When Historic Districts Attack- The 4th Amendment

This is a reposting of an old post from 2007. For some odd reason I was thinking about when historic districting goes south and remembered this case.

Long story short, artist Laura Elkins and John Robbins were getting on the Historic Preservation Office’s (HPO) and DCRA’s bad side and it resulted in a search warrant of their home, where they were living. The incident got some press. It attracted my attention. And it worked its way through the courts. Leagle has a pretty good summary of the case.

See also- Memorandum Opinion- 2007
Memorandum Opinion- 2008
United States Court of Appeals 2012 Decision


File under WTF?

Thanks Ray for pointing out an article in the Washington Times [dead link] (as I hardly ever read that paper) of a couple who won a lawsuit against the DC government for a raid on their home, unlawful seizure of papers from said home, regarding perceived Historic Preservation violations.
A little Google search regarding the saga reveals differing opinions on if the couple actually did the HPRB dance correctly, which is not the matter that makes me fearful, it was the police raid of their home that concerns my little libertarian heart. The portion of the 4th amendment the violation in this is “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
According to the lawsuit [pdf] a March 26, 2003 warrant was issued to search the home of Ms. Elkins and Mr. Robbins, but the warrant didn’t say anything about seizing papers or the like. The next day DC’s finest and DCRA “officials went throughout the home (including the
bedrooms of sick children home from school), opening drawers, observing, and taking photos.”
Seriously, this is just supposed to be about exterior crap, not worthy of a f*ing raid. One of the few things I agree with the pro-Historic District people on is that HDs are about the outside aesthetics of house, and what can be observed from the street, etc, etc. However, this, is something else. Investigate the case for yourself, decide if DC went too far a violated a family’s privacy and order.
On the bright side, Ms. Elkins, an artist, has turned her experience into art.

no Twitter with current id

InShaw Blog Update-2003-2010 catalog added

I started this blog on Blogger and then due to some changes regarding URLs I moved to Moveable Type and then my host no longer supported that and so I’m using WordPress. I thought I added the Blogger posts but discovered the only posts that migrated over were from an announcement page I had. I have the main Blogger posts at dcinshaw.blogspot.com, but I have finally imported those posts, images and comments to this blog. Now there are over 2,500 posts here.

Sadly the Moveable Type (2010-2013) posts are still in limbo. Right now I can’t seem to locate those files. I’m sure they are on an external drive somewhere.

My Dream of Shaw- Looking back at 2003

Yes, for the few of you still following, I changed the look of the blog.

Back on the old blog, which is still sitting at inshaw.com/blog and duplicated somewhere here there is a post I wrote 14 years ago. Fourteen years, that’s a teenager. That’s half the lifetime of some of the newer resident’s walking around! Fourteen years ago, Shaw was a different place. So I’m going to repost that dream.

Note: I don’t feel the same way now as I did then, and I probably wouldn’t put it the same way as I did back then. But for the sake of honesty and truth, I’m not editing it, not even for the spelling errors.

From In Shaw An Historically Gentrified Blog

My Dream of Shaw
Taking an idea from my church’s reading group that we are constantly changing the world into what it aught (ms) to be, I began thinking about what I would like Shaw to be in the near future.
I want a diverse neighborhood. Diversity meaning a strange balance between rich and poor; black, white, hispanic and asian; poor, lower income, middle class, upper-middle class, and rich; old and young; gay and straight, all these in numbers where one does not stick out like a sore thumb or overwhelm and dictate the nature of Shaw.
Jesus said the poor shall always be with us. As long as there is public housing in Shaw and Section 8, we will have our poor. Yet, I have been reading that poor can be a temporary situtation. I grew up poor, in a lower class neighborhood. Some of my friends grew up the same, working class, or homeless, but have transcended poverty and wander somewhere in the middle class zone. I hope the same for my neice and nephew who are currently on public assistance, that they too may transcend their current economic standing. In order to transend poverty or at least not have it as a permanent designation for a family, there must be opportunities in the form of education, training and jobs; things lacking in areas of concentrated poverty. In order to de-concentrate you have to bring in the other classes. Bringing in the other classes will result in the displacement of the poor but not all the poor.
To balance the economic groupings of Shaw, the area needs a healthy middle class population to deconcentrate poverty. This middle class should range from contractors, plumbers, teachers, police, civil servants, IT, and retirees who invested well. They should provide the tax base to help fund social services and give to socially minded charities. But realistically, their numbers will displace some, raise prices (rent, real estate taxes), and they will make demands that old timers will find annoying.
In an 2001 Washington City Paper article an author, writing about his U Street neighborhood, mentioned that as soon as the area blacks begin moving into the middle class they move out of DC and into PG County, just over the border. He noted how the houses in his immdediate area were being bought by whites. My point, you can’t force black folks to stay, especially when they aren’t convinced that the crap they put up with (drug dealing, crime, trash, etc) isn’t going to go away soon enough. Why wait 5 years for the area to get better if you can buy in a quieter lower crime area today? If blacks aren’t moving in great numbers to replace the ones moving out, and there are whites/hispanics/asians willing to pay top dollar, then logically the racial demographics of the area will change. There are middle class black buying and staying in Shaw, but not in the numbers to maintain an overwelming majority. We come as singles, working married/gay couples, not so much as families with children. We are putting up with the crime, the trash, and all the other reasons of why those who have moved out, moved out, hoping that in a few years it will improve. I hope more black middle class households move to Shaw to make it the gleaming neighborhood it once was before the riots and to maintain the history of the area. But realistically, non-blacks are attracted to the area, and hopefully their numbers ( I’m specifically thinking of the clutch you purse ever time they see a black person population) will not overwhelm making it uncomfortable for blacks.
As far as businesses go, I dream of fewer liquor stores. A few places where I can walk to in 15-20 minutes from the house and grab a pastry, or sit down and eat, or buy a book. U Street has a lot of that with Cake Love (great cakes!!!) the kazillion Ethopian restaurants, the Islander Restaurant, and the other stores along U and 14th Streets. I would live to see some of that along 7th Street and North Capitol. I dream of places where I want to spend my money because they have something I want.
Shaw should be diverse. It should have services and businesses for everyone. It should be low in crime and as clean as a city can be. It should feel like home.

