Washington, DC, is running out of homes that middle-income families can afford to buy. Homeownership has plunged from 47.5% in 2007 to just 40% today even as thousands of new apartment units, almost exclusively rentals, have been built in neighborhoods like NoMa and Navy Yard.

These outcomes are the natural, albeit perhaps unintended, consequences of the District’s land use policies. For decades, exclusionary zoning has blocked smaller, moderately priced homes from being built. As a result, options have dwindled for working and middle-class families who want to own a home.

The District’s elected and appointed officials have a rare chance to change course. As they steward a rewrite of its Comprehensive Plan, which will govern what is allowed to be built where over the next 25 years, it should legalize “light-touch density.” That means allowing any owner of a single-family detached home to, should they wish, convert them into duplexes, triplexes, or townhomes, provided that each parcel meets a minimum lot size.

This isn’t radical. A century ago, American neighborhoods featured a mix of different sizes and types of homes. That changed in the 1920s, when federal guidance and a Supreme Court ruling upheld exclusionary zoning practices that segregated real estate by price point and, indirectly, by race. Cities quickly banned what we now refer to as “missing middle” housing from most neighborhoods and increasingly gave private groups veto power over new construction. The result was higher prices, less diversity, and more McMansions.

Allowing light-touch density would help to reverse the negative trends brought about by exclusionary zoning. If existing lots were allowed to contain more than one home, neighborhoods like the Palisades, Michigan Park, Takoma, and Hillcrest—by using land more efficiently—could accommodate more residents while remaining low-rise and residential.

In high-demand cities like DC, land appreciates while buildings depreciate. As a result, market forces incentivize redevelopment. If zoning permits only one large home, you get a $4 million McMansion. If zoning allowed light-touch density, the same land could support four to eight moderately sized homes instead. In DC, these would sell for roughly 75 percent of the price of the home they replaced—not cheap, but attainable for middle-income buyers. Many would serve as “starter homes,” the kind of family-sized, lower-cost options that are increasingly scarce.

And new, moderately priced homes free up older housing. This process, known as filtering, means that building new homes doesn’t just help new buyers—it helps renters and lower-income families too.

By our estimates, allowing light-touch density could enable 800–1,100 homes to be built in the District annually, six times the past decade’s single-family pace. Crucially, these would mostly be for-sale units, with ownership rates around 80 percent, far above the sub-10% ownership rate typical of new multifamily buildings.

The neighborhoods most suited for light-touch density are those most at risk of McMansionization: Chevy Chase, Forest Hills, and American University Park. They have large lots, aging homes, and high land values. Without reform to the District’s land-use policies, these areas will see ever-larger luxury homes that only single wealthy households will occupy. With light-touch density regulations in place, they could welcome multiple families at moderate price points to high-opportunity neighborhoods with strong schools, good transit, and stable property values.

Most buyers of these homes will be District residents; most of them will be young families, first-time buyers, and people of color. These are the groups getting shut out of these neighborhoods today. Legalizing light-touch density would expand housing choices and help build a more inclusive and equitable city.

Some may fear that light-touch density will hurt neighborhood character or property values. But evidence from cities like Seattle or Charlotte show modest density increases have no measurable effect on surrounding prices. New units would match the scale of existing homes, and new residents would largely be middle-class households. Parking and traffic concerns can be addressed through market tools like priced curbside parking. And unlike large apartment buildings, light-touch density would fill in incrementally over time, preserving community continuity.

We recently released a report proposing light-touch density reforms for DC, outlining their housing supply potential and broader benefits. For current homeowners, it would enable them to partner with small builders to redevelop their lot, keep a unit and downsize, create housing for adult children or aging parents, or simply unlock wealth without leaving the neighborhood.

The fiscal upside is substantial. According to our calculations, over ten years, homes built as a result of legalizing light-touch density could generate about $1.2 billion in recurring property, income, and sales taxes for the District—without subsidies. That’s revenue that could be reinvested in infrastructure, schools, or lowering taxes for everyone.

But the details matter. Conversions must be allowed by right, with simple, clear rules—no permit caps and no excessive affordability mandates that make projects unworkable. The District should further improve its zoning code to be small-lot friendly, reduce parking minimums, and offer pre-approved design templates to speed permitting. Neighboring Arlington and Montgomery counties are cautionary tales: Both passed light-touch density-style reforms, but blunted them with strict limits and costly requirements.

