Back in July, ONE Ministries LLC was still hanging onto their dream of making the building known as Hoagie House at 4th and N Street NW in Shaw into a facility for after-school youth programs. But the blighted property tax was about to kick in, and while the Advisory Neighborhood Commission supported their request for a temporary exemption, would really have liked to see the church sell the building to someone with more wherewithal to do something with it.

Well, ONE Ministries took that advice, and recently offloaded the property for around $900,000 to small-scale local developer Abbas Fathi. It’s actually a long, comma-shaped lot, with more property on 4th Street behind the corner storefront, and Fathi plans to turn most of it into apartments with a cafe on the ground floor (the lot is one of those rare properties in with grandfathered commercial zoning in a residential neighborhood).

If Fathi’s name sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve been paying attention to the saga of Shaw’s Tavern, which Fathi owned and lost after the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board deemed the business “unfit for licensure.” Thus, local ANC people are watching the cafe concept carefully, but still happy to see a borderline-blighted property returning to productive use.