D.C. lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a plan to redraw the boundaries of the city’s wards, making the fast-growing Navy Yard neighborhood a part of the historically low-income Ward 8 and the easternmost section of Capitol Hill a part of Ward 7.
Wp Get the full experience.Choose your plan ArrowRight
The new map — which the city must by law redraw every 10 years after the U.S. census provides new information on shifting population levels across neighborhoods — will require two votes by the D.C. Council this month to complete a process that has been contentious across the city.
In almost every ward, residents whose homes might be redistricted into other wards have raised objections. A committee of three at-large council members held weeks of hearings, then approved a map, which council chairman Phil Mendelson (D) proposed several changes to this week.
Advertisement
Story continues below advertisement
The full council must vote to approve, amend or reject that map Tuesday.
Wards 7 and 8 have long represented poor, Black D.C. neighborhoods. What does it mean to redistrict them?
The 2020 Census showed that Ward 6 was disproportionately larger than the city’s other seven wards, having grown rapidly over the past decade as new apartment complexes sprung up in Navy Yard, along the Southwest Waterfront and in other neighborhoods. Wards 7 and 8, which have been almost exclusively east-of-the-Anacostia wards, grew at a far slower pace and needed to grow in population to meet the legal redistricting requirements.
That means those wards would expand across the Anacostia in the new configuration. If the council approves the map that Mendelson suggested, Ward 7 will reach across the river to 15th Street from Benning Road NE to Potomac Avenue SE, and Ward 8 will add the Navy Yard area.
Story continues below advertisement
Part of the Shaw neighborhood will also move from Ward 6 to Ward 2, and a large parcel of land surrounding the Armed Forces Retirement Home and MedStar Washington Hospital Center will move from Ward 5 to Ward 1, a proposal that some Ward 5 residents have objected to despite the fact that very few people live in the zone that would change wards. Wards 3 and 4 would not be reshaped under the proposal.
Advertisement
Much of the vocal opposition to the proposal comes from residents of the Hill East neighborhood that is set to move from Ward 6 to Ward 7. As these residents have objected to a split that leaves part of the Capitol Hill community in one ward and part in another, some have accused them of not wanting to live in a majority-Black ward.
Meanwhile, Ward 7 residents expressed concern that the council committee’s version of the map would have left their ward the least populous in the city. Mendelson said at a news conference Monday that his amendments would allay that concern by keeping the Northeast D.C. neighborhood of Kingman Park in Ward 7 instead of moving it to Ward 6 as the committee had proposed.
Story continues below advertisement
A group of Ward 7 activists held a news conference Monday afternoon to ask the council to vote on a proposal that significantly expands the population of their ward. They said they approved of Mendelson’s plan but worried it would be voted down. “There are some communities actively advocating against this specific proposal or boundaries,” Dionna Maria Lewis, one of the leaders, wrote in an email. “… We believe that the dissension in and of itself is also reflective of a greater issue that externally, Ward 7 is not considered as economically viable, livable, and desirable as other Wards, Ward 6 in particular. DC is only as strong as all eight Wards.”
Michael Brice-Saddler contributed to this report.