Positive Liberty

Or, a glimpse into the absurdly overregulated world of nighttime entertainment.

Background: For longer than anyone has been alive, U Street Northwest has been a center of nightlife in Washington, DC. It’s home to revered cultural establishments like the Lincoln Theater — but also to the 9:30 Club, The Black Cat, and many other popular destinations. In short, it’s the place to party in Washington, at least if you don’t belong to the Georgetown set (and really, who can afford to these days?).

U Street is also home to Cada Vez, a restaurant that hosts live latin music and a once-a-week gay and lesbian party.

There’s also dancing — and that’s where the trouble begins.

Cada Vez is licensed as a restaurant; under the terms agreed to by the owners, it must draw at least 45% of its income from food, it may not play rock or hip-hop music, and the floor area used for dancing may be no larger than 10′x15′. It’s also subject to all of the other regulations that restaurants holding a liquor license normally face.

Add a few disgruntled neighbors, and the result is a clear-cut case of regulatory harassment:

[Manager Chao Charles Zhou] counts about 180 inspections from various agencies over the past two years. “We’ve had ABRA visits. We’ve had Health Department visits. We’ve had fire-department visits, zoning-department visits–we even had Department of Public Works visits about our recycling plan,” says Zhou. “At the end of the day, they could not substantiate anything besides ‘Oh, you have a few people dancing outside of the box.’”

Ah yes, “dancing outside of the box”—perhaps the venue’s most heinous straying from the tenets of its original paperwork.

Make no mistake about it: These visits aren’t aimed at ensuring that Cada Vez is a sound, upstanding establishment. Often coming at a pace of three inspections a week, their intent is simply to run the place out of business. How do I know? A pair of private citizens has been phoning in continual complaints — and DC law is written such that all citizen complaints, even anonymous ones, must be formally investigated. The duo, husband-and-wife team Mark and Christina Parascandola, has also videotaped the establishment and its patrons and filed complaints against another venue hosting gay-themed events. This last is just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Proposals to end the complaints have included banning merengue and salsa music — making it jazz only at a place whose, ahem, Spanish name means “every time” — banning dancing, and revoking its liquor license entirely.

According to [Advisory Neighborhood Commission head Ramon] Estrata and other neighborhood activists in the U Street area, Cada Vez is operating as a nightclub disguised as a restaurant. They say its customers have created noise and parking problems in the alley that separates the restaurant from several apartment buildings and townhouses.

Zhou disputes this claim, saying that his restaurant meets all of the legal requirements of a restaurant, including the requirement that 45 percent or more of its revenue originates from the sale of food rather than alcoholic beverages. He said the establishment offers valet parking, and his staff cleans the alley and does all it can to keep down the noise level.

He said opponents are unfairly blaming Cada Vez for noise and traffic created by more than a dozen other entertainment businesses in the popular U Street entertainment strip that stretches from 15th Street to 10th Street.

Cada Vez is located at 15th and U Street, next to a gas station that is open 24 hours.

A decision on renewing Cada Vez’s liquor license is expected sometime this month.

Here are my questions:

1. To the neighborhood activists: If you wanted peace and quiet, why did you move to U Street, a pricey neighborhood with a worldwide reputation for nightlife? I can’t help but think that you knew what you were getting into, and if you’re living there, I’m sure you can afford to live in many other places, too.

2. To the residents of DC: I understand entirely that nightclubs and even restaurants can sometimes create negative externalities. Can’t you find a better way to deal with them, one that doesn’t let a few busybodies harass a place into closing?

3. To the economists: Is it at all thinkable that, in a well-established nightlife district like U Street, the price of the expected negative externalities is already more or less factored into the property values, and that virtually all buyers in the market are going to know this when they make their decisions? If so, then only particularly new, unexpected, or egregious externalities would be appropriate grounds for complaint.

4. To the philosophers: If I shake my booty at Alain Ducasse’s, does it morph into a nightclub? Just how many booty shakers does it take? Can I get a comment thread going about sorities?

5. To the DC fan base: Maybe we could party at Cada Vez sometime?

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