Grant a Wish for Bread for the City

Well the building is coming along nicely.
Anyway Bread for the city has a wish list of some items you might have around the house:

SmarTrip Cards or Metro Bus Tokens
Forks (for our cooking classes)
Coat Racks
Can Openers for our clients
Cleaning supplies/ Laundry detergent
Gift cards to grocery stores, Wal-mart, Target, CVS, etc
Plastic Storage Bins of all sizes

There is a longer list here. Contact Nathan LaBorie at 202.386.7611 to donate.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on June 14, 2010 8:36 AM.

Random thoughts on housing and affordablity – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

There was a recent report on the relationship between minimum wages and the affordability of a two bedroom apartment. I’m going to reveal a little of my philosophical bent when I write a minimum wage job has as much to do with a 2 bedroom unit as a studio apartment as to do with housing a family of 4.

I remember a lovely trip to NYC where we visited the Tenement Museum, I highly recommend it. Large families would live in these cruddy little spaces which were the size of some studio apartments. We learned laws to make these places more sanitary slowly and later quickly incentivized landlords to close up the tenement apartments and just rent to commercial enterprises. There are costs to renting residential housing borne by the landlord, in the case of Lower East Side landlords, it wasn’t worth it.

So what are the costs to rent out say a small apartment building in DC. Well for one, you need to get a small apartment building. The cheapest building so far is an empty 4 unit near Ft. Totten for $895K. From what I can tell it needs work and could turn into 6 units if you have a lot of 1 bedroom apartments. The minimum monthly payment and we haven’t fixed the place for human habitation is around $6000. If the owner decides to fix it up, that costs money to pay for permits, labor and materials. Over $1500 a unit if we have 4 apartments, $1000 with 6. Insurance, maintenance, utilities for common areas, property taxes, and property management haven’t been added. There are some other concepts such as vacancy, that time when no one is in the unit covering the mortgage. Then there is the idea of profit because what is the point, unless you’re a non-profit with another motivation.

Even companies and persons who’ve owned their properties a while still have to pay for updates, maintenance, management (the people you call when you need maintenance), insurance, property taxes and a bunch of other stuff.

But when you are the one looking to rent, that doesn’t matter. There are many people looking to rent and if a landlord can charge $X,xxx for their dinky little 1 bedroom they will, provided it is worth renting it out over mothballing it.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on May 30, 2016 9:12 PM.

Make your suburban friends jealous – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

Okay so if you’re young enough or new enough you’re probably spending half, or more than half of your income on a small apartment or tiny townhouse in the city. There is probably a reason why you chose to live in Shaw or Bloomingdale or Mt. Vernon Sq. over Springfield, Beltsville, or Mt. Vernon. For me it is the awesome commute (20 mins from front door to butt at desk) and the ability to live over a decade without owning a car. Maybe for you it’s the 5 minute walk to your favorite bar, or your second favorite bar. Or maybe you see the ridiculousness of driving 10 minutes or more to a gym to spend ½ an hour on a treadmill staring at CNN, when you my citified friend can walk or bike or take a bus to the kickbox-parkour-pilates-power-hot-yoga place…. While on your phone updating your Twitter. Do that in a car and you’ll find yourself wrapped around a pole, or in a ditch.

