Same old house, new and improved and expensive

A minor irritation I have with some essays on gentrification and housing is a complete failure to acknowledge investment and disinvestment in physical structures.

This is an August 2004 PropertyQuest picture of 1504 3rd Street NW. I have an earlier one from 2003.150X3rdSt.jpg

Anyway, it sold in August for $765,000. According to the data on Redfin, it sold in 1991 for $76,750. Between 2001-2006 this shell of a house kept getting listed and delisted. I’m not going to do any in-depth research to determine if it changed hands in that period, but in December 2006 it sold for $250,000. Then in 2007 it sold for about $450K, by this time it had definitely been renovated. This year it came back on the market and sold in the mid $700K range.

When someone takes this house and other houses in the neighborhood and just sees prices, what are they thinking? Do they think the rise in price is just arbitrary and an effort to keep lower-income households priced out?

What I witnessed was investment coming into the neighborhood. That house in 2003-2004 was a shell, unfit for human habitation. That was a result of disinvestment when it wasn’t worth it for the owner to maintain the structure.  Shaw had experienced a lot of disinvestment. After the riots in 1968, many businesses didn’t return. Some residents and landlords just abandoned the neighborhood because it wasn’t worth the money to them to fix the damage.

To take a shell from being unfit to being desirable takes capital, investment. Someone paid to buy cabinetry, flooring, windows, paint, drywall, electrical wires, PVC pipes, HVAC system, framing, appliances, and a roof. Plus the labor to install these things. Having renovated my house and another property, I can say this is not cheap. At the very least $100K went into making the house livable.

Well the house was already renovated by 2007, can I justify the $300K-$400K price hike between 2007 and 2019? I can’t tell if the rear deck was already there, but it was the neighborhood that changed in the period that made it more valuable. What happened between 2007 and now? Big Bear, a few blocks away opened up. Then the Bloomingdale Farmers Market about a year later. Nightly gunshots became less of a thing. There are a handful of sit down restaurants within walking distance, 3 that have had or have Michelin mentions. Two with 1 Michelin star within, biking…longer walking distance. Also, other houses in the neighborhood have been renovated and owners have a financial incentive to maintain their properties. But does that justify the price increase? How much is a safer (2019 TC is way safer than 2004 TC) neighborhood worth? How much is it worth to have places to take friends/dates that are a nice stroll back to your place? Schools have improved, and as a parent, it is worth a few thousand to have a plethora of Pre-K choices in walking distance.  As a homeowner, there is a disappointing difference between what you can refinance and what is a possible sales price. The improvements in the neighborhood have allowed us to refinance the house to fix it up, but the value to bank says the house is worth was much, much lower than what was selling around us. But all that is meaningless if all you care about is keeping the price of housing down.

1957 Church Survey: St. Augustine Catholic Church

I mentioned this one earlier this month, well its school, as it is one of 3 private schools in Shaw. Anywho, St. Augustine is at 1717 15th St NW, on the upper end of the neighborhood.

It was a big church with a chunk of the parishioners (50%) in the urban renewal survey area. I’m a convert to the church, but the sense I get is back then, when this survey was conducted, there were parish districts and you were supposed to go to the church for the district you lived in. Another interesting thing about the demographics is that it had a tiny white population, 3%, while the rest was Black. It is still a predominately African American Catholic Church.

Anyway, here’s the 1957 survey for St. Augustine:

CS 30 St Augustine by Mm Inshaw on Scribd

Wrong perp for the crime

I went to the impromptu August 7th ANC 5E meeting at Friendship 7th Day Adventist and there was something at the meeting that’s been bugging me. Nope. It wasn’t the ABRA case invovling Pub and the People.

Nope.

The thing that’s been bugging me is Robert Brannum’s resolution that he included in the meeting packet, to be voted on at a later date by the 5E ANC. I’ve embedded the proposal below:

Advisory Neighborhood Commission 5E Resolution No 2019 by Mm Inshaw on Scribd


One of the things that bugs me (and it a very tiny bug) is that the focus is on non-local incidents by non-local perps/ white supremacists. The beauty of the ANC system is that it is HYPER-local. It is about things occuring in the immediate neighborhood. In walking distance. This is not local.

A larger bug is the fact that crimes against gay men in Shaw and transgender women in NE have not been allegedly commited by white supremists. In April 2018, a gay couple was brutally beaten on the 2200 block of 10th St NW. From the grainy video, it looks like they were attacked by 3 black guys. A few months ago, a gay man, with his boyfriend was beaten very badly by a group of teens on the 1300 block of U St NW. Two teens are juviniles so no info there but the “adult” was a 19 year old Marcus Britt of Fort Washington, MD. That’s in PG County, bet money he’s of African descent. They were not charged with a hate crime. The alleged killer of a Black trans woman killed near the DC border (that’s what Eastern Avenue is) is not white.

Did you know fewer than half of LGBT hate crime arrests in DC are dismissed? Eleanor Holmes Norton enquired about that.

Sadly, the message the city and this resolution is indirectly saying is that if you are Black, you have a license to beat up people in the LGBT community in DC. It would help if the resolution denounced hate crimes commited by anyone, even teenage POCs.

