Month: October 2005

I’m still enjoying my 2 year break from doing anything with the house. The break is here because, A)- I’m still trying to pay off the 2nd mortgage and B)- my job ends next year and I don’t want to start a large project without knowing where or how small my next paycheck will be.
But the house needs some serious fixin’.
The floors aren’t level
The house needs insulation
The windows need squaring and replacing
The stairs need strengthening
The basement walls need replacing
Something needs to be done about the periodic flooding
The furnace needs to get off the floor
None of it will be cheap.
Anyway, found a good entry about the toll that taking up a fixer upper takes on your life. It is not just financial, it eats into the rest of your life. It’s not just weekends that are lost but connections with friends because you are so busy painting or stripping or what have you. I’ve witnessed it with M&K who lived in their house as they were fixing it up. During the fix up period you are just a tired dusty person. However the sweat equity you put into the house emotionally binds you to the place, when the painted walls and the tiled tub are products of your labor. How can anyone say you don’t belong in a place when you have sacrificed part of your life and sanity, with a side of blood, sweat, tears and profane words thrown at a fixture that won’t install easy, on the altar of homeownership in the hood?

From Jim Graham’s office
Dear Friends,

This is a good time for tenant rights! As you know, all but one of my colleagues joined me last Tuesday in support of the first major strengthening of rent control in decades. Now, we need to hear from you.

Please mark your calendars for an important hearing on tenant rights issues to be held on Wednesday, October 26 at 10 a.m. in the Council Chamber at 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. The hearing will be televised life at that time. The Committee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which I chair, will hear testimony on five bills.

One of these is the Rental Control Reform Amendment Act of 2005, which has the support of 12 Councilmembers. This bill would abolish two provisions in the current law — the “vacancy” provisions — that have caused rent ceilings to escalate far beyond what is reasonable or rational. It replaces those provisions with a vacancy formula that is fair to both landlords and tenants. Upon a vacancy, the landlord could raise the rent ceiling by 1% for every year since the last vacancy.

The bill would also limit the amount of any adjustment in rent charged on an occupied unit to 10% of the current rent charged. Finally, instead of the biannual rent increases now allowed, landlords could only increase the rent once per year.

We will also consider the Right of Tenants to Organize Amendment Act of 2005, which spells out the basic right of tenants and tenant associations to organize without interference from landlords.

Two other bills would give tenants access to much more information about how rent increases are calculated. Finally, the Committee will consider legislation to allow a hearing examiner to consider a tenant’s challenges to rent increases taken before the Act’s 3-year statute of limitations period, so long as any damage award is limited to that 3-year period.

Your testimony is needed. Please call John Adams at 724-8198 if you wish to testify.

Bests, Councilmember Jim Graham

I typically answer emails before 9 AM on weekdays. If you email me after that, it is likely that you will hear from me the next weekday. If there is a need to communicate prior to that, you may wish to call me.

Jim Graham, Councilmember, Ward One, 1350 Pa. Ave., NW, #105,
Washington, DC 20004. 202-724-8181; 202-724-8109 (fax).

Chairman, Committee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. Main Committee
Number: 202-724-8198. 1350 Pa. Ave., NW, #112, Washington, DC 20004.

Website: www.grahamwone.com

There is an article in the Post I just couldn’t resist commenting on, Sursum Corda. It’s not in the TC (Truxton Circle) but just across the street and close enough.
As I read it the city has an interest in the outcome of the Sursum Corda deals. And I’m also reading into it that the city wants, the mayor wants, there to be some affordable housing to remain.
Another thing I’m picking up in reading these stories about Sursum Corda is a slight irritation with people patronizing (second definition, to talk down to) residents considering both deals. “We can make our own deal,” Rooker said. “We can care for ourselves.” Okay, whatever they chose it is all on them. If it turns out to be a bad deal, it’s all on them. They are grown folks, but as they are poor, there is the assumption that they are ignorant and can’t do for themselves. Well……that’s another can of worms I’ll just set aside.
But there are some things, minor details I wonder about. Regardless of what deal residents choose, and if they decide to put the money towards a unit in the new development, how will they be able to remain? As I understand it, and please correct me if I’m wrong, both deals give residents the option to move back, either buying a unit or getting a unit as part of the deal. Well after the checks and titles have been exchanged, who’s gonna pay the condo fee? The taxes? Insurance? Those things can add up to well over $500-$1000 a month. Other residents mentioned in an another article worry about those other bills, like utilities, that would be a problem. Maybe that will be remedied by the HUD Homeownership vouchers. Some may take the money and run to cheaper homes in PG, some may stick it out in DC. Whatever they do, let it be an informed decision.
On a completely selfish note, may the decision help make the neighborhood and surrounding areas like the TC a less crime/drug ridden, better serviced, “nicer” place for all.

