Real estate revival surges into long-depressed DC neighborhoods

Those who attended the CNU annual conference in Washington, DC, last June noticed something very encouraging: Not only is the nation’s capital booming, it’s booming in neighborhoods that had been falling apart for decades. And some of the new development is generating lively, pedestrian-oriented streets. New Urban News returned to Washington in November to inspect the results of the rapidly growing investment in the city’s northeast quadrant — an area where the Washington Regional Network for Livable Communities is encouraging affordable housing and walkable, mixed-use development. “The real estate market is shifting east,” said Cheryl Cort, the Network’s executive director. In the vicinity of U and 14th Streets, which Cort points out was “the epicenter of the 1968 riots,” developers are erecting one residential/retail project after another. Especially impressive is Ellington Apartments, a massive, carefully articulated building that will contain 186 apartments above 15,000 square feet of retail. Located across the street from the 13th Street/Cardozo Metro rail station, Ellington Apartments will open this year, with rents for one-bedroom units starting around $1,300 a month. Designed by Torti, Gallas and Partners, the building ranges from four to eight stories and has courtyards and upper-story setbacks to help it avoid overwhelming U Street. There are two levels of underground parking. At 14th and V Streets, developer Scott Pannick is planning Langston Lofts, 80 condos priced at about $375 a square foot, or $300,000 for an 810-square-foot unit. “About 1999, it started to turn,” Pannick says of the 14th Street corridor, where his Metropolis Development Company has already undertaken other construction or renovation projects. One of them is Lofts 14, a 1920s auto showroom building at 14th and P Streets that has been redone to offer ground-floor retail space and loft apartments above. The area, which has a sizable gay population, has become an attractive site for new housing, Pannick says, because “it has a significant amount of developable land close to areas that are safe. As soon as I learned Whole Foods was going to be built [on P Street a short walk west of 14th], I spent a year looking for property in the area,” he notes. The 14th Street corridor lies several blocks east of the well-established DuPont Circle neighborhood. From Third to first As recently as 1995, Washington was hampered by having what Pannick describes as “a third-world planning office.” As part of the turnaround, the city now has “a top-flight office of planning which is struggling to get up to speed,” says Scott Pomeroy, executive director of the 14th & U Streets Main Street Initiative. Some housing in the 14th Street area has been made available to people of more modest means, including African-Americans who remained in the Northeast neighborhoods during the depressed years. Meanwhile, Victorian-style row-houses are popping up in LeDroit Park, a long-neglected neighborhood on the periphery of Howard University, about three-quarters of a mile east of 14th and U. The American Institute of Architects, the Urban Land Institute, and CNU have all given awards to Sorg and Associates for the firm’s work there, which includes streetscape improvements, master planning, and housing development in conjunction with the university. Howard, a historically black institution, teamed up with Fannie Mae, the Fannie Mae Foundation, and LeDroit Park residents to carry out redevelopment within a 150-block area surrounding the central campus. Sorg designed 15 brick rowhouses — subsidized so they could be offered at $131,000 to $182,000 to Howard employees — and took on renovation of 28 vacant rowhouses, selling for about $90,000. LeDroit Park shows evidence of increasing popularity. Houses without subsidies are reportedly selling for $300,000 to $400,000. Mayor Anthony Williams has declared a goal of adding 100,000 residents to the city, which lost population up to the mid-1990s. For now, Washington is making a comeback.

This correction appeared in the March 2004 New Urban News:

An article in the January-February New Urban News about a surge of redevelopment in long-depressed parts of Washington, DC, mistakenly described several projects — near 14th and U Streets, in the Howard University-LeDroit Park neighborhood, and elsewhere — as being in the city’s northeast quadrant. All are actually in the city’s northwest quadrant. Cheryl Cort of the Washington Regional Network for Livable Communities says the overall point of the article remains true. “In Northeast DC, in places that you wouldn’t have imagined would see reinvestment, new housing and renovation are occurring. This is often related to proximity to Metro — the region’s subway system,” Cort says. One example is a joint development project moving forward at the Rhode Island Avenue Metro station near 8th Street NE. The project will replace Metro’s six-acre parking lot with a mix of 270 apartments, 70,000 square feet of retail, a parking garage, and bus bays.