D.C. Preservation Board Includes Parking Lot in Historic Designation

The inclusion of a parking lot in a historic landmark designation by the District of Columbia’s Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) is raising eyebrows, writes Nick Sementelli in Greater Greater Washington, causing concern among housing advocates who say the decision will limit any future development on the lot.

The historic building at the heart of the matter is the Chevy Chase Savings Bank on Connecticut Avenue. “The landmarking of the building follows HPRB’s established norms, but the inclusion of a parking lot adjacent to the site seems to violate the board’s own precedent and national historic guidance.”

Although “Using the historic nomination process like this to control future land use is supposed to be impermissible,” the HPRB acted on the claim from Historic Chevy Chase and the DC Preservation League (DCPL) that preserving the lot is important “to prevent too tall a building from being built on the lot in the future” and “ruin” the bank building’s ambiance.

According to DCPL Executive Director Rebecca Miller, “the bank and the parking lot share a single tax lot, and that DCPL uses tax-lot boundaries when drafting nominations.” The preservation groups say they are “not trying to prevent all development on the parking lot,” but having to go through historic design review in the future will likely ensure that any future building will be limited in size.

For Sementelli, “Preemptively limiting the scale of infill development on a parking lot by surreptitiously sliding it into a landmark application for a specific building” looks suspiciously like exclusionary zoning that “is supposed to be legally out of bounds.”