Washington, DC

Housing, Built environment, Transportation | 2025

Mapped links between multifamily housing development and high-traffic corridors to promote health equity. 

Land use and health equity are intimately connected. In the District of Columbia, multifamily housing is located primarily along high-traffic corridors, exposing residents (and, disproportionately, residents of color with lower incomes) to public health risks, such as air pollution from vehicle exhaust and traffic crashes. But these linkages are not fully understood or transparent to most people. With this grant, Greater Greater Washington Commons (GGWash Commons), a local housing and transportation policy advocacy organization, created an interactive map that illustrates the intersections of housing, land use, transportation, and public health, and is using it to communicate the public health impacts of land use regulations to decisionmakers and the public.

Data aggregated into the GGWash Commons map include demographics, affordable housing, traffic incidents, air quality, and transportation networks. The map allows users to explore data by key geographies such as wards, planning areas, advisory neighborhood commissions, and zoning classifications. This map will help the organization, its base, the public, and decisionmakers understand how zoning regulations, which limit where different types of housing can be built, contribute to disproportionate exposure to public health risks for those who cannot afford to live in predominantly single-family areas.  

In addition to making visible the connection between poor air quality and high-injury arterial roads, the GGWash Commons map allows users to compare geographies and highlights inequities in traffic fatalities, transit access, and the location of recent subsidized housing development. The map, and findings from it, are an educational resource with which GGWash Commons will engage DC councilmembers, advisory neighborhood commissioners, and government officials, as well as partner groups for which land use policies are relevant. Equipping such decisionmakers with data about zoning’s impacts on public health will help them better understand why it matters to legalize more housing off high-traffic corridors.  

The project is a timely endeavor: The DC Office of Planning is fully rewriting its Comprehensive Plan, which guides future development within the District, for the first time since 2006. As the Office of Planning opens the draft plan for public comment, GGWash Commons will use findings to provide insights on the public health impacts of concentrating multifamily housing adjacent to the District’s arterial roads, as well as to support District residents, decisionmakers, and other advocates in their own engagement with the draft plan.