A regular summary of irregular news and notes from neighborhood blogs and email lists around the District.
Foxy Coyote: “I saw, what appears to be, a gray fox this morning (5:40am)while running down Alaska Avenue. It trotted across the street just below the entrance at Alaska and 14th Street and before the next gate. I’ve seen raccoons, possums and deer, but never a fox,” reports a member of the Shepherd Park email list. Another member reports that she’s “shared the sidewalk” with the same kind of animal while walking her dogs in the morning. But another member isn’t so sure it’s a fox: “Since you describe your sighting as a ‘gray fox,’ I wonder if it may possibly be a coyote?” A fourth member recalls that “5 years ago or so, we had a momma & 2 young coyotes in Shepherd Park. The next summer, there was one of the young ones still around. They are really quite mangy looking.”
Preventative Parking: After an incendiary email about the city’s zoning code rewrite, a member of the Tenleytown email list posts a thoughtful response to the overdramatic assertion that “Transit Zones” around Metro stations will forcibly extract drivers from their cars. He argues that businesses in Tenleytown don’t cater to its family-centric population, because it’s too hard to open new establishments given the parking minimums in the current zoning code. “Parking—and the zoning requirement for parking—plays a big role in this. It is hard to start a business here because it is hard to provide enough parking to meet the current regulations. Because of our geography and patterns of land use it’s hard to add parking and when it is added it is often in a way that unwelcoming and unsightly,” he writes. A second member adds, “Thanks for responding….Any other points of view? Yes, as I am often reminded we are not the Cleveland Park [email list] but it’s nice to have forums in between the ISO board postings.”
Selective Change: InShaw quibbles with the Washington Post‘s latest coverage of the Ward 5 special election, which spins a narrative about the various candidates in the race into a typical newcomers-vs.-oldtimers trope. (The story also includes a point about how condominiums are racist.) The blog asks, “Also what role does the Summit, the workforce housing built in/near Eckington a couple of years ago play in this? None? It’s relatively new housing, and residents complained about that too before it was built. Ah selective memory, my aunt has that problem as well.”
Crocular: A member of the New Hill East email list (who admits she “just need[s] to vent”) writes, “Some shoes were delivered to our house shortly after I left to pick up my daughter from school. Some jerk stole the shoe boxes *right out of the box* (they didn’t even have the courtesy to take the whole dang thing), and left the empty box on our porch. Someone scored 2 pairs of women’s crocs sandals (size 9) and a pair of purple girls’ crocs (8/9) at my family’s expense today. Fortunately, Crocs is willing to re-send the items (and I’ll just pick up my order from the local FedEx this time); but it’s disheartening to know that people are still stealing from their neighbors.” Another member adds, “Ridiculous. I have a PO box but the mail person keeps leaving mail on the outside of my door (since I have no mail slot). God only knows if anyone has been going through it.”