I own a family of real estate management companies. We tend to thousands of homes throughout the District. Gun violence and crime in the city are not new to us. It’s not new to any resident. But during a recent week, I considered closing my offices — in a matter of days and in broad daylight, there were three separate shootings in a three-block radius of our building.
As a business owner and community member in D.C., I live in a world of policies, meetings and agendas. I talk about quarterly income and employee satisfaction. I talk about policy for nonprofit boards, policy in the buildings we manage, policy for my offices. But when I stopped to think about it, we have not had proactive conversations about anti-gun violence policy. We were only talking about fear. We were reacting to the last shooting. And then the next. And the next.
My companies have proudly operated in a converted liquor store on First Street and Florida Avenue NW since 2014. You might recognize it by the black…
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