Buildings – Page 16 – Truxton Is In Shaw

Why you can’t compare a pre-gentrification house to today

Vacant house on P — *214 P St NW with broken windows in 2008*.

When I read studies about housing, housing stock and affordable housing, as it applies to areas like Shaw, I can’t help feeling there is a very wrong assumption flowing through them all. I encountered, that feeling when talking to a renter on my street who would love to buy, but was unaware of what some of us did to make affordable homes livable, and once they became livable, unaffordable to people like him. A house that was affordable in Shaw in the 80s or 90s is probably not the same house that stands today.

In the 1940s-50s Shaw was described as a slum. A slum was defined in some writings as an area where a significant number of houses lacked indoor plumbing or interior toilets, thus slummy Shaw. I want you, dear reader, to think about that. Living somewhere, when you have to go, you’ve got to go….. outside. But now there are laws and regulations so when you rent a place, you get that fancy pants indoor bathroom with hot water.

But there are other housing deficiencies that houses in the 90s and early 00s suffered from because of the history of disinvestment in the neighborhood. Disinvestment meaning, landlords and homeowners had no incentive to maintain properties, beyond necessity, with little to no equity gained. Not updating kitchens, or electrical wiring, or plumbing, resulting in cramped little kitchens, wiring that would fry your electronics, and leaky pipes.

Renovation_0045 — *House under renovation*.

Then came the renovations and the gentrification. Some were crappy and cosmetic, like my house when I bought it, and some actually fixed long neglected problems or updated systems. Even crappy renovations cost money and those costs are pushed onto the end user, the home buyer or the renter. Yes, there are places where there has been no, to little reinvestment, and the prices act as if there were.

So next time you read a report that assumes the equity gained due to gentrification is unearned, question if the house that was affordable in year X is of the same quality, with the same features, when it is unaffordable in year Y.

Church Survey Northwest Urban Renewal Area October 1957

A copy of the National Capital Planning Commission’s October 1957 Church Survey that I copied part of is sitting on DDot’s website. But it is a partial copy of the whole report. One of my bad habits, not citing where I got the document, has bitten me in the butt, and I never got around to copying the whole thing. Until now.

Thanks to interlibrary loans, I have been able to get my hands on a copy from a college library several states away. I don’t know why I couldn’t find a copy of this book locally.

The Church Survey has data on 108 63 churches that were in the Northwest Urban Renewal Area. The powers that be decided to shrink the urban renewal area down, and out of it, we get the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area, that became known simply as Shaw.

The survey looked at all kinds of religious houses, from steeple churches, storefront churches to house churches. There are several churches mentioned in the 1957 survey that no longer exist. I notice this as I copy each page. A lot can happen in 62 years. There are others where the church changed hands or names. The quality of the surveys vary from church to church. Some entries give great demographic information about the church, parishioners, staff, and programing. Most entries give the address of the pastor, size of membership, a short list of types of programs, and publicly available information. The sparse entries are just publicly available land information and maybe whatever could be observed from the outside.

So far my plan is to copy the whole book, splice in what I previously copied and, since it was a government document, put it on-line.

509 O St NW- Finally

I’m hoping this was not a hallucination but in a cab, back from the doctor’s I spotted a pile of rubble where 509 O Street NW stood. Upon seeing it I exclaimed, “Finally”.

I would have investigated further, but I’m contagious and need to avoid people. And stay home and do this thing called resting. So I don’t have an updated image of 509 O Street.

If you are newish, you may wonder, what’s the big deal?

The problem with 509 O Street was that it was stuck as a vacant property for at least 20 years. That means it was vacant when the neighborhood started gentrifying. It was vacant when shells in the area cost half a million. It has been vacant now, still vacant. Now a vacant lot. It had the resistance to development like a Shiloh Baptist property. And even some Shiloh properties not on 9th, managed to get developed.

I have my opinions. And it was my opinion that the woman who owned the property was crazy. Whether bat-shyte crazy or crazy like a fox, I don’t know. But the crazy was the only thing to explain why this property managed to stay vacant despite legal action from the lender, vacant rate taxes and a white hot real estate market.

Just for my records, the lot number for 509 O Street NW is a PITA to locate. In the tax assessment database searching for O St lots on Square 0479, all I could find was lot #0818. In the DC Atlas I found 3, lots 0044, 2001, & 2002. This makes me wonder if the taxes could be wiped out with a shell game of lose the lot number? Looking at the Recorder of Deeds paperwork, that’s a confusing mess and introduced more lot numbers. Lot number 0813 for condo unit (yeah it was a ‘condo’) A. sigh.

So in summary, I seriously hope that pile of rubble was 509 O Street NW. Hopefully, it can move on. Maybe there is a serious developer behind this who will plop another million dollar condo on the spot with quartz countertops and Lutron light switches.

I’ll probably cross post this with DC Vacant Properties.

319 R Street the plan

Okey dokey. The fugly, and I’m gonna call it fugly, ’cause it was a plan of ugly of freaking magnitude, plan of replacing the top level of 319 R St NW with a meh 3rd floor and an out of proportion dunce hat is no more. The Historic Landmark application, killed that.

So the developers played chicken, lost and looks like they’re gonna try to recoup their money by selling it, unimproved, for $1.05 million. Unimproved. I don’t think the plans are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that’s just my opinion.

So what’s the plan? Go down.

There will be three floors but you’ll have to go down, into the basement. Have they dug the basement? I don’t think so, so there is no guarantee of anything. If they haven’t, you could hit water. Anywho. The top floor is a rooftop deck of sorts, because you can’t change the top anymore. Because of historic stuff. If they just left the damned turret alone, like 210 P Street NW, they would have had more freedom to put on a 3rd floor.

