This month marked the one-year anniversary of the Mayor’s submittal of the Comprehensive Plan Update to the DC Council, which sought to bring the 2006 document up to date with major updates around housing, equity, resilience, public space, and COVID-19 recovery. It also marked the DC Council Committee of the Whole’s markup of the document. This is an important milestone that numerous stakeholders have been working towards for over five years. The Council will hold two more votes, the first of which is scheduled for May 4th. Once approved, we look forward to moving on to implementation beginning this summer.
Another one of the DC Office of Planning’s top priorities of 2020, the 2020 Census, also reached an important milestone this month. On April 26th, the Census Bureau released population counts from the 2020 Census that reported DC’s population growth nearly tripled compared to the previous decade. The 2020 Census reports DC’s population at 689,545, a 14.6% increase since the 2010 Census. This increase represents the seventh highest growth rate in the nation. While we celebrate this tremendous growth, we also know residents of the District are more likely to be undercounted than other states. Given that that this was an unprecedented Census, with operations being challenged by a global pandemic coupled with a tumultuous federal process, we will be reviewing the numbers carefully and the factors that may have contributed to an undercount. You can read more about this below.
Stay tuned as future newsletters promise to be full of milestones and planning news. Please feel free to share with others, who can sign up here. In addition, you can follow our work on Twitter under @OPinDC.