1409 Decatur St NW, Washington, DC 20011

Sixteenth Street Heights Residential House Zone 1B

The purposes of the Sixteenth Street Heights Residential House (R-1B/SH) zone are to: Promote the conservation, enhancement, and stability of the low-density, single dwelling unit neighborhood for housing and neighborhood-related uses; Control the expansion of nonresidential uses, and/or further conversion of residential housing to nonresidential uses in order to maintain the housing supply and minimize the external negative impacts of new nonresidential uses that are permitted in the R-1B/SH zone in order to preserve neighborhood quality; and Allow neighborhoods to continue to provide a range of health and social service facilities as well as private institutions that provide cultural and religious enrichment and economic vitality, but within the framework of improved public review and control over the external effects of nonresidential uses. The objective is to make more compatible the Comprehensive Plan's goals and policies for maintaining the quality and stability of residential neighborhoods with other policies related to the reasonable provision of human services throughout the District of Columbia.; The R-1B/SH zone is intended to: Respond to concerns that over a period of years approximately 1 in every 10 houses in the R-1B/SH zone north of Colorado Avenue, N.W. has been converted to a nonresidential use, a much higher ratio than has been identified for any other similarly zoned neighborhood in the District of Columbia; and south of Colorado Avenue, N.W., address concerns that more than 20 percent of the residentially zoned land is used for nonresidential purposes; Recognize that the neighborhood accommodates a significant number and range of human service facilities and private institutions to an extent that new and significantly expanded nonresidential use facilities should be governed by improved public review to ameliorate adverse impacts on immediate and nearby neighbors and to preserve a predominantly single dwelling unit residential character; Respond to the District of Columbia Comprehensive Plan’s identification of the number of nonresidential uses in the neighborhood as a problem; and Address the impacts of the number of nonresidential uses and the conversion of houses to these uses in the neighborhood as reflected in the Comprehensive Plan.