Justice
The Ghosts of D.C.'s Zoning Code
A wonky Tumblr documents the city’s retail shops converted into residences, thanks to arcane zoning laws.
Stroll down the wide, leafy residential streets of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and you might notice some peculiar details on the homes around you: oversized bay windows, decorative overhangs, corner-facing doors. These are signs of the past lives of these buildings: as shops, grocery stores, and service businesses.
“Once you start to notice the ‘tells’ about these buildings, you see them everywhere,” says Jared Alves, a D.C. healthcare consultant who serves as a committee member of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) in northeast Capitol Hill. “It’s incredible—the amount of stores that have been lost and can’t be replaced.”