Politically, the challenge is that neighborhoods that are prime candidates for light-touch density have long resisted change and are politically powerful enough to continue to do so. Still, the alternative is more McMansions, rising prices, and falling rates of homeownership. Once a lot becomes a single high-cost home, it’s locked in for decades—and once the Comp Plan rewrite is finalized, there won’t be another opportunity to legalize light-touch density for over a decade. Successful reforms in Portland and Austin prove that it can be done.

Light-touch density alone will not solve DC’s housing crisis. But it will increase ownership opportunities, support the middle class, promote a more equitable city, and better align market incentives with public goals. In an era of fiscal strain for the District, it will also more than pay for itself. The District should make light-touch density one of the pillars of its new Comprehensive Plan.

Top image: A satellite view of the intersection of 38th and Albemarle streets NW. It looks all single-family, but, behold the duplexes in between (highlighted). Image by Google Maps and AEI Housing Center.

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“We are laser-focused on our safety efforts,” said Sharon Kershbaum, director of the District Department of Transportation (DDOT), this summer. District of Columbia residents might be tempted to be reassured by her words — and stated commitment to “making the city … safe and inviting for transit and for pedestrians and for bikers and for drivers” — but that would be a mistake.

Since DDOT committed itself in 2017 to eliminating deaths on its roads, the tempo of fatalities has only increased, from 28 that year to 52 in 2024. This is no accident.

In the last year and a half, DDOT has abandoned plans for protected bicycle lanes on Connecticut Avenue for political reasons, torn out protective flex posts on Arizona Avenue for aesthetic reasons, quietly shelved plans for a busway redesign on H Street NE for unknown reasons, and decried efforts by the National Park Service to improve safety on Rock Creek Parkway for reasons of commuter convenience. In every case, DDOT has chosen to compromise safety in the name of some other priority, and this pattern of compromise is showing up even in the projects still under development.

A little safety for U

Take, for instance, its approach to U Street NW and Florida Avenue NW/NE. The two roads are among the most dangerous in the District. Since 2017, nine people have died there and dozens more have suffered life-changing injuries, according to official crash data. The thriving nightlife and restaurants of U Street and Shaw spawn an obstacle course of double-parked taxis and rideshare vehicles, food delivery drivers, and freight trucks. Buses carrying more than 18,000 people per day slow to a crawl as they weave around the parked cars and through traffic to access the disordered curb space. Drivers who are just passing through frequently shift lanes to avoid left-turning drivers and double-parked cars, while pedestrians hope cars stop at the lights so they can safely cross. Bicyclists, wisely, try to avoid the roads entirely.

To deal with the chaos, DDOT has proposed, with two projects, a busway from 18th Street to the brand-new Mamie “Peanut” Johnson Plaza. Unfortunately, despite some improvements, it’s yet another example of the agency’s failure to truly make safety its top priority.

Two bus lanes will take the place of two of the through-traffic lanes. Some intersections will be hardened to prevent left turns, while others will have new bump-outs and pedestrian refuge islands. Parking will be blocked near intersections so drivers will be able to better see pedestrians crossing.

In presentations, DDOT staff explained that their goal was to speed up buses while still providing space for traffic, parking, and deliveries. Safety improvements were made to the corridor only where they did not interfere with these primary aims. Shunting bicyclists into the bus lanes — which degrades bus reliability and travel speed as well as bicyclist safety — was, according to DDOT, a necessary compromise to ensure drivers were not overly constrained. This is even more dangerous at corners, where turning drivers must merge into the combined bus/bike lane to avoid interfering with the flow of traffic behind them, which also significantly increases stress for bicyclists.

“It’s sad to say … [but] our sweet spot is really, everyone’s a little unhappy,” said Kershbaum in the same July 17 CityCast interview in which she claimed safety was paramount.

