulations over height and mass trump zoning rules, a primacy that CCDCC is obviously hoping to trigger with its nomination. CCDCC is far from the first applicant to weaponize historic preservation’s dominance: In recent years, anti-housing activists have repeatedly used historic nominations to try to thwart land-use changes that would increase density in their neighborhoods. But most of those applicants have at least attempted a cover story about being motivated by history. CCDCC’s willingness to give away the game on its own website may represent the final, shameless discarding of that fig leaf, though news this morning that HPO “is not prepared to recommend that the current proposal for a Chevy Chase Historic District be considered by the HPRB at this time” suggests they at least are not going to rubber stamp such an attempt this time.