I’m starting to feel sorry for the guy almost.
So I’m in a cab heading to Georgetown with a cabbie who has been around long enough to remember when parts of Georgetown was ghetto, and we get talking about the mayor’s race. I say Fenty is young and cute. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he responds. He prefers Cropp, believes she’s knowledgeable and is on the right track. He thought Evans was running. He was vaguely aware of Johns and Brown. When I mentioned Orange, he said, “Orange is running for mayor?” Total surprise to him. I mentioned that Orange started running early and he did remember the cheap gas stunts that got Orange in the Post, but the whole running for mayor, new to him.

From another blog in NC, a bit about the bus and city living sometime ago. but the thing I took away from it was people used to live in a style that was less car dependent. Of course I used to live in a style that was less car dependent growing up, even though my town didn’t have any public transit. My schools, up until high school, were within walking distance. Also within walking distance was a fish market, gas station, a few corner stores (not the highest in produce quality but good for milk), fast food joints, several relatives and some daycare. Within biking distance, crossing several roads of death, was the supermarket, fruit stand, office supply store, the crappy dying downtown, the best bakery evah in the crappy downtown (later it closed) and the court house. I really miss that fruit stand.
Our family did have a car, and several trucks used for dad’s business. But car trips were for big purchases, business related errands, and trips to the mall way out near the city lines. It also helped that mom hated driving, so if I couldn’t walk to it, I just stayed home. Staying home forces you to hang out with people in your neighborhood.
Yet to have a car-less life one needs an environment where it all works. For one it helps to have things you need to get to so close that it doesn’t justify getting into a car or reliable public transit. Key word is ‘reliable’. Second, I think it helps to live a bit modestly, hunting down the ‘best’ and ‘premium’ products and services takes time and a lot of gas. Lastly, one should have the option to get a hold of a car or truck when needed. Before Flexcar (or zipcar) I would rent a truck or car for a day or weekend and make the most of it as there are just some things you can’t do or cart around without wheels.

Hi,

Sorry for the last minute notice. The PSA meeting scheduled for Thursday October the 13th is being relocated.

The PSA 501 meeting will not be held at the Mt. Calvary Greater Mt. Calvary Family Life Center.

The new location is:

St Martin’s Catholic Church
Community Room
1908 North Capitol St NW
7-9pm

I will post signs on the doors at Mt. Calvary in case someone misses the change notice.

Thanks,

Tom Usselman

Once upon a time Shaw, and I’m talking my end, was affordable. You could by a 2 bedroom tiny closet shoe box for the low $100K range. Then nothing was promised except a 10 minute walk to the metro. The neighborhood was worse than what it is like now, and was even worse before I arrived nearly 5 years ago. So some of the old timers tell me.
So don’t assume those of us who are “new” bought at the height of the market. If I had to buy my house at what it would go for now, I couldn’t afford it. Actually, if I go by the DC tax assement values, I think I stopped being able to afford my house 3 years ago.
People told me I should have bought 5 years ago. Well that statement never helps anyone, particularly due to the lack of working time machines. But 5 years ago, there was this window, this time when a semidetached 2 level home on NJ Ave went for $99K. There was this other house, also on NJ with a garage that could (and later was) have been converted into a mother-in-law apartment going for about $89K. Then there was this small house on 5th Street that was $79K. About 4 years ago, as an estate sale, a small stucco frame house (the white one) on 6th was up for sale at sixty-some odd thousand.
Absent a fleet of time machines, this is useless info. As I write this I think of my best friend who is just now thinking that he should buy property. And 5 years ago I did encourage hime to buy, but no, he wanted certain things in his life to happen. Now, those things still haven’t happened and the market is beyond him. I really wish he’d bought 5 years ago.

