Via the Washington Post this a.m. comes news that the latest round of property-tax assessments has increased slightly citywide. But the variations from block to block provide the really interesting story.

For instance: Brentwood, for the second straight year, posts big increases in assessments. Guess the garbage isn’t stinking quite as much as in the past.

Another for instance: Assessments in LeDroit Park have gone down just a hair, by 1.7 percent. What’s gone wrong over there? Did someone’s cornice fall off? Or did someone in the tax office decide, Hey, Florida Avenue is still a dump?

And while I’m on a property-tax rant, I pose the following question to our world of D.C.-philes out there. Who in this vast universe actually knows, off the top of your head, which neighborhoods fall into the tax office’s “Old City I” designation and its “Old City II” designation?
Yes, these terms are used to cover all those neighborhoods in the the city’s gentrification plume. Yet no one, I maintain, has any clue where the boundaries lie.

If you’re out there, Mr. or Mrs. “Old City I and Old City II,” catch up with me in the comments section. If you can convince me that you have this nailed, and you don’t work in the tax office, I’ll give you a Washington City Paper T shirt plus a $25 money order, even if the latter has to come out of my own pocket, because I haven’t cleared this one with corporate yet.

And merely Googling the tax office’s definitions isn’t going to get you there. I want a phoner interview with you too.

There’s a big debate over the day laborers that congregate near Home Depot in Northeast. Neighbors are pissed that these folks, well, piss and do other unseemly things in the vicinity. See this story in the Washington Times for more on that.

Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. has proposed building a multiculti training center on the site, the better to handle the open-air labor market that has sprung up at this contractor hotspot.

Build the center, indeed. But before building the center, raze the entire shopping center, bulldoze the parking lot, and keep digging. As Washington City Paper pointed out years ago, this project was launched and executed hastily, to the eternal detriment of economic and community development in and around Brentwood. The whole thing sits too high off Brentwood Road NE, a problem that the developers handled by building a retaining wall and saying, essentially, the hell with it. Bring this eyesore to street level, make the shops front the street, and then build the day laborer site. How hard could that be?