Overview

Takoma Park is a city in Montgomery County, Maryland, directly adjacent to the northern boundary of Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1883 as a railroad-suburb retreat marketed to Washingtonians as a place of “fresh air and high moral tone,” and has, in the century and a half since, retained the second of those two qualities with considerable emphasis.

The city is best known, regionally and nationally, for a series of ordinances that have collectively established what residents describe as “a particular civic identity” and what officials of neighboring jurisdictions describe, in off-the-record conversations, as “a lot.” In 1983, the City Council adopted the Nuclear-Free Zone Act, prohibiting the conduct of “nuclear weapons work” within the municipal limits and requiring that contracts with the city be reviewed for compliance. In 1992, the city extended the franchise in local elections to noncitizen residents, becoming one of the first U.S. municipalities to do so. In 2013, the voting age for municipal elections was lowered to sixteen. Each of these measures has been the subject of periodic national commentary, to which the city has responded with the steady patience of a jurisdiction that considered the matter some time ago and has not revisited it since.

Takoma Park’s principal thoroughfare, Carroll Avenue, is lined with independent bookstores, food co-ops, a free-store, two vegan bakeries, a repair café that meets on the second Saturday of every month, and a branch of the public library whose community bulletin board is considered, by residents of surrounding jurisdictions, to be the most ideologically dense square meter in the National Capital Region. The city’s annual Fourth of July parade includes, by longstanding custom, a brigade of residents on decorated bicycles, a contingent of drumming grandmothers, and a float sponsored by the local food co-op that has, in recent years, abandoned any pretense of a theme.

The city is governed by a mayor and six councilmembers. Meetings of the council are notable for their duration, the civility of public comment, and the practice, unusual among municipalities of its size, of resolving procedural disputes through consensus rather than vote. A 2022 session on the placement of a single speed hump ran nine hours and produced a seventy-three-page record.

Local Character

Takoma Park residents are, by the city’s own formulation, “engaged.” The density of yard signs per block is among the highest in the country. The composition of yard signs rotates with the season — election cycles in the spring and fall, climate in the summer, solidarity in the winter — and a 2024 study by an urban-planning graduate student at the University of Maryland found that only 3 percent of residential properties displayed no yard sign of any kind, a category the study labeled “quietist.”

The civic culture is one of sustained, deliberate participation. The farmers’ market, held Sunday mornings on Laurel Avenue, is considered by its patrons to be “more than a farmers’ market,” a claim they will elaborate on if invited. Neighborhood listservs are vigorously active and are occasionally the subject of outside scholarship. Residents have been known to decline offers to relocate for employment in other jurisdictions by citing, among other reasons, “the listserv.”

Political disagreements in Takoma Park tend to concern method rather than direction. Residents agree, almost universally, on the destination; they disagree, sometimes at length, about the route. A 2021 dispute over whether the city should divest its municipal holdings from a particular category of mutual fund, or from all categories of mutual fund, was resolved by a working group that delivered a forty-page report and a plate of home-baked granola bars.

The city’s relationship with Washington, D.C., immediately to its south, is cordial and slightly distant. Takoma Park residents tend to speak of the District the way small European countries speak of larger ones next door — appreciatively, a little warily, and with the awareness that most of the weather comes from that direction.

Notable Residents

  • Brendan Vossmeier, 34, a writer and self-described organizer whose thirteen-year failure to register to vote has, in his own account, become a sustained act of anti-patriarchal resistance.

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