Month: October 2018

Condo, Condo, Cahn-do

Tell me what they will build there?
Tell me
Condo, Condo, Con-do!
Things cropping up everywhere,
Open house just tell me when.
-to the tune of Quando, Quando, Quando

Gray Condo on NJ Ave NW
So I have a bias against condos. Just for myself, not other people. If you have stayed in the same 1 mile or 1/2 mile area for 10 years, and are renting, you might want to consider buying a condo…. unless you can afford an actual house, where you own the bricks or board and the dirt beneath.

Unfortunately, condos are the most “affordable” things that are livable around here. Probably not these condos, considering Compass is involved. The Chapman Stables have some studio and 1 bedroom units in the $300K range. Yes, not including the condo fee, you’re paying a little over $2K, provided you put down a decent down payment for 1 room. No parking space. I think Chapman has 1 studio left for $333K. Should the owner of this fine unit ever decide to rent out their unit, because they fell in love, added another human to their life and needed more space, they would probably need to charge nearly $3K a month to break even (condo fee, property management, business license, etc).

I’m not too distressed by the idea that large houses are being broken up into smaller condos. Many of the Truxton houses, the Wardman Flats, and the Bates Street houses were created as 2 unit flats. The value went down and some of them were turned into 1 unit homes. Now developers are turning them back into 2 unit properties. What goes up can go down. This neighborhood pretty much ignored the 2008 housing crash, but I can imagine something that would make those new 1 million dollar condos and houses near worthless. Not anytime soon, and hopefully, not in my lifetime, but a lot can happen in 100 or 50 years.

The Problem is People- Renters and Airbnb

RooftopsI like Airbnb. We’ve used the service to temporarily relocate when our house was being renovated. My spouse used it to be as close to his mother’s elderly boarding house when visiting her in California. We’ve stayed in people’s second bedrooms in NYC. We’ve also hosted Airbnb guests in the room that now belongs to Destruct-O-baby and I’m allowing a tenant for a one bedroom house in Baltimore to be an Airbnb host. So, I’ve had good experiences because it has allowed us to see how other people live. And when the situation requires it, we stay in a hotel.

I’m still feeling frustrated after last night’s BACA meeting where the staff member from Councilman McDuffie’s office touched upon it. The complaints of noise and trash regarding bad Airbnb guests reminded me of the complaints residents made about Section 8 (or suspected Section 8) renters. The problem isn’t length of stay, it’s the people.

When I first moved into the TC neighborhood, Section 8 was shorthand for bad neighbors. Section 8, which goes by different names depending on location, is subsidized housing. In THEORY, renters would be on their best behavior because they could lose their subsidy if they had drug dealing in the home, or were a nuisance. Yeah, that didn’t work. For one you couldn’t find out if a house was a Section 8 house because of privacy. With noise, everyone who has ever called the cops on their neighbors about a blasting stereo or thumping noise, knows how that plays out. Now there were other houses I suspected of being Section 8 where the occupants were quiet and clean. So the problem wasn’t the Section 8 program so much as it was the people in the Section 8 houses and the poor enforcement.

Later the economics of things made it so there were more owners, so the subsidized renters became limited to the co-ops and other apartment buildings. Then those owners moved and rented out their homes to young adults who were oblivious to certain ways of doing things, like trash day, and how to get bulk pick up. These mishaps are not just for renters, sometimes owners and other people who are hard to categorize will leave trash, make noise, and be irresponsible.

There are other problems with the proposed Airbnb legislation before the city council. The concerns about noise and trash remind me of the complaints about Section 8 renters about 15+ years ago. The good thing about Airbnb renters, at least they go away and you’re not stuck with bad neighbors for years on end.

Lincoln Congregational Temple Closes- Don’t blame gentrification

Churches close.

typesof1957churchesThere are dozens of churches that existed in general Shaw area in the 1950s that are no longer around. Some church congregations moved, some churches are closed by their denomination, there are a variety of reasons. The Lincoln Memorial Congregational Temple at 11th and R St NW, 2-3 blocks from the Shaw metro R Street exit had its last service this weekend.

The Washington Post made mention of gentrification in its article about the church’s last days. There isn’t a direct blaming of gentrification, but there is a lot of hinting. The church attempted to reach out to neighbors, added some programing but couldn’t get the membership numbers up after the Rev. Benjamin E. Lewis retired. Yes, parking pressures didn’t help. But looking back at the 1957 Church Survey (PDF), Lincoln UCC church members mostly lived outside of the Shaw neighborhood.

1957ChurchMapThe Church Survey from October 1957 looked at steeple, storefront and residential houses of worship from a block over from U St, Florida Ave, 14th St NW, Mass Ave and 2nd St NE. Lincoln UCC was one and in 1957, 74% of parishioners lived outside of the map in Brookland and Kenilworth. Those 25%  who did live in the Northwest Urban Renewal Area were reported to be elderly members, who should be more than dead right now. Don’t blame the demographic changes on the church’s decline.

When doing neighborhood history, I encounter many quaint fictions. Most of them are harmless. There is the belief that residents are home owners. And there’s the idea that church congregants lived in walking distance. Some do, many don’t.  Bible Way Church, which stopped the I-395 from destroying Shaw and going all the way through, only had 30% of its members in the Urban Renewal area. Mt. Sinai who will host tonight’s BACA meeting, had 96% of its members scattered elsewhere in the city. The upper and middle class Blacks who supported and were a part of these churches did not all live in the slum that was Shaw.