319 R St NW- There can be a way forward with a turret

So last week I saw the good news from Scott Roberts that the ANC 5E voted to oppose the raze permit application for 319 R St NW.

Since I’m not a house historian I’ll quickly mention 319 R and most of the houses on that block are Wardmans built around 1902-1903, by developer Harry Wardman and his architect Nicholas R. Grimm. My interest is that it at one point housed members the Glorius family, who had owned the whole block and lived there in the late 19th Century. So the house is special in that way. It is also special because it is a corner house.

From what I can remember from the October 2016 BACA meeting the developers wanted to get rid of the turret on this building, among other things. The other things, like placing the entrance on the 4th St side, thus changing windows and doors, and putting on an extra floor, I actually have no problem with that. It’s getting rid of the turret that I have a problem with. Development has been done before, on this very block, a floor added and a turret kept.

Back in 2009, I and resident of the 1700 blk of 4th St, John, fought to preserve a look for that block as the owner wanted to add a 3rd floor and obliterate the roof (with the turret) and replace it with something pitched and very suburban looking. I’ll admit the turret wasn’t the focus, preventing an ugly az popup was, as this was the time of horrible pop ups, popping up in the neighborhood.

1721-1719 4th St NW. Taken December 2007

This is what 1721 4th Street NW (the blue/gray building) looked like in 2009.

The shorter building to the left is the dry cleaners, and to the right that gap between the buildings is now gone and something plain and brick resides there now.

I never had images of what the owner had suggested to the BZA. But imagine an extra floor and a “decorative” upside down ‘V’ of a roof, like you’d see in suburban Maryland on top. It was ugly.

The owner had to go to BZA because this property was well over 62% of its lot occupancy. Unfortunately Jim Berry was no longer our ANC because he had moved/retired, and our ANC at the time (now city councilperson) was too trusting of the system so this fight was hard. Berry was there with neighbors at BZA hearing with the development on Richardson Place NW.  The ANC then, not so much, and there were fewer neighbors up in arms to fight the owner’s ugly proposal.

1721 4th St NW. Taken in 2012.

Long story short, we prevailed and it was win-win.  The owner got more square footage and an extra floor. We got something that looked good and was not an ugly as F* popup. Yes, the turret is absorbed into the house, but it isn’t too out of place.

I believe that there can be a win-win with this developer. They can get an extra floor and new entrances (I dunno about parking, that’s another ball of wax) without destroying the turret.  That block will probably see more development in the future and we’ve set a path for how that can look, I just hope the new people follow.

 

Postscript- Yes, I know of this thing called historic districts. I oppose that for my own neighborhood. With historic districts we wouldn’t get such interesting houses like the Darth Vader house that just sold for a million dollars, or the interesting Ditto condos. Yes, we wouldn’t get the monstrosities on P Street, but there is enough good to outweigh the bad, you just have to be vigilant.

So Truxton? Shaw? Bloomingdale? Where the hell am I?

Commercial Building Map
Map of Shaw for 1970 Commercial Buildings

So this comes up way too often. So that’s why I decided with this re-boot (messy as it is) that I would call the In Shaw blog Truxton is in Shaw, because it is.

Here is the quick and dirty and maybe in later posts I’ll go deeper.

Bloomingdale is on the other side of Florida Ave, which used to be Boundary Street in the 18th century. Why Boundary Street? Because it was the boundary between the city of Washington and the county of Washington, in the District of Columbia. Bloomingdale, lovely as it is, was/is a suburban neighborhood, in the then county.

Shaw. I have yet, to find ANYTHING, anything calling the area we know as Shaw as “Shaw” prior to the late 1950s, and even then it was called the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area. See the map there? That is of the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area. Everything in it, is Shaw. The area known as U Street, you will see it, in Shaw. The portion known as Logan Circle, you can find it in the map, in Shaw.

Truxton Circle, look at the map, it is IN SHAW.

If it is in this map, it is in Shaw, which kinda stopped being a thing sometime after Home Rule and wards were a thing.

The In Shaw blog is a mess and so am I

I’m going to let this go live. And maybe next month I will try to bring back or fix the URLs for the previous 2010-2017 blog entries on the Inshaw Blog. But it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

Why?

As the blog title hints there are several things going on in my off-line life. For one I have a money pit in Baltimore. Second, I have an in-law situation where we are attempting to move my mother-in-law from CA to DC. Due to a horrid mix of complications and bad lawyers it is a slow moving tragedy I have to keep my eye on. Third, our AC died and apparently needs to be replaced. This is tiny in relation to the other two things, and we went out and bought some units from Home Depot so at least part of the house can be cool.

Maybe, just maybe after I’ve fixed and undone poor workmanship, got my mother in law settled in a place where we can better care for her and the Summer heat is behind me, I can clean up all the messy files on my server.

Changing In Shaw

This is just a placecard until I figure out how to deal with the change from MT to WP for the blog.
As you can tell I’ve moved from Inshaw with more gentrification to Truxton is In Shaw, to mainly say… Shaw is a huge neighborhood and Truxton is/was part of it.

Parents do not want to live the wire

BFM May 2017

I sent some questions to Dr. Hyra, author of Race, Class, and Politics In The Cappuccino City, a book about gentrification in Shaw, so I’m waiting to hear back. Until then I wanted to share something a friend mentioned to me.

I was talking about the book and my impression to a friend who is white and a parent and lives in another gentrifying neighborhood. Hyra has a theme in the book of “living the wire”, which refers to the HBO series The Wire, and in the context of Shaw, as I understand it means the danger, but not too dangerous environment of the neighborhood appeals to millennials. I and my friend are Gen-X, a generation that barely shows up in the book by name, and maybe we do not fit in the book since we are not millennials.

My friend stated that parents do not want to “live the wire”. My observations tell me that statement is very true. The parents who live and used to live in my end of Shaw bear that out, be they millennials or late Gen-Xers. In the early 00s, white couples who started having kids were more than likely to head for the ‘burbs or west of the park or elsewhere when those kids started hitting the age of 2. Why? Because DC schools sucked back then that’s why. Another thing is parents are protective of their kids be they well off or poor. Those who could move to a ‘better school district’ or a place where they felt their child would be safer, did. No one talks about poor people displaced by crime. Wouldn’t fear for the lives of those you love move you as much as rising rent?
BFM May 2017
People can be edgy when they are single. Maybe a little less so when they couple and the love they have for the other person makes them actually care for the safety and well being of their significant other. That care goes into overdrive when the babies show up.

Some parents moved, others dug in their heels and made it work. My friend, as well as some others who were around were pioneers when Two Rivers and Yu Ying were new and unproven. I saw that without the charter school system, these families would have left, because families did leave when their kid did not get into the charter school of their choice.

The childless versions of new comers, and I knew some who moved in when young and single (sometimes moving out as married parents), may give the impression of ‘living the wire’. But time and experience makes ‘living the wire’ less appealing, besides, there is far more attractive and wonderful things about Shaw (transit, dining, history, architecture, etc) than some misguided fantasies.

NOTE: I’m upgrading the servers this blog sits on in June. Hopefully something will be here at blog.inshaw.com .

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.