 

Our suburban friends, we love them, and I’m sure they love us, but they don’t see why we’d choose less than 1000 sq feet of urban jungle over .25 acres of grass that needs mowing and private parking. Remind them of what they’re missing and why it’s worth it. At least remind yourself.

 

It helps if your neighborhood is great. I have a bias for Shaw. Even in the bad old days of Shaw, with hot a cold drug dealers and gunshots every other night, it was walkable and close to Downtown with lots of transportation options (bus and metro train). Yes, no one wanted to deliver food to you, or come by and pick you up in their cab, but I had more options in early 00s Shaw than I did in Hyattsville. Now, Shaw is amazing and gets more amazing each day. There is still crime and drug dealing but the good mostly outshines the bad. There are more transportation options, I can start sentences with, “Lets get an Uber …” and have one at my door in less than 4 minutes. There are 2 Capital Bikeshare stations within a 3 minute walk from my house. And there are those little Car2Go things all over the place. I can walk to church, to either the Giant or the Safeway, to the metro, and to more than 50 bars, restaurants, and other eateries. There are a handful of places that want to deliver food to me from more than 100 restaurants.

Inside BKK on Snow DayWhen we had that big snowstorm (yes, I know it is summery now… finally) and the streets were blocked and folks who lived in less dense areas were stuck in their houses. We, were able to trudge to the restaurants and businesses that were open because some business owners were local. That was one little perk of living in town.

So enjoy the life you live, in the city.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on May 25, 2016 11:06 PM.

MISSING: Neighbor Cat Lila – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

A cat that is as much of a neighbor to me as her two cat parents, Lila has gone missing.
She is 20 years old. Yes, she is an old kitty, and like some of the elderly, probably has dementia and has wandered off.
She was last seen somewhere along 1st and Bates. Her home is the 1600 block of 4th St NW.
Yes, there are a lot of black cats wandering the neighborhood, but these are the features of Lila:

  • She is 100% black.
  • She has a red collar with a heart shaped tag with her name and her people’s number.
  • Her rear legs are a little stiff.
  • She hates being picked up but she won’t fight you.

If you see her, grab the old lady and call the number on her tag. Her people have put up signs so I’m not sure what phone number is listed.  Please call 413-9699 if you see her.  I’ll update this when I talk to her people. Please help us return her to our street so she may sit on top of her trash can again.

If time is no issue, email me at {removed}.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on May 21, 2016 2:21 PM.

2.5 centuries of DC architecture – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

Morgan St HousesI have no idea how old these Morgan Street houses are. Mid-Late 19th Century off the top of my head and I think there is some construction going on that block. So this photo is old.
DC has tons of old buildings. Call them historic if you want to get all fancy pants. The folks at RENTCafé sent me this from their post “D.C. Architecture:  260 Years of Home Design Evolution in the Nation’s Capital“. At first glance I thought they did this thing that a lot of people do, include parts of Maryland and Virginia but it looks like it is pure DC (a lot of upper and way west NW, but still DC). So enjoy.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on May 18, 2016 3:46 PM.

Visitors Stink After a While – In Shaw – Mari in the Citi

Let me start of with a story about my mom, who I think is a wonderful person. She lives way over in Florida in the same town as my sister. My sister loves my mom as much as I do, but doesn’t think mom is as wonderful for reasons that I will explain.
On the rare occasions my mom comes up to DC I love having her visit. Mom would visit my sister almost every other day, because she could do that because they live in the same town, the grandkids want rides (to the mall/ the movies/ etc) and she has a key to the house. So it wasn’t too hard to imagine sis being annoyed after coming home from work to find mom in her house. The occasional visit is nice, the constant dropping by and hanging out (not always at the request of the grandkids) became intolerable, even though it is mom, who’s wonderful.

Corner guys
Now if someone as lovely and nice as my mother can make a nuisance of herself, the same can be said of the old guys on the corner.

The old guys claim to the area is they used to live around here. Fine, but still not a valid reason to hang behind a shuttered store under the “No Trespassing” signs almost every day. They may have friends and family in the area. Cool, they should visit them. Let those friends feel the same thing I feel coming home to see a gaggle of 5-6 or more hanging out on the corner.

They also don’t help that commercial strip. Right now there is only 1 business operating there. The corner store is closed and having a bunch of men hanging out back probably didn’t help and may have hurt. I worry about the prospects of that strip with that crowd constantly there.

I could bring up the drug dealing, and the public drinking but I will leave that for now.

The problem with mom has been semi-resolved. She comes over less often, but now finds herself with little to do, so she’s thinking of going back to work as a nurses aid. Part-time.

This page contains a single entry by Mari published on May 14, 2016 3:29 PM.