GROWTH 4 GROWTH SAKE: Recent Public Hearings Reveal Who is Fighting for Affordability in Ward 3, It Ain’t the YIMBYs

Who Is Really Fighting for Affordability in Ward 3? Recent Public Hearings Show It’s Not the “YIMBYs”

Washington, D.C. December 2025 — For years, DC’s housing debate has been framed as a morality play: YIMBYs want inclusion; NIMBYs want exclusion. But recent Ward 3 zoning hearings are finally revealing the fraud this false binary has become.

At two recent DC Zoning Commission hearings (Case Nos. 25-09 and 25-13), the supposed villains — longtime Ward 3 residents, preservationists, better planning advocates and community housing activists — were the ones demanding that much more truly affordable housing requirements be clearly tied to the massive new density giveaways proposed for large swaths of Connecticut Avenue and Wisconsin Avenue, including Woodley Park, Cleveland Park, Tenleytown, and Friendship Heights.

The Ward 3 upzoning proposals are being brought forward by the Mayor, through the Office of Planning, asking the DC Zoning Commission to upzone dozens of parcels in a single sweep — effectively creating hundreds of millions of dollars in new speculative land value. The question raised by the alleged NIMBYs was simple: why should that value accrue to the market without firm public benefit?

Meanwhile, at these same hearings many self-identified YIMBY voices focused almost exclusively on maximizing new construction, demanding as much height and density as possible while leaving racial equity as an afterthought — something the market might deliver later, if at all.

Let’s be clear: bigger, taller new buildings in Ward 3 without real requirements to repair the harms of the past are not progressive housing policy. They are a choice — one DC has made for decades — with predictable results: tens of thousands of new expensive market-rate units, a miniscule amount of family-sized homes, little deeply affordable housing, and continued displacement, including the loss of roughly 60,000 Black residents over the past two decades (US Census).

So who is actually asking for inclusion in exchange for the proposed new taller bigger buildings in Ward 3?

Not the pro-growth advocates calling for upzoning at any cost, no strings attached. 

It was neighbors who insisted that if the city is going to create enormous new land value along Connecticut and Wisconsin Avenues with a stroke of a pen, DC’s working families and public must receive something real in return — something that actually meets DC’s stated affordability goals and racial equity commitments.

That position was captured plainly by Deidre Brown of the Ward 3 Democratic Committee, who warned that affordability set at 60% of median family income does not reach most Black families in DC — and that without deeper affordability and family-sized units, equity rhetoric rings hollow.https://www.youtube.com/live/35td4HApPCo?si=sFME7EyE8PPG9AzB&t=16337

Watch the Record for Yourself

The contrast is visible on the public record:

• ZC Case No. 25-09 – Hearing Video 

• ZC Case No. 25-13 – Hearing Video 

Density is easy. Equity is the fight — and many longtime Ward 3 residents are showing up for it.  

Truly disgusting NIMBYism exists, and when it appears, it deserves outcry and criticism. But that’s not what these recent zoning hearings are revealing.

Instead, what the hearings show is a deeper split: between those who treat density as the goal itself, perhaps knowingly or not in service of DC's real estate speculators, and those who insist new growth be a tool for racial and economic equity in the District of Columbia.

In Ward 3, the people fighting hardest for affordability aren’t the loudest YIMBYs. It's the neighbors who have in many cases been unfairly castigated as older obstructionists (NIMBYs) — those folks who are now demanding that new growth finally deliver on the promises DC keeps making, and failing, to keep.

The recent zoning hearings expose that it might be past time to shed the gross rhetorical reductionism of the binary YIMBY vs. NIMBY high-school name calling and get to the real work of delivering true inclusivity in Ward 3 and citywide. 

See more in the press release below and find out more about the SHIMBY (Social Housing in My Back Yard) take on the future of housing development.

Post written by: C. Otten
Produced by: DC for Reasonable Development