DDOT’s deliberate mediocrity

This deliberate mediocrity is a direct outgrowth of DDOT’s approach to Complete Streets, the road-design philosophy under which the department has been operating since 2017. The philosophy, first articulated in 2004 by Smart Growth America and best codified by guidance published by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), attempts to reprogram streets to provide safe and comfortable access for bicyclists and pedestrians alongside drivers and transit. It is a philosophy of deliberate, thoughtful compromise, flexible enough that any department of transportation can adopt the system without harming its commitment to existing standards. But in DDOT’s case, that wiggle room has only enabled it to wiggle away from adequately prioritizing safety.

The shortcomings of DDOT’s approach to Complete Streets are obscured by the fact that it largely has been a revolution for bicyclists in the city. In 2017, just 5% of District trips were done primarily by bicycle, according to the regional Transportation Planning Board. By 2019, the proportion had jumped to 15% and by 2022 it had risen to 22%, according to a GGWash-commissioned analysis cited by DDOT. And, even with more bicyclists on the roads, the number of deaths stayed flat at between 1 and 3 per year while major injuries declined from 61 to 32.

For everyone else, however, the roads became more deadly. In 2024, 19 pedestrians died, up from 11 in 2017. Drivers, their passengers, motorcyclists, and even scooter riders all saw jumps in fatality numbers. Leaving out bicyclists, deaths per year nearly doubled, from 26 to 50.

This is not the fault of more bike lanes on the road: The deadliest roads in the District largely lack safe spaces for bicyclists. Nor is it one of “extreme anti-social behavior” and “incredibly high speeds,” as Kershbaum put it in July. On U Street and Florida Avenue, at least, just two of that corridor’s nine deaths were a result of speed. Rather, it’s the fault of DDOT’s abuse of a philosophy with built-in room for compromise. Perhaps a more prescriptive philosophy is called for.

An uncompromising approach

In 1998, the Netherlands adopted Sustainable Safety, a road-design approach that established a strict hierarchy of roads and associated, necessary measures to achieve safety. At its core are three design principles: function, user vulnerability (“biomechanics”), and clarity (“psychologics”).

Function is dictated by the concept of monofunctionality: the road’s primary traffic purpose. It must be classified as one of three types: a through road with no access to property, a distributor road to move people between neighborhoods, or an access road to get to a destination’s front door. Unlike an American stroad, a Dutch road cannot be both a high-speed thoroughfare and a place to live or shop.

This single classification then dictates the design requirements for all the transportation networks — walking, bicycling, driving, and transit — that use the street. The road’s importance within each network determines the quality of its infrastructure. A distributor road that is also a main bicycling route requires a wide and comfortable cycle track. If it hosts a major, frequent bus route, it needs a dedicated busway. If there is not enough room to serve all of these functions with excellence and safety, the road’s functions must be reduced until it is safe and excellent. A design that is merely adequate is a failure.

Second, the road must address vulnerability. An engineer must ask whether pedestrians or bicyclists will be exposed to traffic and, if so, design the speed limit and any physical protections accordingly. On distributor and access roads, the presence of pedestrians and bicyclists is treated as a given, not an option, and so some form of protection is always required.

Finally, a road’s purpose and the hierarchy of users must be clear to everyone. It must be obvious, so all users understand their place, priority, and obligations.

By focusing on function, safety, and clarity, a Sustainable Safety engineer doesn’t seek to merely balance all users, as the American does, but to establish a hierarchy, creating roads that always put the most vulnerable at the top.

And this method works. Over the first decade of the Sustainable Safety program, road deaths per capita in the Netherlands dropped by 38%, from 7.3 per 100,000 people in 1998 to 4.6 in 2008, stabilizing at a 5-year average of around 3.7 since 2014, according to official data, even while maintaining a road network rated as among the best in the world. (Keep in mind that 74% of Dutch households own a car compared with 65% of Washingtonian households as of 2022.)

Bringing sustainable safety home

We can see how this could play out back home on U Street and Florida Avenue. DC has classified both as “primary arterials,” which means they are distributor roads. Bicyclists and pedestrians will be on the road, so they will need physical protection from other traffic. Looking at the transit network, we find that these roads are also major transit routes, serving more than 18,000 bus riders per day, so they will need dedicated bus lanes.

