Hotels, Vacant Lots, and Zoning Follies

There is a vacant lot right around the corner from my building, a rampant waste of an extremely valuable property. It seems that ambitious developers bought it and demolished whatever was there to make way for the "eco-luxury" hotel pictured above. Which looks kind of cool. Anyway, they had no sooner finished demolition than the financial markets collapsed and they put their plans on hold. Development is roaring ahead in Washington these days, but this lot remains vacant, and the proprietors of the DCmud blog could get no information on construction plans. But all of this raises the question of why there are so many hotels within two blocks of my office, and one of the commenters at DCmud explains:

The West End is oversaturated with hotels, the unanticipated result of zoning which required at least half residential for all developments--but then counted hotels as residential. Back in the day (i.e. prior to about 2000), new residential in D.C. was few and far between, so naturally most West End developers chose the hotel option.

Now that I know more about zoning and development, I can sometimes look at a neighborhood and guess the zoning rules and other limits on development that gave it its shape. Most people pay no attention to these things, but they have profound impacts on our lives.