Local
Comings & Goings
Urban Pace sold; Shotwell promoted
The ‘Comings & Goings’ column chronicles important life changes of Blade readers.
The Comings and Goings column is about sharing the professional successes of our community. We want to recognize those landing new jobs, new clients for their business, joining boards of organizations and other achievements. Please share your successes with us at [email protected].
Lynn Hackney
Congratulations to Lynn Hackney who sold her firm Urban Pace to Long and Foster. Hackney is a well-known entrepreneur and innovator in the Washington, D.C. multifamily real estate industry. According to its website, “Urban Pace, is the leading condominium sales and marketing firm in the nation’s capital (also serving urban Maryland and Virginia).” Since Hackney founded Urban Pace in 2001, the company has orchestrated the disposition of more than $1.8 billion of real estate assets comprising more than 6,000 condominiums and townhomes. According to the Washington Business Journal, Hackney said, “Urban Pace will continue to operate at the same location with the same staff but teaming up with a larger real estate company made sense since many players in the condo marketing space have done so over the years.”
Hackney is also a partner in Allyson Capital, a New York- and D.C.-based firm specializing in equity and debt for residential and commercial real estate transactions. Complementing Urban Pace’s full range of services to developers, Allyson Capital provides specialized financing for projects with an average valuation of $30 million each.
In 2015, Hackney was the winner of Smart CEO’s Brava Award, placing her among Washington’s most distinguished women business leaders. She serves as vice president on the executive committee of the District of Columbia Building Industry Association and was a founding member of the Washington ULI Women’s Leadership Initiative and board member of Capital Bank.
In addition Hackney, along with her wife Kimberly Hoover, has been a major fundraiser and volunteer in several national presidential election campaigns. She is a longtime resident of D.C. and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in economics and finance from Virginia Commonwealth University.
David Shotwell
Congratulations are also due to David Shotwell who was recently named one of Compass’ newest vice presidents. Compass is a New York-based real estate brokerage with a large presence in D.C. and other top markets in the country. This recognition was based on client satisfaction, brand ambassadorship, brokerage and industry engagement and sales production.
Shotwell’s clients include first-time buyers and sellers to seasoned investors, with a special focus on livable neighborhoods and empty nesters. Before he began his career in real estate, Shotwell worked at AARP for 13 years, where he led national efforts to promote livable communities, including walkable neighborhoods, accessible housing, access to transportation options, smart growth and mixed-use development. He is a Certified Aging-in-Place Specialist (CAPS), an Accredited New Urbanist from the School of Architecture at the University of Miami and a member of The Congress for New Urbanism (CNU).
Shotwell takes his love of the city and its surrounding neighborhoods beyond buying and selling — since moving to D.C. in 1998, he has lived in Shaw, Logan Circle, U Street, Woodley Park, Old Town, Alexandria and Del Ray. He and his partner currently own a home in D.C.’s Bloomingdale neighborhood. Shotwell is hooked on HGTV and real estate blogs, but he isn’t always thinking about home. An avid traveler, he has visited every continent except Antarctica.
District of Columbia
Mayor Bowser signs bill requiring insurers to cover PrEP
‘This is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser on March 20 signed a bill approved by the D.C. Council that requires health insurance companies to cover the costs of HIV prevention or PrEP drugs for D.C. residents at risk for HIV infection.
Like all legislation approved by the Council and signed by the mayor, the bill, called the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act, was sent to Capitol Hill for a required 30-day congressional review period before it takes effect as D.C. law.
Gay D.C. Council member Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5) last year introduced the bill.
Insurance coverage for PrEP drugs has been provided through coverage standards included in the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. But AIDS advocacy organizations have called on states and D.C. to pass their own legislation requiring insurance coverage of PrEP as a safeguard in case federal policies are weakened or removed by the Trump administration, which has already reduced federal funding for HIV/AIDS-related programs.
Like legislation passed by other states, the PrEP D.C. Amendment Act requires insurers to cover all PrEP drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Studies have shown that PrEP drugs, which can be taken as pills or by injection just twice a year, are highly effective in preventing HIV infection.
“I think this is a win for our community,” Parker said after the D.C. Council voted unanimously to approve the bill on its first vote on the measure in February. “And this is a win in the fight against HIV/AIDS.”
District of Columbia
Blade editor to be inducted into D.C. Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame
Kevin Naff marks 24 years with publication this year
Longtime Washington Blade Editor Kevin Naff will be inducted into D.C.’s Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame in June, the group announced this week.
Hall of Fame honorees are chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., Pro Chapter. Naff and two other inductees — Seth Borenstein, a Washington-based national science writer for the AP and Cheryl W. Thompson, an award-winning correspondent for National Public Radio — will be celebrated at the chapter’s Dateline Awards dinner on Tuesday, June 9, at the National Press Club. The dinner’s emcee will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU radio’s weekly “Politics Hour.”
“I am tremendously honored by this recognition,” Naff said. “I have spent a lifetime in the D.C. area learning from so many talented journalists and am humbled to be considered in their company. Thank you to SPJ and to all the LGBTQ pioneers who came before me who made this possible.”
Naff joined the Blade in 2002 after years in print and digital journalism. He worked as a financial reporter for Reuters in New York before moving to Baltimore in 1996 to launch the Baltimore Sun’s website. He spent four years at the Sun before leaving for an internet startup and later joining the mobile data group at Verizon Wireless working on the first generation of mobile apps.
He then moved to the Blade and has served as the publication’s longest-tenured editor. In 2023, Naff published his first book, “How We Won the War for LGBTQ Equality — And How Our Enemies Could Take It All Away.”
Previous Hall of Fame inductees include luminaries in journalism like Wolf Blitzer, Benjamin Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, and Edgar Allen Poe. The Blade’s senior news reporter Lou Chibbaro Jr. was inducted in 2015.
Maryland
Supreme Court ruling against conversion therapy bans could affect Md. law
Then-Gov. Larry Hogan signed statute in 2018
By PAMELA WOOD, JOHN-JOHN WILLIAMS IV, and MADELEINE O’NEILL | The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against a law banning “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ kids in Colorado, a ruling that also could apply to Maryland’s ban on the discredited practice.
An 8-1 high court majority sided with a Christian counselor who argues the law banning talk therapy violates the First Amendment. The justices agreed that the law raises free speech concerns and sent it back to a lower court to decide whether it meets a legal standard that few laws pass.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the court’s majority, said the law “censors speech based on viewpoint.” The First Amendment, he wrote, “stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”
The rest of this article can be read on the Baltimore Banner’s website.
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