In D.C., an anti-development crusader or mere extortionist?
WASHINGTON: The man with the ponytail raised his voice as he stood before the commissioners at the District of Columbia zoning board hearing, ignoring the chairman’s warning that no public testimony was allowed.
“There’s confusion in the audience here,” Chris Otten called out, holding up his cellphone to record his own intrusion.
“I’m not going back to my street days, Mr Otten, where I’d come over there,” said Chairman Anthony Hood, well-schooled in his theatrics. He ordered a fiveminute recess.
“You’re breaking the rules!” Otten shouted. “You’re destroying our city!”
As Washington has turned increasingly affluent, with glass towers rising across the city, restaurants dishing US$275 (RM1,240) tasting menus and baristas brewing US$8 coffees, Otten has dug in as a self-styled contrarian-at-large.
A law school dropout who subsists on food stamps and an US$800 (RM3,600) monthly stipend from Ralph Nader, Otten, 42, touts himself as a “citizen agent” who uses his knowledge of the municipal code to oppose development projects; one builder agreed to pay US$2 million to halt his resistance.
Otten says the settlement money is for low-income residents and small merchants struggling to survive in a city with one of the country’s widest gaps between rich and poor. But developers say Otten is an extortionist who is expert at using little-noticed administrative hearings and court proceedings to slow down projects and drive up costs.
His impact was evident in December, when he helped persuade the D.C. Court of Appeals to order the city to review its approval of a massive redevelopment in Northwest, just one day after Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) presided at a groundbreaking for the project.
“His tactics are to disrupt and keep coming and coming,” said developer Dennis Lee, who, because of battles with Otten and his allies, is behind schedule building a New York Avenue hotel.
“He’ll relentlessly keep finding any angle because he knows that affects the developer adversely. But the bigger damage is to the city itself.”
Otten, in an interview, said his target is not developers but government officials who “rubber-stamp” projects catering to the affluent without consideration for the environment and the poor. “That’s all that matters to the greed machine,” he said.
He said the US$2 million settlement - a rare instance when he and his allies wrung a payment from a builder - is “chump change” compared with tax abatements that the city routinely grants developers. “These little victories do nothing to stem the evisceration of existing D.C. culture,” he said.
Yet luxury development is not the sole target of Otten’s wrath, which can be so intense that developers and civic leaders are reluctant to criticise him publicly. Even fellow activists, who share Otten’s desire to protect neighbourhoods, are repelled by his fervour.
Affordable housing is too expensive for the poor, he insists. A plan to create smaller shelters for homeless families is a ruse for the District to reward developers with land deals, he says.
“I know what he’s against,” said Harriet Tregoning, the District’s former planning director. “What’s he for?”
Anti-development activists often are spurred by projects in their proverbial back yards. But Otten is ubiquitous, travelling city-wide to organise opposition, enlist lawyers, testify at hearings and file appeals. At times, neighbourhood groups appoint him to question witnesses at hearings, as if he’s an attorney, albeit one who’s often unshaven and favors phrases like “Dig it” and “Right on.”
“Are you a lawyer, in fact?” Attorney General Karl Racine asked at a recent meeting after Otten criticised the city’s zoning oversight.
“No,” Otten replied. “A civic agent.” Others are less charitable. “A hyperbolic polemicist, an obstructionist caricature who deals in caricatures,” D.C. Council spokesman Josh Gibson wrote on an Adams Morgan listserv last year.
The son of a retired New York City police captain, Otten earned a maths degree at a Jesuit college before working as a stock analyst, a job he said he quit in the late 1990s because he rejected the “Gordon Gekko scene.”
After tutoring poor children for AmeriCorps in Florida, Otten moved to Washington, where he was the Green Party’s 2006 mayoral candidate. He enrolled at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school in 2010, but took a medical leave soon after and never returned.
He met Nader while advocating for the District to improve library services in the poorest neighborhoods. They unsuccessfully challenged the city’s plan to allow a developer to rebuild the West End public library and add condos and rental apartments.
“He has been a problem for me and many other people,” said Anthony Lanier, the developer of the West End site and another project opposed by Otten on Capitol Hill.
“There’s no compromise for him because he doesn’t have a defined beef, except that he’s opposed to me. He dislikes what I stand for.”
Otten claims no interest in material comfort. He lives in subsidised housing in Adams Morgan and drives a 21-year-old car. A few years ago, he started D.C. for Reasonable Development, a non-profit advocacy group he helps direct, without pay, from Nader’s P Street headquarters.
He is a mix of zealous advocate and sober-toned policy wonk. —WP-Bloomberg