At this point, the road’s physical constraints start to bite. At just 45 feet wide curb to curb, there is not enough space to add protected bicycle lanes and transit lanes and vehicle lanes, so the lowest-priority network — driving — needs to adjust. For much of the corridor, that will mean removing driving lanes entirely: Neither Florida Avenue nor U Street can safely be major transit routes while catering to drivers as primary arterials. The broader driving network will need to adjust to accommodate spillover traffic, and provisions (such as designated delivery hours or disability exceptions) will need to be made so people can still get to their front doors and deliveries can still be made.

Such a major reworking of the road network would be a significant undertaking: New parking structures would need to be built, new flow patterns accommodated for, and a hefty dose of traffic evaporation encouraged. But because safety cannot be compromised, there is simply no choice.

This is a stark contrast to the compromises made in the busway plans guided by Complete Streets. With DDOT’s preferred approach, it has the risky freedom to weigh safety as just one among many priorities and to balance it against the needs of drivers. The agency’s proposal includes fewer driving lanes, but because it is unthinkable to remove these roads’ designations as primary arterials, the safety and capabilities of all three networks (car, bicycle, and transit) will be degraded. If mere adequacy is failure, these streetscapes, trying to be everything to everyone, certainly qualify.

DDOT is waking up to this reality in its own way. “There used to be a real push for complete streets, and that concept was, ‘We need streets to be all things to all users,’” Kershbaum said. “I believe the reality is [that] the roads just don’t have the dimensions and space to be all things to all users. So, we’re trying to focus on networks.”

“That means that we’re not going to have bike lanes on every road,” she added.

Of course, one should assume there will be car lanes, however shoehorned, on every road.

DC’s walking, bicycling, transit, and driving networks malfunction because they overlap and interfere with one another, with delay and death being the inevitable outcomes. DDOT’s “sweet spot” engineers new failures on Florida Avenue and U Street, sacrifices safety for aesthetics on Arizona Avenue, and wants the National Park Service to put commuter convenience over commuter safety on Rock Creek Parkway. Everyone, even drivers and their passengers, lose.

Adopting Complete Streets was supposed to be the lens that focused DDOT’s energy into making DC’s roads safer. Instead, it has been warped, transforming safety into just another competing priority — a competition it often loses. In reality, DDOT’s “laser focus” is fragmented and diffuse.

As it continues to compromise safety in the name of its myopic notion of “completeness,” the District faces a choice not between bike lanes or bus lanes but rather between the ongoing percussion of death or an actual prioritization of safety that is clear-eyed and purposeful. No compromises.

Correction: A previous version of this post attributed the jump in bicycling to 15% in 2019 and 22% in 2022 to a DDOT study, instead of a GGWash-commisisoned analysis cited by DDOT. The post has been corrected.

Top image: U Street NW can’t safely be a major transit route and a car-first road. But DDOT is allowed to weigh safety as just one of many priorities in its “Complete Streets” approach. Image by Mike Maguire licensed under Creative Commons.

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I mentioned this in last week’s brief thoughts on the end of the government shutdown, but I was kind of annoyed to see “moderates” widely used as the shorthand for the group of eight Democratic senators who decided to back down from the fight with Republicans. I’m annoyed because of course it’s a bad look for “moderation” to be identified with a decision that highly engaged grassroots Democrats hate.

But I’m also annoyed because I think using that terminology to describe what happened during the shutdown genuinely misstates what the broader argument is about.

I think the moderation argument is primarily about:

• Do you prioritize the issues the public says they care most about?

• Do you take positions on issues the public agrees with?

• Do you prioritize delivering on what the public cares about in your governance?

Elissa Slotkin bucking Chuck Schumer’s whip to vote with Republicans on a vote about letting California ban gasoline-burning cars is moderation. Michael Bennet denouncing the Biden administration’s pause on natural gas exports is moderation. Bennet, Cory Booker, and the late Diane Feinstein fighting the Biden administration on behalf of charter schools is moderation. Ruben Gallego backing an immigration reform plan that limits a path to citizenship to Dreamers and the spouses of U.S. citizens — a far narrower approach than the 2007 and 2013 bills — is moderation. Joe Manchin insisting that the Build Back Better plan be pared down to something that was less inflationary was moderation.

Even moderation that I don’t approve of, like Kyrsten Sinema demanding that the legislation scale back its revenue aspirations, can be a meaningful form of moderation. Jared Golden backing the SAVE Act is moderation. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez denouncing student loan forgiveness and fighting with the Biden administration about the regulation of table saws is moderation.

