Friday, June 12, 2026
By Allister Chang?
?
Debates around housing this election cycle increasingly agree on the goals: Build more housing. Prevent displacement. Respect community input. Speed up permitting. Preserve neighborhood character. Expand affordability. Add density near transit. Protect tenants. Reduce costs. Build in every neighborhood.?
The harder part is governing through the conflicts that emerge once those goals become operational.?
Try being mayor for five minutes. Your staff identifies one of D.C.’s neighborhoods that has added relatively little housing over the past decade. A recent report by the D.C. Policy Center found that just 10 census tracts accounted for nearly one-third of all housing units built citywide between 2000 and 2020, while many neighborhoods added comparatively little housing.
So, you propose exactly the kind of project nearly everyone says they support: hundreds of new homes, affordable units, child care space, retail and infrastructure upgrades.?
Then the opposition arrives: Neighbors want it smaller. Environmental groups want more review. Tenant advocates want deeper affordability. Local leaders want more process. Agencies want more studies. The developer warns that every delay makes financing harder.
Each of these concerns is legitimate. Some improve projects. Some protect vulnerable residents. The challenge is that they all delay the project. Taken together, they make the project nearly impossible to build.?
That may sound hypothetical. But D.C. permitted just 1,372 multifamily units in 2025, a fraction of the 5,000 to 8,000 units the city was permitting annually through much of the previous decade.?
What do you do??
Option A: Scale it down.?Result: The politics get easier. The housing shortage doesn’t.?
Option B: Push it through.?Result: More homes get built. Parts of your coalition get angry and rebel against you.?
Option C: Keep negotiating.?Result: Nobody gets a definitive no. Years pass. Costs rise. Financing changes. The project shrinks, stalls and dies.?
This is the housing debate I want the candidates to have. Not whether they support affordable housing. At this point, virtually every serious candidate supports some combination of more housing production, affordability measures, tenant protections and anti-displacement policies.?
The real question is what they’re willing to say no to in order to build it.?
If D.C. needs tens of thousands of additional homes, what existing veto points, approval structures or procedural layers would need to change to make that possible??
The D.C. Policy Center estimates that zoning appeals since 2015 affected more than 17,000 housing units and added an average of roughly 450 days to development timelines.?
When local political opposition conflicts with citywide housing goals, which should prevail, and why??What are you willing to say no to in order to deliver the housing you promise??
Every candidate can tell you how many homes they want to build. The more revealing question is whether they can explain what they are willing to change, override, streamline or prioritize in order to get there. When choosing between candidates, voters should pay at least as much attention to the pathway as to the promise.?
Allister Chang represents Ward 2 on the D.C. State Board of Education.?