The Washington Sanitary Improvement Company (WSIC) was a late 19th century charitable capitalism experiment that ended in the 1950s. This blog started looking at the homes that were supposed to be sold to African American home buyers, after decades of mainly renting to white tenants.
Looking at WSIC properties they tend to have a pattern where the properties were sold to a three business partners, Nathaniel J. Taube, Nathan Levin and James B. Evans as the Colonial Investment Co. for $3 million dollars. Those partners sold to African American buyers. There was usually a foreclosure. Then the property wound up in the hands of George Basiliko and or the DC Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA). Then there were the odd lucky ones who managed to avoid that fate.
Let’s see what happens with 202 Q St NW:
- January 1951 Evans, Levin and Taube sold the whole of 202 Q NW to Katie L. McCrae, a widow.
- January 1951 Mrs. McCrae borrowed $6,250 from Colonial Investment Co. favorite trustees Abraham H. Levin and Robert G. Weightman.
- August 1961 Mrs. McCrae lost the home to foreclosure and Evans, Taube, and some of Nathan Levin’s survivors regained the property through an auction.
- November 1961 the partners of Colonial Investment Co, Harry A. Badt (who replaced Nathan Levin), Evans, Taube, Levin’s survivors, and their spouses sold 202 Q St NW, as part of a larger property package, to Sophia and George Basiliko.
- July 1970 the Basilikos, as part of a larger property package in doc #1970011877, sold the house to the DC Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA).
- June 1980 the DC RLA transferred/sold 202 Q St and many other Truxton Circle properties to the BSA Limited Partnership, or as I suspect, the Bates Street Associates in document # 8000020294.
I’ll stop at the the BSA because it gets messy after that. So there is a foreclosure and it got sold to slum landlord George Basiliko. Then he, when Basiliko got in trouble for being a bad landlord, sold it to DC RLA who then turned around to hand it off to supreme f-ups BSA. ooh. I must be in a mood.