Even those on the left can manifest acts of moderation. Zohran Mamdani disavowing “defund the police” and committing to retaining Jessica Tisch as police commissioner is moderation. That doesn’t make Mamdani “a moderate” in some absolute sense. But he was trying to move to the center relative to his prior image, to reach out to the middle ground of New York City public opinion (which is way to the left of national opinion), and in doing so he successfully got himself a hair over 50 percent of the vote.

I don’t think Chris Murphy would want me to characterize it this way, but taking the lead on negotiating a border security bill with James Lankford last Congress was moderation. He broke the interest group taboo that said hawkish moves on immigration had to take place in the context of a deal for dovish moves on immigration. And, of course, Joe Biden belatedly moved to the middle on this topic by eventually shutting down the asylum system. Earlier, though, back in 2023 Gallego broke with Biden on the border along with Senators Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, and Sherrod Brown, but Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan declined to join them.

I know Shaheen and Hassan think of themselves as moderates, as does Catherine Cortez Masto, and probably some of the other members of the surrender caucus.

But I can’t think of major examples of them fighting with the Biden administration or progressive interest groups about issues or ideas. And in keeping with that (and not meaning this as a defense of the decision to surrender), I don’t think they ended the shutdown for particularly moderate reasons.

If you ask them what they’re up to, they’ll tell you very plainly that they were trying to safeguard the interests of federal employees and low-income Americans. I think a big part of the subtext of the fight is that they wanted to preserve the filibuster. This bit of Senate procedure is something people have been arguing about for decades, but it’s clearly not something that normal voters care a lot about or that has tons of relevance to electoral strategy or party positioning. The case for moderation is a case about aligning with public views and priorities and just has nothing to do with the inside-baseball Senate stuff.

The real stakes of the decision

Understanding of this is unfortunately distorted by the number of opponents of the deal who were posturing in Congress, insisting on painting a picture where the likely alternative to striking a deal would have been for Democrats to score a win on the policy issue of health-insurance tax credits.

There is certainly a universe in which Donald Trump responded to the licking Republicans took in the off-year elections by opening the door to a deal on this topic. That, in fact, might have been the smartest political move for him.

But it’s not the direction he went. If anything, it was the opposite. While the White House’s original posture had been to refuse to indulge Democrats’ demands under threat of a shutdown, the administration was not expressing that much hostility to the idea of extending the tax credits. But evidently there was some kind of internal debate, and Trump started mouthing off hostility to the idea of the tax credits and indeed hostility to the entire idea of government-subsidized health insurance. Wavering Democrats were clearly eager to see what would happen in the elections. If the party underperformed polling, that might be evidence that the shutdown was backfiring and it should end. If Democrats overperformed and Trump seemed open to negotiating, that would have been the time to work on a deal. But Trump made it clear that no deal would happen.

This gave Democrats a choice between reopening the government in exchange for nothing (what the Shaheen Team did) and simply pushing the country into a cascading series of air-traffic-control problems, loss of income for SNAP families, and financial hardship for federal workers.

I think the “push the country into hardship” option made political sense because, as far as we can tell, voters were blaming Trump for the shutdown, so hardship would reduce his popularity and reduce his political power. I’m not sure how Trump would have handled the scenario of escalating national economic pain and unpopularity. Perhaps he would have persuaded Republicans to nuke the filibuster. Perhaps he would have rescinded the Carter-era interpretation of the Antideficiency Act that led to government shutdowns and tried to unilaterally reopen the government. Either way, the shutdown would have eventually ended after some amount of pain for the American people, likely with no concessions on health care.

I was happy to bite that bullet. Just as I’m always urging progressives to abandon some of their policy rigidity for the sake of defeating MAGA, I think it would make sense for progressives to be a bit cold-hearted about this tradeoff for the sake of defeating MAGA. I’d have loved to see Democratic Party politicians and progressive donors mobilizing resources to support SNAP families to further make the political point. And I think the fact that it would’ve ended without concessions on health care anyway would mean that Democrats would still have the issue to run on.

But those of us who criticize the decision to fold should be clear about what we’re asking for.

