No one wants to build in DC

Monday, June 8

Good morning! Have we got news for you: D.C.’s double-barreled housing disaster… A poll puts JLG in the lead with a week to go… Do any actual stars want to come to Donald Trump’s UFC fight? This is Michael Schaffer, your fun-loving City Cast executive editor. Let’s get into it.

On today’s pod: I huddle with Richard Hahn, one of the authors of a new Niskanen Center study on crime rates in D.C. The think tank report has gotten a lot of attention because it concludes that last year’s National Guard deployment shrank property crime but didn’t affect violence. In fact, there’s a lot more to it than that, and Richard got into the nuances. Listen here.

In today’s roundup: Brendan Banfield, David Gadis, the Prime Rib, affordable housing, Ultimate Fighting, Charles Allen, Chuck Redd, the Mubadala D.C. Open, Jeff Krulik, Judas Priest, Adam Sandler, Dwayne Johnson, Jean Beaudrillard, and more.

First Up

A jarring new report in Greater Greater Washington makes it seem like D.C. will be lucky to build any new housing, much less the 72,000 units promised by Janeese Lewis George or the 12,000 promised by Kenyan McDuffie. That’s a pretty shocking analysis in a city where just about everyone agrees we need to build more housing unless we want to turn it into a place where you need a trust fund to raise a family.

What’s going on? Developer Patrick McAnaney says “investors are fleeing the city, and housing construction has ground to a halt.” It’s a reality that’s not really reflected in most of the mayoral debates so far.

According to McAnaney, D.C actually has two crises. The first: Market-rate housing — that is, ordinary, non-subsized apartments — isn’t being built because of the economy. Donald Trump’s federal workforce cuts landed just as lots of new rentals were coming online, causing a “deflationary spiral.” In other words, not an environment where a lot of builders think they can make money.

The second crisis: No one wants to build “affordable” housing either. “A surge of unpaid rents [is] putting many properties on the brink of foreclosure,” McAnaney says, tracing the phenomenon to covid-era tenant protections. Six years on, D.C.’s rent-payment stats in buildings covered by federal low-income housing credits are the nation’s worst. The average operator is underwater. Once again, that’s not exactly an enticing environment for builders.

McAnaney avoids mayoral politics, where McDuffie supporters have beaten up on Lewis George for making it harder to evict non-payers. But one of McAnaney’s arguments stands out as something it’d be nice to hear the candidates make speeches about: “What will matter most to restoring investor confidence is increasing housing demand,” he writes. “To do that, District leaders will need to retain and attract residents.” In other words, make it a nice place to live — and an easy place to find a job.

What D.C.'s Talking About

JLG in the Lead. A Washington Post poll found Janeese Lewis George has an 11-point lead over Kenyan McDuffie among likely voters just over a week before the D.C. mayoral election. McDuffie’s supporters drew solace from the fact that the Post’s sample skewed unusually young. Lewis George’s supporters focused on the fact that their candidate is ahead by double digits.

Tennis Name. The D.C. Open tennis tournament now has an exclusive name sponsor: Mubadala, the UAE’s state investment fund. Along with Qatar’s stake in the Wizards and Capitals, it’s an example of authoritarian governments buying into D.C. sports. Critics call it “sportswashing.” But Washington could benefits from the trend since we’re home base for most folks that iffy foreign regimes want to influence.

Trump’s Star Deficit. This weekend’s White House UFC fight will draw MAGA world’s stars. But it’s having a hard time attracting actual stars, says Vanity Fair columnist Aidan McLaughlin. He reports that fight sponsors invited seven big names: Adam Sandler, Guy Ritchie, Tom Brady, Jared Leto, Jason Statham, Dwayne Johnson, and Mario Lopez. But “of that group, few, if any, will actually be there,” which McLaughlin says speaks to “a growing trend in Trump’s second term” where stars shun Trump D.C.’s “tawdriness, hyperpartisanship, and self-obsession.” (The UFC bout is also the subject of a lawsuit filed Saturday by a Virginia good-government nonprofit that wants a judge to stop it because it was a “corrupt” use of public land.)

Parsing the Arch. If you like catty highbrow criticism, you’ll love Naomi Leigh’s pan of the Arc de Trump in The Architect’s Newspaper. “The ornaments are almost cartoonishly large, dwarfing the arch’s piers, and painfully literal,” she writes. “It is, in effect, classical architecture translated into the idiom of contemporary political messaging.” Bonus points for name-checking the postmodernist French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard.

“Au Pair Affair” Case Ends. City Cast’s Emma Uber covered the sentencing of Brendan Banfield, the Fairfax dad who conspired with his twentysomething mistress/au pair to kill his wife, Christine. The whole thing seems destined for a DMV made-for-Netflix-movie: Setting up a fake account in his wife’s name on a rough-sex fetish site, Banfield lured an unsuspecting man to a supposedly consensual encounter — with the goal of making it look like an intruder killed Christine and then died when Banfield rushed to her rescue. The au pair copped a plea but was sentenced to 10 years in prison; Banfield got life without parole.

Finally: 40 Years And Still Head Banging. The 1986 film Heavy Metal Parking Lot, shot in a single day outside a Judas Priest concert at the now-demolished Capital Centre, may be one of the DMV’s greatest contributions to American popular culture, an early example of the parking-lot-exploitation genre before anyone ever live-streamed fans showing up at a Trump rally. Jeff Krulik’s movie just celebrated its 40th anniversary, and City Cast contributor Elana Gordon caught up with some of the unwitting stars. “ It's a blessing to grow older,” said Z.Z. Ludwick, who fans may remember as the shirtless bassist in the crowd. He now runs a violin shop.

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Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is opening a retail outpost at Tyson’s Corner.
Sonic, known for its drive-through restaurants, plans to test a car-free “urban” concept in D.C., potentially along 14th Street or Navy Yard.
Councilmember Charles Allen’s bill to permit self-driving taxis in D.C. will get a hearing in August and a possible vote in fall.
DC Water chief David Gadis was ousted Friday, a casualty of last winter’s Potomac sewage spill. Also Friday, a boil-water advisory hit several northwest D.C. neighborhoods.
An “Epstein Memorial Reading Room” installation, where visitors can read from millions of pages of files about Jeffrey Epstein, will occupy a Chinatown gallery between tomorrow and Friday.
The Kennedy Center’s lawsuit against Chuck Redd — a musician who canceled an appearance — was dismissed by a D.C. judge, who said the center was actually retaliating against Redd for an anti-Trump political statement.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging Trump’s plan to close the center — which has been put on hold by a federal judge — fear he may effectively close it anyway, by just not booking anything. In a motion, they ask the court to prevent this.
The Federal Aviation Administration says the Arc de Trump will need red lights to protect against airplane crashes.
The Prime Rib, the venerable K Street lobbyist eatery, has closed.

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D.C. Tab

What if Washington had an old-fashioned tabloid? Here’s what one recent news story — about a surprise Russia trip by the chair of the Commission of Fine Arts, which oversees many D.C. architecture proposals — might have looked like. For the full collection, visit dc.tab on Instagram.