Housing – Truxton Is In Shaw

Affordable Housing of the Past is Illegal

I was listening to an audiobook and was annoyed with one of the prescriptions that authors are forced to tack on to their books. Housing was a background issue. It would have made more sense if the prescription was unionizing, not touting zoning for more multifamily housing, a topic explored at the 11 hour.

What annoyed me was, after working on the history of this neighborhood, that a historical solution that worked was ignored. Boarding houses and taking in boarders. Many people in Truxton Circle, homeowners and renters, had boarders.

Men and women in boarding house room — 1943 DC Boarding House

However, this very low rung in the housing is almost illegal. Like mobile homes (another affordable housing product illegal in many municipalities), the laws on the books make such a thing impossible to run legally. There are illegal boarding houses in DC. We find out about them when someone dies in a fire.

We’d prefer someone to live in a tent in a park, then have a house with all sorts of people coming in and out, where people live for cheap. I’m not going to romanticize boarding houses either. Poorly run ones were a nuisance. But, they were a roof over a person’s head. Four solid walls (maybe thin walls) where they could call home.

Back when I was in elementary school and at an age where we made friends easily, I had a ‘friend’ who lived in a boarding house near the school. Her family, mother, father and maybe a sibling, all lived in a room in the back of this 2 story frame house that no longer exists. I remember the room being poorly lit & junky. This was a working class Black neighborhood, and if you couldn’t afford to rent a whole house or get into the public housing, well you were pretty bad off.

The author, like Jane Jacobs, assumed a type of housing would make it affordable. Jacobs believed older housing was affordable. I’m in my youngest house, built in 1940, cheap is the last word I’d use to describe it. And likewise, there are multi-unit houses, houses carved up into condos, that are out of the price range for most. Even if DC allowed people to live in converted Home Depot sheds on land they rented or owned, the prices will find a way to jack up.

Okay. Rant over.

Sometimes smaller is better

I’m going through my old drafts. Some I rewrite, such as this one. Some I delete. And some I rewrite, still think they’re crap and delete them. This was written October 8, 2008.

Sometimes.
I’ve just finished reading an article regarding the upsides of raising a family in a 1,200 sf house over that of a McMansion. The author writes:

Looking back on 18 years of living small, I see that our snug house has prevented us from easily avoiding one another by retreating into our own spaces. We’ve been able to eavesdrop on our kids as they played with friends and look over their shoulders as they did homework on the dining room table. It’s been good for our health too, forcing all of us, especially our sons, to spend more time out-of-doors. There simply isn’t room to get too rowdy inside, so often they have headed outside to a neighborhood park that’s conveniently located just across the street.I hope we’ve given our sons the message that wealth doesn’t come from our material possessions, but instead from the diversity of experiences we have and the richness of our community.

The author also mentions that with a smaller house she could pay off the mortgage quicker, heat it for less and have a better commute. I already have the great commute. It is my great luck to work for an agency whose DC metro branches are all along the Green Line. My current commute is a 30-45 minute walk, or 20 minutes by metro, and that is priceless. The house is small and there isn’t much to heat or cool, and I tend to be happy lounging in 1/6th of the space. And there is the possibility of actually paying off the mortgages in the next 15 years, but I owe that more to when I bought the house as opposed to the size of the house.

The article was in the conservative online magazine Culture 11 “Living Small”

That DC Redlining Map

People in academia tend to like to tell research adventure stories. The problem with archives and libraries and other places digitizing everything is taking the romance out of these tales. No need to get a grant, rent a crappy motel room during the middle of summer, nah. Tippy-tip tap, an email here, a subscription to a certain website and there’s your document. Of course, not everything has been digitized. And because of that, a person could still have a research adventure.

My research adventure takes place at the National Archives in College Park, MD. Those who know me are probably rolling their eyes, but bear with me. So my goal was to find the lost redlining map of Washington DC. I can call it lost, ’cause it was a b!tch to find. For one, the Mapping Inequality site showing off redlining maps doesn’t have Washington, DC. The DC Policy Center and Mapping Segregation had a map on their sites that approximated or was very similar to a DC version of the redlining map.

The DC Policy Center just said it came from the National Archives. Ok. NARA has a bunch of stuff and it’s catalog can be a PITA when you’re trying to actually find something. Clicking source just brought a person to the Mapping Segregation site. Digging into the resources there would send you back to the DC Policy Center and round and round I went. I eventually found the citation at the end of http://mappingsegregationdc.org/assets/residential-sub-areas-for-website-rev.pdf. It narrowed it down to the record group (RG) and the box, but not the entry. More poking around and it was entry A1-6.

I got the box. I was in the research room scanning area. I was at a desk next to a dear friend who is a professional researcher showing me the ropes and I managed to scrounge up an SD card for the camera. But the monitor was acting funny. And the SD card was ‘corrupt’. I managed to fit just 2 images on the card before giving up. And below was what I was able to capture.

Source: Map 11. Housing Market Analysis Washington DC. Records Relating to Housing Market Analyses, 1940–1942. National Archives, College Park, MD RG 31, entry A1 6, (NAID 122213881)

A description of the letter based residential sub-areas.

Perpetual Building Association Ads

Just for fun I looked up the Perpetual Building Association on Youtube. Perpetual was a lender for several Truxton Circle African American home owners.

Here are three radio jingles from the early 1970s.

Television ad?

WSIC- Square 552- Odd side of 200 blk Bates- A visual

This concludes the visual look at the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company (WSIC), properties on Square 552. According to the 1933-1934 General Assessment WSIC owned lots 33-35, 49-94, 98-100, 104-150, 811, and 816-820. The 200 even block of Bates St NW were lots 80-94.

Whereas there were fewer dual entrance properties on the even side of the 200 block of Bates, the odd side had preserved more of them into the early 2000s.