The shutdown was a winning political hand vis-a-vis Trump — but the mechanism of action is that people suffer. Shaheen was acting in solidarity with federal workers and their labor unions, and in solidarity with SNAP recipients and anti-poverty advocates.

The Shaheen Team also made the point that the bipartisan appropriations bills — which the deal has now cleared the deck for — will set spending levels higher than the continuing resolution, and considerably higher than the levels that would be set if Republicans nuked the filibuster. This wasn’t the Washington Generals blundering away a game for no reason. It was earnest progressive Democrats trying to deliver the least-bad substantive policy outcome. This is the exact same impulse that has Senate Democrats filibustering federal voter ID or the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act — they’re declining to accept short-term policy losses for the sort of political gain that might let them do more good in the long run.

Procedural hardball trades off with policy

The luxury of being a progressive senator with a safe seat is you can live in a world with zero tradeoffs, where you tell everyone that if it were up to you, 100 percent of their dreams would come true.

The problem with this is that even the most ideologically extreme members tend to get bored playing pure fantasy politics and not actually doing anything. Elizabeth Warren, for example, made real concessions of substance — including some very in-the-weeds stuff about consumer protection regulation of mortgage lenders that was probably a bitter pill for her to swallow — to Tim Scott for the sake of getting the ROAD to Housing Act written, passed through committee, and out of the Senate. It’s now pending in the House, where a different set of stakeholders has its own hang-ups, and it may collapse.

But if it passes, it won’t pass because it represents Warren’s pure ideological vision. It represents some ideas she believes in, paired with some other ideas that sealed the deal. And good for her! But imagine that it does pass, and Donald Trump gets to say he’s signing historic bipartisan legislation to address housing affordability. That’s pretty great politics for Trump. Someone, somewhere, who is not as much of a housing supply head as Warren and I both are is going to be asking, “Why did Democrats give Trump this win?”

And in the real world, this is a common tradeoff.

A lot of progressive fighters have a kind of envy of the extreme procedural hardball that Republicans played in the mid-Obama years. It’s worth recalling, though, that this hardball involved Republicans rejecting offers from Obama for meaningful cuts to both Medicare and Social Security.

In formal terms, the reason they didn’t do the deal is that it would have raised taxes. But in truth, taxes were scheduled to rise anyway (and, in fact, did) due to the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts. They just didn’t want to do anything that would let Obama run for re-election as having achieved a major bipartisan deficit-reduction deal. They wanted to beat Obama and then run the table in 2013. But instead Obama won, and they lost the opportunity to lock in policy gains.

One reason Obama was optimistic that the fever would break if he won the election is that he thought Republicans would see it was a mistake to prioritize hardball over policy wins.

What happened instead, of course, was the rise of Trump, who is certainly a huge fan of hardball politics. Progressives often look at that and characterize Trump as an ultra-conservative. But part of Trump’s whole deal was just completely giving up on G.O.P. policy goals with regard to Social Security and Medicare. He didn’t make the tradeoff go away; he just chose definitively to prioritize crushing the left over cutting federal transfer payments.

Fighters versus policy-demanders

I also want to clarify here that I’m not just talking out of my ass. The faction urging the Democrats to be more moderate isn’t saying they should be like Jeanne Shaheen.

Third Way President Jonathan Cowan denounced the deal in a press release. Note that the shutdown fight itself — which was about health-care tax credits rather than authoritarianism or ICE raids — was from the get-go moderate in its conception. Moderates want Democrats to fight on their best issues rather than tilt over stuff the public doesn’t care about, and incremental expansions of the health-care safety net are one of Democrats’ very best issues.

My favorite group of elected officials is the Majority Democrats. If you look at their Senate members (Gallego, Slotkin, and Bennet) and their members who are running for Senate (Angie Craig and James Talarico), none of them were for the deal.

I also think the exceptions here prove the rule. The party’s two successful gubernatorial candidates this year, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, are both Majority Democrats. They’re also similar politicians — elected in the same House class, roommates in D.C., good friends by all accounts — and have broadly similar approaches. Sherrill, like the rest of the Majority Dems, was against the deal but Spanberger came out for it.