Schools in Shaw- Public, Charter, and Private


Private
Believe it or not, there are private schools in Shaw. I found three.

Ujamaa-1554 8th St NW. This is an African-centric school. According to one source, it is a K-9 school. But looking at their alumni testimonials the school did teach at the high school level. Website

Emerson Preparatory– 1816 12th St NW 4th Floor. According to the school’s Wikipedia page it moved to the Shaw neighborhood in 2017, from Dupont Circle. It is a private day high school. Website

St. Augustine Catholic– 1421 V St NW. This is on the north end of Shaw and is the remaining Catholic School, because once upon a time Immaculate Conception at 8th and N had a school. Like Ujamaa, it is predominately African-American. It is a pre-K to 8th grade school. Website

Public Charter
There are several, so this is just a basic list.

City Center-Shaw-711 N St NW. Grades: Pre-K4 to 8. Website
Friendship-Armstrong-111 O St NW. Grades: PK3 to 6. Website
KIPP-Grow-421 P St NW. Grades: Pre-K3 to K. Website
KIPP-Lead-421 P St NW. Grades: 1 to 4. Website
KIPP-Will-421 P St NW. Grades: 5 to 8. Website
Meridian– 2120 13th St NW. Grades: Pre-K3 to 6. Website
Mundo Verde– 30 P St NW. Grades: Pre-K3 to 5. Website

DC Public
These are the DCPS schools physically in the bounds of Shaw, not the schools that service students in Shaw.
Cleveland Elementary– 1825 8th St NW. Grades: Pre-K3 to 5. Website
Dunbar High– 101 N St NW. Grades: 9 to 12. Website
Garrison Elementary-1200 S St NW. Grades: Pre-K3 to 5.  Website
Seaton Elementary– 1503 10th St NW. Grades: Pre-K3 to 5. Website

Did I miss a school?

1957 Church Survey- Vermont Avenue Baptist

I should sneak a Shaw church in this run of random churches. Vermont Avenue Baptist is at 1630 Vermont Avenue NW.

In 1957 Vt Av was a HUGE church claiming 3,600 members. They had 3 Sunday services with over two thousand congregants showing up on any given Sunday. It was a predominately white collar Black church with 41% living in the urban renewal area. About half the membership lived in the rest of DC. So about 1000 people coming in on Sunday, where did they park?

CS 20 Vermont Ave Baptist by Mm Inshaw on Scribd

1957 Church Survey: Southern Baptist Church- Random Church Not in Shaw

When you think Southern Baptist, what comes to mind? A Black church? Probably not, but that’s just what we have here. Southern Baptist Church at 134 L St NW. If memory serves me right, I believe there’s a bus in their parking lot that says “We Love Black People.” The church sits in NoMa so, not in Shaw.

Anyway there isn’t a lot of information in the 1957 survey, except they are a black church, they had a huge membership (1,300 souls), and the church was newish then.

CS 15 Southern Baptist by Mm Inshaw on Scribd

1957 Church Survey: Metropolitan AME- Random Church Not In Shaw

I’m not even going to search for a photo. But do a quick and dirty post for Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church at 1518 M St NW.  In 1957 it was a big church, with 1200 members in 1957, with about 400 showing up on any given Sunday. The professional majority were skilled laborers, followed by Professionals and white-collar members. It was and is, as far as I can tell, still a Black church. It does not give a breakdown but claimed many members lived in the Northwest Urban Renewal area under study at the time.

CS 53 Metropolitan AME by Mm Inshaw on Scribd

Black education, DC, and a middle class path

My male cousins on my mom’s side of the family are doing okay. One lives in Manhattan with his wife and 3 kids. Another, he moves around a lot, but once when he worked for the state of NC, his salary was like a quarter of a million dollars a year. I think he left to make more money elsewhere. He’s a finance guy. Their parents, my aunts and uncles, were teachers and civil servants raising their kids (my cousins) in Afro-American middle-class bubbles. I like their results and would like to re-create that for my own son.

Education was a part of their success. Not being Humanities majors also helped, as they were math and science people who currently have math related careers. So I attended a meeting about Black education in the city, wondering if I might learn something that I could use to help re-create and re-affirm my son’s membership in the middle class and beyond.

ehhhhhh, not really. But what I did get out of it was a hope that the Charter vs DCPS fight might die and find a way to work together. Kids like my son, who have two involved parents and live economically stable lives, aren’t a priority, or even a consideration. And why would they be when a large number of African American students struggle because of their neighborhood and or home life?

So I will have to go my own way and find a different path for Destructo-toddler, since I’m the only one interested in him. This may even mean figuring out how to create our own bubble.

I’ve been playing around with school data. Charter school data, DCPS data, parochial school data, random group data, and think tank data. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll need to start saving money in a 529 for private high and maybe middle school. Next month over at the City Mom’s Blog I’ll go into a little more detail about the reasons why. To sum it up, I’ve concluded the outcome for black males is better in private school. But even that has its own problems, besides cost of tuition.

I feel no one is asking, ‘what is Black academic success and how do we replicate it?’ I feel that the question is ‘how do we support this institution’ with the assumption that if the institution or if a certain profession is supported then academic success will follow.

I’m rambling. I’ll stop here.