Although it no longer had a second entrance, you can see evidence that there was a door under the window of 225 Bates Street NW.

A ‘positive’ of neighborhood disinvestment is that sometimes it works as a preservative. If structures manage not to get torn down, there is little incentive to modernize or gussy up the exterior. When gentrification hits, as it has, there is an incentive to add a third story or change the whole structure. I am thankful for the 2004 photos. It was the start of the 2nd wave of Shaw gentrification, but well before the million dollar houses started showing up. We can still see what the WSIC built and what managed to survive after 100 years.

I’m going to take a little break from WSIC. Just a little.

Rando Alley In Shaw- Glick Alley

This is from 1916 and shows Glick Alley which is in Shaw. It was on Square 442, which is between 6th and 7th, R & S Streets and Rhode Island Avenue NW.

Glick Alley, as far as I can tell, no longer exists.No inside plumbing for these Glick Alley homes. As I remember it, the lack of plumbing made something a slum dwelling.

A Program for Bates Street 1968- Updated

This is the 3rd version of this post because I realized that the images did not transfer when I moved this from a Blogger environment to WordPress. So the links did not work. This post aims to fix that.

Although this does not mention the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company, it is about the houses the WSIC built, plus another block. Below is a 2008 post where I misremembered the name of the 1968 report, which I have below the fold. The report, A Program for Bates Street, is just 12 pages with a few pictures of residents, has mentions of rehabilitation and new construction. Fast forward, this was under Marion Barry’s tenure so it got halfway done.

I have the 1968-1974 (the dates I’m unsure of) brochure of “A Plan for Bates Street” in PDF form. It’s a big file and because it is so large, I’m not posting here. However, I will mail it to folks who ask (offer expires in 30 days). Basically, like the title says, it was the government’s plan for the two blocks of Bates, to improve the housing.

Continue reading A Program for Bates Street 1968- Updated

A Program for Bates Street 1968

Continue reading A Program for Bates Street 1968

Crowding- and good intentions gone lost- Washington Sanitary Impr. Co.

I am looking at what I’ve written before on the InShaw blog about the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company (WSIC) before going deep on the topic and writing something new. Call it procrastination.

This piece was about the intentions of the WSIC. They saw it as a way to battle overcrowding and substandard housing by making that housing go away and replacing it with better housing. What it did was expel Black residents, who were not going to live in the new housing. History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. The same could be said of HOPE and other government (WSIC was private) housing programs. Anyway…..

I forget which census year it was but one year there were 11 people living in the house I currently occupy. As far as I know, the house has always been a two bedroom and I believe the cellar is a late 20th century addition. My house is about 1,000 sq ft.
I have read that overcrowding could be blamed on segregation. Segregation was probably one of several causes, if there are so many structures in the city and many of those structures are off limits due to covenants and other restrictions, then that limits housing choices. I get a sense that economics had something to do with it as well, but that is just a guess.
Anywho, a turn of the century description of crowded rental housing comes from a report from Clare de Graffenried:

I have no doubt that lodgers are harbored in these alleys whose presence, for many reasons not creditable to the occupants, is always concealed. The confessed facts are startling enough. We have here accounts of 7 persons living in two rooms– the mother and her sons, 21, 17 and 7 years of age, occupying one bedchamber. Again, 9 individuals live in two romse[sic]; 11 people in four rooms. Five, almost all adults, sleep in one room– the mother 43, a son 21, and daughters 19, 17, and 14; and 4 persons use another room– a mother 45, and aunt 70, and a son 22, and a baby 9 months old.
–Page 18 of Kober, George “The History and Development of the Housing Movement in the City of Washington, DC” Washington, DC 1907.

Doing a Google search for Miss de Graffenried, brought up Between Justice and Beauty by Howard Gillette, Jr., which on page 113 where he notes that she goes for the dramatic story over statistics. Later Gillette writes on page regarding the predecessor of the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company, which built the houses on Bates Street:

By 1904 the company housed 140 families, 30 of whom were black. Since the overwhelming majority of alley dwellers were black, the company clearly did not direct its attention to those in greatest need.– page 115

In Kober in 1909 writes about their housing efforts:

It should be stated, that while the original intention was to provide homes for alley residents and thereby remove the slums, it was considered best to begin this movement by providing improved dwellings for the better class of wage earners, in the belief that houses vacated by them would be rented by the next grade, and so on until the bottom of the ladder was reached. –page 31

Not a charity but capitalist enterprise- Washington Sanitary Improvement Co

Below is an old post that was originally posted on January 30, 2009. For this deep dive into the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company, I will look at the few posts where we looked at the WSIC but then I will look at the land and other records about the squares 552 and 615.

When last I left I was writing about the Washington Sanitary Improvement Company (WSIC) which built the houses along Bates Street NW, and some other streets in the TC that are somewhat Bates adjacent, around the turn of the century. You know they are built by the same company because their 2nd story bay window thing.
Anyway, the WSIC’s goal was to replace the slum dwellings in the various alleys, but as a profitable company and not a charity. From The History and Development of the Housing Movement in the City of Washington, D.C. page 61, Article III, section 4:

The company, although organized from philanthropic motives, is not a charity organization, and the executive committee shall take all legal measures to collect rents and to evict tenants who fail to pay their rent, or who neglect to keep the tenements occupied by them in a cleanly and sanitary condition, or who lead a dissolute or criminal life.

Another thing, as part of the pitch to draw interest in the company the author and secretary of the company George M. Kobr writes:

The attention of capitalists should be drawn to the fact that no class of realty pays as well as alley property in this city, and that there is a splendid field for investment in the erection of sanitary and comfortable alley houses on a business and humanitarian basis.
–page 23