Is that because Spanberger is more moderate than Sherrill? I don’t think it is. It’s pretty obviously because the cost-benefit of sacrificing federal workers’ paychecks for the sake of getting over on Trump looks different from Richmond than from Trenton.

Precisely for that reason, I kind of wish Spanberger had come out swinging against a deal days before it was announced to show that even though a deal is narrowly good for Virginia, she still wanted to fight.

But I bring up the difference because I think it illustrates what the actual tradeoff is here. Tim Kaine was on the bubble, but joined the dealmakers at the last minute because he got Republicans to make concessions protecting federal workers from Trump’s efforts at mass layoffs. Again, I think it’s totally comprehensible that a Virginia politician would consider this concrete policy win very important. I wish he saw it otherwise, but it illustrates the actual dynamic here, which is that dealmakers were prioritizing policy outcomes while rejectionists wanted to accept a worse policy outcome for the sake of political combat.

I will also say that I am not fanatical about this. There is a universe in which Trump said “yes” to Chuck Schumer’s proposal to extend the tax credits by one year, and I think a bunch of Democrats would have voted for that deal. I bet hardcore partisan brawlers would have been pretty disappointed with that outcome, too, because they are true fanatics about the ethic of fight fight fight. But that would just turn it into a losing fight.

Either way, though, there’s no getting around the basic tradeoff of fighting versus policy wins.

National party leadership matters most

One bit of nuance here is that moderates do genuinely value politicians who can win in Trump districts. I think Henry Cuellar and Tom Suozzi, both of whom fit this bill, are valuable to the Democratic Party because ultimately the road to a majority requires winning those seats.

These guys tend not to be big partisan brawlers on process questions; Cuellar and Suozzi weren’t involved in the dealmaking or the strategic decision to throw in the towel. But, once the deal was sealed, they voted for it because people in mismatched districts like to have bipartisan voting records.

This is why, even though I personally admire our brave Blue Dogs holding down red districts, I do not think that “recruit more moderate candidates” is the only solution to Democrats’ problems. I’ve been trying to be more conscious in recent months about the need to be clear on this. I think these are good politicians, and Democrats should recruit more like them. But recruitment doesn’t magically solve problems. That’s because:

1. It’s incredibly hard for politicians to credibly differentiate themselves from national party brands.

2. It’s incredibly hard for politicians representing red districts to engage in the kind of partisan hardball that would genuinely cripple MAGA.

The solution is that instead of just recruiting candidates who can win in red districts, national Democrats need to try to be a national political party that can win in red districts, such that those districts are no longer red.

My go-to example of this is that if Democrats won’t accept that the Democratic senators from Pennsylvania and Colorado and New Mexico won’t vote for a fracking ban because those states have oil and gas industries, then obviously Democrats aren’t going to win in redder Ohio and Texas and Alaska while banning fracking either.

The solution is for Chuck Schumer, Brian Schatz, and — yes — Jeanne Shaheen to make the entire Democratic Party into a party that’s not trying to ban fracking. That makes life much easier for Sherrod Brown. It makes it easier to recruit Mary Peltola. It means that Talarico and Colin Allred can wage a vigorous primary without either of them committing to anything politically suicidal.

I don’t want to re-do my whole schtick about this. But the point is that a more moderate Democratic Party, to me, means a national party with leaders and safe seat members who are genuinely trying to become more popular — who are more willing to align with majority opinion on major issues and less in hock to progressive policy-demanders. It’s not a party that relies on candidates who distance themselves from the party to win tough seats, but a party that positions itself such that candidates don’t need to distance themselves so much in order to win. And it’s definitely not a party that reflexively abandons the public-opinion high ground in order to secure obscure policy wins about appropriations levels.

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A small Missouri town will pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a man whose 13-pound blind and deaf shih tzu dog was shot and killed by a police officer. It is one of the largest settlements of its kind, an animal rights group says.

Nicholas Hunter filed a lawsuit last year against the City of Sturgeon, Missouri, and former Sturgeon police officer Myron Woodson, alleging his Fourth Amendment rights were violated when Woodson killed his dog Teddy shortly after finding it wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19, 2024.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), an animal rights advocacy group, provided a grant to help cover costs for the lawsuit and announced the settlement last Friday in a press release.