Is there something in the water? It seems some of the local community listservs have reporting an upsurge in crime. Over on the Logan listserv one fellow reported his mugging over by 14th & Q in full view of other pedistrians (who did call the police). An attempted robbery and assault with a knife over by Bar Pillar and a whole slew of other crimes up 14th and along U. Eckington and Truxton Circle have been shocked by the story of the Mike Benson adventure where he confronted the guys who stole his Stella then there are the reports of shootings on 1st Street. Crazy.
One poster made a good point of a reason behind the upsurge:

It’s not uncommon for things to get worse before they get better. According to a sociologist I know who studies gentifying neighborhoods, poor people who get displaced often come back and hang out in their old communities… but no longer have the stake in them they used to. It’s sometimes those former residents who are committing the crimes — they know the turf, and what vulnerabilities they can exploit.
Plus teenagers will sometimes make new gang alliances in their new neighborhoods and then tensions flare up with their old friends when they come back to visit.

We as residents need to make sure it does get better and not decend into worse. Chris Benson wrote:

This open letter to the community is intended to be a call to action, to motivate all of us to do our parts in keeping the spotlight on this crime issue until we get real RESULTS. We believe that crime needs to be THE pivotal campaign issue in the upcoming Mayoral and Council races. Our jobs as citizens and business people is to keep this issue at the TOP of the media radar as the elections approach. We all have a lot at stake here and cannot afford to be complacent.
For example, we were truly SHOCKED and STUNNED to read in this week’s Post Express that the Mayor and Chief Ramsey rejected outright a proposal to add 1600 new officers to the DC police department! WHY?? We understand that Jim Graham has a good record of voting in favor of assigning more officers to PSAs, and adding 500 new officers to the department, but frankly 500 is not enough!
We want to state unequivocally that we strongly back and support the brave officers who place their lives on the line everyday in our city. They are on the front lines patrolling on foot and in police cars and responding to community calls. But they simply cannot do their jobs effectively without more officers and better equipment,
technology, and resources, all of which have failed to keep pace with the unprecedented growth in our neighborhoods.
Think about this: In this election, we the community have resources available that we did not necessarily have in past election years– well organized blogs, neighborhood email listservs, business organizations, community groups, and active PSA meetings– all of which give us an effective way to communicate with each other and mobilize a grass roots campaign to make crime and public safety a major hot button campaign issue. This is a problem that severely impacts daily quality of life in our communities, and we need to publicize what it is that that our political and government leaders are and are NOT doing to confront this problem. Perhaps we need to get more organized and start playing politically savvy hardball to get our city leaders to dedicate the resources needed to address these critical public safety issues. So far, simply calling and writing letters doesn’t seem to be making a dent in the problem.
Below is a short sampling of just some of the crime related issues and problems that we think need to be addressed by our city leadership. We are sure all of you can think of other items to add to this list:
1) Public Safety is a Necessary Precondition for Successful Economic Development:
All of the effort the city makes to encourage home renovations, business development, new retail projects, new restaurants, and new housing projects are wasted if the communities in which such development occurs are plagued by crime. As demonstrated in the emails shared by Scott Pomeroy, many buyers of these new homes
and condos and patrons of these new businesses have expressed that they simply do not feel safe, and they are shocked at the lack of official response to their concerns. Public safety and economic development must go hand-in-hand, and the city cannot expect to attract new private investment to underserved areas of the city as
long as such neighborhoods continue to be plagued by armed robberies, muggings, vandalism, auto/bike/scooter thefts, drug activity, gang related shootings, and the like.
2) Our Hard Fought Success in Revitalizing the Image of our Communities Will be Defeated by Crime if We Do Not Stamp it out Now!
DC revitalization generally, and the U Street corridor in particular, have received wonderful positive national media attention in publications ranging from the New York Times to Travel and Leisure magazine. Many hardworking and enthusiastic people have invested time, energy and money into buying property, opening businesses,
and/or promoting the area as a great place to live, work, shop and go out.
This hard won effort to revitalize the image of the area will suffer a potentially irreversible setback if people do not feel safe patronizing the area. The homeowners, business owners, developers, and organizations that have invested so much in promoting the positive image of this community need to get involved in mounting an unprecedented effort to combat this crime wave. If we wait until the
reputation sets in that this is a dangerous place to walk and go out, then we will have to work ten times harder to try to turnaround that perception.
3) Our Police Have Insufficient Manpower and Resources
The number of officers and amount of resources dedicated to our police department and local PSAs has simply failed to keep up with the unprecedented pace of growth in our area over the last 5-10 years. Given the number of new residents, new businesses, new condo projects, etc., there needs to be a commensurate increase in the resources provided for public safety. At every PSA meeting, we hear from officers on the front lines that they simply do not have the manpower to respond promptly to every call, and that bureaucratic procedures often prevent them from responding rapidly and pursuing suspects immediately.
The data on the number of active duty officers available in DC also is fundamentally misleading, because it does not account for the fact that a large number of officers still listed as “active duty” have actually been on disability leave for months or even more than a year at a time. They may still be on the payroll, but they are unable to actually patrol our neighborhoods and thus should not be listed as “active duty”. We need more officers actually on the streets, whether on foot patrol, bicycles, or in police cruisers.
Officers also repeatedly tell us they need better equipment and more resources. Apparently most of the computers placed several years ago in police cruisers to download data in the field and communicate with central command are not even working anymore, and yet have not been replaced with anything that does work. Communications
are hampered such that police do not even know what is happening in the city. For instance, residents alarmed by the apparent explosions occurring last Saturday night around 10pm asked police officers “what is going on?”, and the police did not even know it was a fireworks display at the Kennedy Center and had difficulty finding this out.
4) Inefficiency and Bureaucracy Plague the System
Finally, inefficiency and bureaucracy also plague the system, eroding the community’s faith in police and consequently lowering police morale. For example, several neighbors on our block have tried to call 911 in recent weeks to get a civil protective order (i.e., restraining order) enforced against a man who has assaulted neighbors and continues to hang out on the block. Callers to 911 were told there was no record of the restraining order in the system. On further investigation, we discovered that it often takes weeks or even months for the data entry department to input restraining orders into the central computer system, and 911 cannot dispatch police to apprehend the violator until the order is officially logged into the
system. This means that potential victims who go through significant effort and red tape to secure the restraining order from a judge are left completely unprotected for weeks on end from their would-be attackers. There is simply no excuse why it should take so long to enter civil protective orders into the computer system used by 911 dispatchers and police officers in the field. Similarly, the controversy of slow 911 response times due to bureaucracy or inefficient communication systems has made headlines in recent years.
4) Increased Taxation Without Commensurate Improvement in Public Safety
Perhaps the most fundamental question in all of this is WHERE ARE OUR TAX DOLLARS GOING??? The city had imposed unprecedented increases in real property tax assessments on all DC property owners.
In addition, as restauranteurs, we pay a whopping TEN PERCENT of all of our gross revenues over to the city every month, as compared to only 4%-6% paid by restaurants in surrounding jurisdictions. What are we getting in return, when the city is blatantly unwilling in spite of a budget surplus to dedicate more officers and resources to fighting crime?