210 P St NW Open House — Turret on 210 P St NW.

But, noooooo. They had to plan to destroy the original turret or threaten to tear down the building. Now they expect someone to pay over a million dollars for the mess they made.

319 R St NW

I ran into a neighbor who apparently went to the last BACA meeting. I stayed home because of a sick kid. He’s fine now, thanks for asking. Anyway, she informed me of what is going on with 319 R Street NW.

For those of you new to the story, here is the Cliff Notes version of the 319 R Street NW saga. The property was sold by a Korean Presbyterian church to a developer. The developer wanted to chop off the roof and turret and make a fugly building. There was some pushback by neighbors and the developers threatened to demolish the building as a matter of right. The developers, and other people, forgot that 319 was on a block built by celebrated developer Harry Wardman and a majority of the structures on the block were Harry Wardman originals. When it looked like the developers were going to be able to get their fugly building with a dunce hat of a turret, someone submitted a historic landmark application for the whole damned block. The submission and the approval meant no changes could be made, so no ugly 3rd floor or dunce hat, but unfortunately a bunch of innocent homeowners got caught up in it like dolphins in a tuna net.

Anyway……

The developers got permits to make changes (but not the fugly building) and plan to sell 319 R with the approved permits. They played chicken and they lost. Depending on how much they sell the building, a talented developer like Ditto could turn it into a two unit, million+ property.

So after 20+ years Shiloh might do something with its vacant properties

My usual path no longer takes me along 9th Street anymore. Trips to Giant stops right at 8th Street. I might wander over to 9th to see if Buttercream has any ho-hos. And so the search for specialty cake products brought me over to the 1500 block of 9th Street NW and I was surprised to see what looked to be work on Shiloh Baptist Church’s long vacant properties.

This might be old news to some, as I did notice another Shiloh property on the opposite side of the street appeared no longer vacant. And the poster celebrating Victory Village looks, old. When doing a Google search for Victory Village and Shiloh, I came across a 2010 CityPaper article about the project. That doesn’t provide a lot of confidence. What does provide confidence is the scaffolding up along the sidewalk. And the fact that the block is a little less vacant than 10 years ago.

Next to the National Park Service’s Carter G. Woodson House, formerly owned by Shiloh were some 3 story high scaffolding with the banner of a contractor, Thomas Archer on it. That looks a bit more real, and this thing might actually happen. Maybe. Hopefully. Lord willing.

I pray that in 5 years the 1500 block of 9th Street NW is as healthy as the 1500 block of 7th St NW. I hope that Shiloh will no longer be known as the church with all those run down vacant properties. I don’t expect Shiloh to gain the real estate mojo of UHOP, that would be akin to expecting Keneau Reeves to out act Christian Bale.

This has been cross posted with the DC Vacant Properties blog.

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

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.

Baltimore City level of Historic Districts- When you have too many

DC has too many historic districts (HD) and just recently got one more as Bloomingdale fell to this sad fate of HD collecting. So about 1 in 5 DC properties is some historic something or another. DC is on its way to becoming like our sister city Baltimore where some historic districts are respected and others, kinda ignored, making the designation meaningless. Maybe it needs to be made meaningless.

So I own a small rental in Baltimore which happens to be in a historic district and the neighborhood is listed with the National Register of Historic Places. Historic districts in Baltimore are a different animal than the HDs in DC from what I observed. When I had a local charm city architect over, I mentioned the vinyl window I had in my house and the other vinyl windows I saw in the neighborhood. He said, “Yeah, they’re not supposed to do that but….” and he shrugged and we moved on to other topics.

Baltimore has over 60 historic districts, DC has over 30. The Baltimore Sun supposed that 1 in 3 buildings was listed on the National Register. I have no idea how many of those include abandoned shells. Baltimore also has a local tax incentive to get homeowners on board, but the logic in how it applies confuse me. There are newish condos just outside the district’s boundaries that advertised the 10 year tax credit. Of course there is a lot in Baltimore where the logic of how they apply a lot of things confuse me.

I wonder if the trend to add more and more historic districts will create an environment where the original intents will be undermined because it brings in too many unwilling participants, thin supporters and stretch the resources of the enforcers. Maybe. We’ll see.

So Asbury Dwellings used to be a school

Three white guys posing in front of Shaw Jr High. Circa 1967-68.

Okay, if you are familiar with the corner of Rhode Island Avenue and 7th Street NW you are aware of Asbury Dwellings, senior citizens’ apartments.

Well before it was housing, it was a school. It was THE school the neighborhood was named after. Just like Adams Morgan was named after two schools there, with its own urban renewal project, Shaw was named after the Shaw Junior High School. Which was named after Col. Robert Gould Shaw. So the neighborhood being named after the Col. Shaw is sorta kinda true if you’re totally ignoring the urban renewal part of the neighborhood’s history.

So behind the three white guys with rolled up posters, is the school and you may be able to make out the word “High School”. It now reads “Asbury Dwellings”. If you don’t feel like bringing up a Google street view of the place here’s a link to a Library of Congress photo of the current building. When you really look at it, it is a beautiful building.

BACA on Langston School

The Langston School on the unit block of P St NW has been vacant, and crumbling for years, possibly decades. The building is in such bad condition, charters who get 1st dibs on DC school buildings have given it a hard pass.

So after decades of nothing from the city, the Bates Area Civic Association (BACA) has decided to attempt to tackle the problem. Take a look at the BACA Resolution in Support of Development Proposal for Langston School. To sum it up, BACA says it has been vacant for too long and is hurting the surrounding area, and maybe the National Peace Corps Association seems interested in it, please let them buy it.