Washington D.C. CFO: Bring on the Skyscrapers

Could the skyline of our nation's capital be in for a monumental change?

July 19, 2012 RSS Feed Print

"I'm worried if we add a story here, a story there, it'll be a death [of the skyline] by a thousand cuts," he said. "I believe there are places in this city—distant from the monumental core—where we can put taller buildings, not skyscrapers. People shouldn't be envisioning Chicago or New York."

Laura Richards, of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, a nonprofit urban planning group, says that plan—which would put tall buildings in typically poorer, African-American parts of the city east of the Anacostia River—would "further exacerbate the city's racial divide."

"There is just as much affection for Washington's horizontal scale east of the river as there is anywhere else in the city," she said in her prepared remarks. "The Committee of 100 also opposes tinkering with the Height Act on a piecemeal basis. The Height Act must neither be swept away nor chipped away."

Jason Koebler is a science and technology reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at jkoebler@usnews.com