No, Cleveland Park & Woodley Park should NOT be in separate ANCs

Today a comment on Twitter took issue with the Corridors of People approach to drawing ANCs:

It shouldn’t all be one ANC. Cleveland Park and Woodley are distinct neighborhoods with unique social and economic ecosystems. They should have their own ANCs.

No, the Connecticut Ave corridor should not divide Cleveland Park and Woodley Park, for several reasons:

1) Woodley Park is land locked by the Ward boundary. If cut off from Cleveland Park, an ANC anchored in Woodley Park can only go so far before it runs into the Glover Park ANC. It could reach a size of 4 SMDs, picking up Woodland-Normanstone and Massachusetts Heights, but would need to cross Wisconsin Ave to add a fifth.

2) There are significant common interested along the Connecticut Ave corridor. Many of the people living in multi-family buildings along Connecticut Ave, as well as the single family homes along streets like Cortland Place, Devonshire, 28th and 29th Sts, look to the Cleveland Park commercial area as the home base of daily living.

In 2018, I did a survey for the Cleveland Park Business Association on attitudes toward the commercial strip. The poll was broadcast far and wide through listservs and social media. What was fascinating is who responded from where, when they knew what the survey topic was about. Of the nearly 1,000 responses, one third came from the area just east of the commercial strip. An additional 22% came from the area on the northern side of Woodley Park - the second largest source of interviews. The Woodley Park area was nearly three times as likely to respond to the survey than people west of 34th Street in Cleveland Park. That’s like due to both raw population and interest in the commercial strip. Point being: Many in Woodley Park feel the CP strip is their neighborhood center of gravity.

As someone who lives close to the Klingle Valley and the CP strip, and knows many people on the WP side of the ravine, this is a truism.

3) The Cleveland Park Citizens Association has boundaries that it considers to be Cleveland Park - if you live within them, you can be a voting member. The Woodley Park Community Association has similar boundaries. Guess what? They overlap, by a lot. CPCA has as its southern border Cathedral Ave, which is deep into the area commonly known as Woodley Park. This “disputed territory” has such a large population (2,255) it would fill more than one whole SMD. Bottom line, even Cleveland Park isn’t sure where it ends and where Woodley Park Begins.

Names of neighborhoods have value, especially to realtors. But actual neighborhoods are the places where we live our lives and they don’t always sync up to the names, depending on where you live. I think designing our hyper-local government boundaries around the “corridors of people” makes a lot of sense. If you agree, please let the Task Force know.

There are three ways to provide input to the Task Force:

1)      You can send an email to ward3ancredistricting@gmail.com

2)      You can post a comment for the public record using this form

3)      You can show up at our Tuesday meetings and make comments live (just show up and raise your hand).  Information on our meetings can be found here.