About the Plan

Everything in DC is connected to everything else. A neighborhood without bus lanes pushes its workers into cars, which makes every other neighborhood's traffic worse. A ward that loses its tree canopy makes the whole city hotter. A broken Metro escalator in Anacostia makes a morning commute longer for a nurse in Petworth. A grocery store that closes in Ward 8 raises the diabetes rate of the children growing up around it. When the system fails part of the city, it fails the whole city.

DC does not govern itself this way. Housing, transit, healthcare, schools, jobs, air, water, and public safety are run as separate problems with separate budgets by separate agencies that rarely talk to each other. A resident facing eviction, a long commute, a closed clinic, and a school underfunded by the same tax structure is facing one connected failure. The District treats it as four. That is why solutions never quite work and why every fight feels uphill: because the city is fighting symptoms one at a time while the underlying conditions stay the same.

A livable city is one whose government understands that everything is connected and acts that way. Housing decisions are climate decisions. Transit decisions are health decisions. School funding decisions are public safety decisions. Tax decisions are democracy decisions. When the city governs itself as one system, the system can heal. When it doesn't, no single program can carry the load.

DC has every ingredient of a world-class city. International capital. Federal investment no other American city can access. Transit bones most cities envy. The Potomac, the Anacostia, and Rock Creek Park. Universities, culture, density, and the people. And yet the District's own data shows a tree canopy that is declining, a transit system that has collapsed, a lead pipe replacement pace that will leave children drinking from toxic pipes into the next decade, and a life expectancy gap between Ward 3 and Ward 8 that has widened to 18.6 years. A child born in Congress Heights, four Metro stops east of Ward 3, is expected to live nearly two decades less than a child born across town.

DC is a C40 city. The network includes 97 cities representing nearly a quarter of the global economy and 920 million people. The District sits at the same table as cities like Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Medellín, and Curitiba. These are cities that faced their own constraints and roadblocks and dared to build better anyway. This is DC's peer group, the cities whose governments meet to share what works, what scales, and what a serious urban agenda looks like.

Paris built itself around the fifteen-minute city, the idea that every resident should live within a quarter-hour walk of school, work, a doctor, a park, and a grocery, and is reclaiming streets from cars, planting urban forests, and cleaning the Seine so residents can swim in it again to make that life possible. Vienna has been building publicly-owned social housing for a century. The housing is designed to be beautiful, attached to parks and libraries and transit, and treated as a civic right rather than a welfare program. Six in ten Viennese now live in homes the city owns or subsidizes. Barcelona converted dozens of street grids into pedestrian-first Superblocks, reclaiming public space from traffic and cutting air pollution in the process. Curitiba built its entire urban plan around the city as a living organism, with parks placed along waterways to absorb flooding, green space protected as a constitutional right, and one of the most influential bus rapid transit systems ever built. Medellín built its most beautiful libraries in its poorest neighborhoods and cut its homicide rate by 95% in a generation, not through policing but through public investment in the communities the previous government had abandoned. DC has watched them do it, and has been left behind.

A city is not just its people. It is the rivers and trees and animals and soil that share the space with us. It is the pipes and pavement, the traffic lights and Metro cars, the bus stops and elevators and streetlights and the signs that tell a newcomer how to find their way. The Anacostia cannot testify before Council. The Heritage oak on Alabama Avenue cannot submit public comment when a developer wants it cut down. The pollinator cannot lobby for the pesticide-free neighborhood it needs to survive. But all of them are participants in whether this city works, and a livable city is one whose government speaks for them too, not just manages them, but stewards them with the same responsibility it owes to every resident who can speak for themselves. A city that stops stewarding its non-human participants stops being livable for any of them.

Livable DC produced this Plan as a coalition document, drawing on decades of organizing, advocacy, and policy work across the District. It is a single framework that any candidate, advocate, or organization who shares its vision can adopt and fight for. The Oye Owolewa for DC Council campaign was the first to adopt it and is hosting the current version. The Plan is meant to grow.

The architecture starts from a premise. The heart, the lungs, the gut, and the mind are one system operating inside a lived environment. You cannot treat a patient one symptom at a time and call it medicine. A city works the same way.

DC is a C40 city, one of 97 cities representing nearly a quarter of the global economy. Throughout the Plan, peer cities are named not as aspirations DC should consider but as documentation of what cities at DC's scale have already built. When the Plan calls for a swimmable Anacostia, it is pointing to the Seine. When it calls for publicly-owned social housing at scale, it is pointing to Vienna. When it calls for libraries in the neighborhoods most cut off from opportunity, it is pointing to Medellín. The bar is not invention. The bar is catching up. The reference point is what is already done, not what is theoretically possible.

The Plan is organized into three sections. The City at Street Level is what residents experience moving through DC every day: bus stops, bike lanes, sidewalks, trees, air, water, the surface underfoot. The first promise the city makes to its people, and where most of those promises currently fail. The City You Live In is what residents come home to and what thrives alongside them: housing, healthcare, schools, food, libraries, the care economy, the pollinators outside the window. The City We Govern is the power underneath both sections: who owns the utility, who enforces what is promised, who can override what voters passed, who answers when an agency does not deliver.

Each section contains a set of fights. The word fight is deliberate. These are not policy proposals presented for consideration. They are positions taken against existing resistance, named actors, and institutional inertia. Some fights are old. Some are new. All of them require showing up.

Every fight follows the same structure. It opens with the human stake. It names the failure with the data behind it. It references how peer cities have answered the same question. It ends with specific commitments that any official, candidate, or organization adopting the Plan would advance. The Plan does not include a fight without specific commitments behind it. A plan without commitments is a wish list. This is not a wish list.

The Plan is meant to be adopted, expanded, and articulated by candidates, organizations, and advocates willing to fight for it. The policy substance stays consistent. The language and emphasis can grow as more people take it up.

If you have the time, read the Plan end-to-end. The systems argument only lands when you see how the fights connect. A neighborhood without bus shelters is a heat health crisis. A river the District will not clean is a Ward 8 dignity problem. A budget that strips ERAP from $63 million to $8.6 million is a public safety decision. These are not separate problems and the Plan does not treat them as separate.

If you have less time, take the matcher. Three questions, thirty seconds, six fights surfaced from the Plan that match what you care about. Find Your Fight is the front door for most readers.

If your organization wants to sign on, the Endorse page is where you do it. Organization name, contact information, an authorization check, and your organization is added to the public list of signatories.

If a specific fight matters to you, share its link. Every fight has its own URL. Send Fight 2-2 to a tenant organizer. Send Fight 3-1 to anyone who has been disconnected by Pepco. Send Fight 1-7 to anyone who has lost a heritage tree in Ward 8. The Plan exists to be used.

If you are a candidate, an advocate, or an organization that shares this vision, the Plan is yours to adopt and fight for. It is built on decades of work that came before it, and meant to continue past any single campaign cycle.