"Mr. Hunter is relieved this matter is concluded but nothing can ever bring his Teddy back," Hunter's attorneys, Daniel J. Kolde and Eric C. Crinnian, said in the release. "Teddy was a good dog who did not deserve this. We hope that other departments will learn from this and train their officers better in the future so events like this don't happen again. We also are grateful to the ALDF for their support and efforts to bring light to tragedies like Teddy and encourage better training and more responsible police behavior towards beloved family pets."

Teddy's shooting was a particularly egregious example of a common phenomena: police needlessly shooting family dogs. (There have been so many cases over the years that we have a "puppycide" tag for stories on the Reason website.) No one knows exactly how many dogs police shoot around the country, but every year, there are more cases of wanton killings that, besides terrorizing owners, generate huge lawsuits, viral outrage, and sometimes result in officers being fired or facing trial, such as in the case of a New Orleans officer who shot and killed a puppy.

The trouble in Sturgeon started on May 19, 2024, when Teddy escaped from Hunter's backyard while Hunter was out at dinner. Hunter's neighbor called a county dispatch center to report that the dog had wandered into their yard. According to Hunter's lawsuit, the caller responded, "No, not at all," when asked if the dog was aggressive.

The town of Sturgeon's official Facebook page posted an alert on May 19 about the missing dog, along with photos of Teddy: "Do you know this doggie? Joint communications has been notified. The doggie seems in need of medical attention."

Hunter had been called about the Facebook post and was on his way to pick up Teddy. Instead, Woodson beat him to the scene, and a few minutes later, the officer shot the dog twice, killing it.

The city of Sturgeon posted on Facebook about the incident the next day, defending Woodson's decision: "Based on the behavior exhibited by the dog, believing the dog to be severely injured or infected with rabies, and as the officer feared being bitten and being infected with rabies, the SPD [Sturgeon Police Department] officer felt that his only option was to put the animal down," the city wrote. "It was later learned that the animal's behavior was because the animal was blind. Unfortunately, the animal's lack of a collar or tags influenced the SPD Officer's decision to put the animal down due to his belief that the animal was injured, sick and abandoned."

But when the local news outlet ABC 17 obtained Woodson's body camera footage, it showed that Teddy was never aggressive and didn't bark or growl. Woodson tried to lasso Teddy with a catch pole—a common tool used in animal control—but the dog simply shook its head free of the rope and trotted away. After fumbling the catch pole several times, Woodson drew his gun and killed Teddy. ABC 17 reported that Woodson's entire encounter with Teddy, from exiting his car to putting two bullets in the animal, lasted three minutes and six seconds.

Yet after body camera footage was released, Sturgeon doubled down: "The City believes that the officer acted within his authority based on the information available to him at the time to protect against possible injury to citizens from what appeared to be an injured, sick, and abandoned dog," Sturgeon posted in a follow-up Facebook post.

Hunter filed a federal lawsuit within a week of the shooting.

In a deposition, Woodson testified that he destroyed the animal because "I believed the dog was seriously injured and suffering."

Sturgeon city officials suspended Woodson and promised to conduct an investigation, but according to Hunter's lawsuit, that investigation never occurred. The city allegedly instead paid Woodson a $16,000 settlement regarding his suspension.

Woodson no longer works for the SPD and is apparently a process server. ABC 17 reported last week that Woodson was charged with trespassing for allegedly refusing police officers' orders to leave a retirement home where he was attempting to serve papers.

Chris Green, executive director of the ALDF, said in a statement that the settlement is "one of the largest of its kind for the police shooting of a beloved family dog."

The typical size of these settlements has grown substantially since a court ruling in the early 2000s established that the Fourth Amendment protects pets from unreasonable "seizures"—that is, killings. In 2018, a Maryland jury awarded $1.26 million to a family whose dog was shot and killed by police. As Reason reported that year, these settlements and the intense public backlash has caught police departments' attention; they've started to incorporate training for officers to recognize dog behaviors and respond with non-lethal methods first. It's a step that animal rights groups say is long overdue.

"These horrendous tragedies are completely unnecessary and preventable with simple, adequate training," Green continued. "I hope this half-million-dollar amount sends a message to other police departments that if your officers needlessly harm an animal, you will pay."

The City of Sturgeon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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