Does anyone recall the scene in the movie “Network” where fed-up TV
anchorman Howard Beale delivers the following call to action:
All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.
You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, g-da#^mit!
My life has value!”

So, I want you to get up now.
I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell,
and I’m not going to take this anymore!!”
We think it is high time that we all get up out of our chairs and take action to do something about the crime wave in our neighborhoods. Maybe we should start by saying “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore!” We invite all of you to make further suggestions on what to do next . . .

Update
I was alerted to the fact that some coward (if you don’t put a name behind your comments, you are a coward) made a dumb comment. But I was stuck in the basement of the Library of Congress on an LC computer and the best I could do was remove all comments.

Went to the Truxton Circle Happy Hour, or hours, at the Saloon on U and one topic of discovery was that serveral neighbors are experiencing leaky roofs. Me? Basement problems. The basement has flooded so I’ve moved a couple of rugs, threw down some newspaper and let the dehumidifier work itself to death. IT & B’s basement is a little worse off as they have stuff on the floor. If I lose power like I did a few hours yesterday I’m completely screwed because the sump pump has been going off non-stop.
The happy hour had a good turn out, met some new neighbors, witnessed the battle of the real estate agents, and talked more about the whole Shiloh church thing.
Anyway, I’ve got to get the wet & dry vac out and try to deal with the small lake that has formed down here.

Still in the packaging are two Blastguard somethings sitting on the platform of the Shaw/Howard station. I’m going to guess those somethings are trashcans. I’m looking forward to trash cans on the platforms because when they took away the garbage cans the metro just got dirtier. I used to pick up trash and toss it in the can when that trash was either on the train or on the platform. I know WMATA would have liked it if I’d dump the trash in the cans outside the fare gates, but I’m not taking someone else’s garbage up the stairs or escalator.
I’m looking forward to a cleaner metro.