Have a Drink and Stop Bickering About Liquor License Moratoriums, D.C.

Slate’s Matt Yglesias takes aim at liquor license moratoriums, particularly one floated for his own Washington, D.C. neighborhood. Here’s a quick look at the debate that’s shaken out on fast-developing District corridors over the years.

A bar on U Street in Washington, D.C. Credit: Alex Barth on Flickr

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Slate blogger/rabble rouser/filthy rich condo owner Matt Yglesias took aim at NIMBYs in a Tuesday column, writing about why he thinks such policies as liquor license moratoriums stifle local economies and small business growth.

Using a likely-doomed-to-fail proposal for a liquor moratorium in his own Washington, D.C. neighborhood as a case study, Ygelsias bemoans the fact that bars and restaurants are viewed as “the ugly stepchildren of the modern urban economy.” He notes that it’s often residents living in the immediate vicinity of a nightlife corridor who object to the prospect of more bars, and that their opposition — usually treated with more deference than the opinions of those who just visit the neighborhood to eat and drink — can come at the expense of a city’s economic well being.

His argument hinges on the notion that bars and restaurants are some of the only businesses that can viably occupy the sort of small storefronts that line so many commercial streets in cities. In the era of big-box stores and online shopping, Yglesias writes, storefront spaces are ideal for bars and restaurants, but not retail. Limiting the number of watering holes that can move into these spaces ensures that more buildings will remain empty and derelict.

That’s why bars will cluster in dense urban neighborhood, he writes, while rustic local merchants will not.

D.C.’s U Street, the corridor referred to in Yglesias’s post, has been the locus of this kind of debate before. Last year, a proposal to cap liquor licenses in the area made the rounds (and that wasn’t even the first time). It met some pretty hefty resistance.

“A lot of us have lived around here for a long time, and while we welcome development, we would welcome more planned development,” one moratorium proponent told Washington City Paper’s Lydia DePillis last May. His rationale for capping liquor licenses ran a typical line: It would help deter increases in crime, noise and trash.

(One snarky response in the comments: “Yeah, that moratorium has worked out great in [the D.C. neighborhood of] Cleveland Park, hasn’t it? I mean, who *doesn’t* love vacant storefronts?”)

Next City partner website Greater Greater Washington, an urban policy blog focused on the D.C. metro region, has tackled the issue of liquor license moratoriums before. In a post last year on the U Street proposal, Eric Fidler argued that moratoriums are arbitrary, difficult to administer and don’t even reduce levels of noise, crime and trash. In 2010, Natalie Avery wrote that a better way to address these problems is to make the liquor licensing process a collaborative process between bar owners and the communities in which they seek to open.

Weighing in on the debate this year, transportation planner Dan Malouff explains how moratoriums “don’t usually stop things, but rather move them somewhere else.” So if U Street doesn’t want more bars, those bars will likely only open in another neighborhood that will take them.

Similar ideas for liquor moratoriums have been floated for H Street NE, another District nightlife corridor that’s not nearly as far along in the development stages as U Street, as well as New York’s Lower East Side. Chicago has whole districts where new liquor licenses are disallowed, and California has capped licenses in cities and counties where the ratio exceeds one license for every 2.500 residents.

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Tags: economic developmentwashington dcretail

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