Last night, Mayor Vince Gray gave a 5,700 word speech on the state of the District, laying out his priorities on public safety, sustainability, education, and fostering new and existing industries other than the federal government (especially tech). All great things!
But for someone who covers real estate, something was obviously missing: Housing. Creating more of it, [...]

Dan Reed at Just Up the Pike had a good piece the other day on the need for housing that's affordable to 20-somethings just starting their career—a constituency that's currently paying a huge percentage of what they earn to live someplace cool, or just going elsewhere. He brought to my attention a form of housing [...]

If you've ever wandered through the alleys south of U Street NW, you may have noticed a large empty lot inside the block between 12th and 13th Street, unkempt and fenced off. It's a shock to find such an expanse of unused space in this increasingly expensive neighborhood. I first thought it must be some [...]

Last week, the Brookings Institute came out with an update on the city's progress on a landmark set of recommendations from back in 2006 on how to deal with the affordable housing shortage. The verdict was mixed: Some laws have been enacted and homes built, but the recession whacked most of the public subsidies for [...]

When Amber Massey was looking for a place to live three years ago, she knew she couldn’t afford most real estate in DC, at the age of 25 on a non-profit salary. But she also didn’t like the idea of paying rent forever to a landlord, building no equity in a home.
While visiting the now-closed [...]

The National Low Income Housing Coalition just came out with its 2011 data dump, and D.C. residents shouldn't be that surprised: Our fair city is second only to Hawaii in the price of its rental housing.
More specifically, the NLIHC calculates the "housing wage," which is the full-time hourly wage a household would need to earn [...]

Here's the lesson of Gibson Plaza, the 10-story Shaw behemoth housing mostly Section 8 tenants: If you suffer through bad conditions long enough, you might just be there when a fantastic upgrade comes around.
The 217-unit building hadn't had a major renovation since it was built, back in 1974, by the development arm of First Rising [...]

Walking into the Temple of Praise near the end of a service is like lifting the lid of a tea kettle: The energy inside the Southern Avenue SE church is so intense, with worshipers dancing and wailing and fainting in the aisles, that it seems like it could boil over at any minute. Even when [...]

If the word "zoning" makes your eyes glaze over, get yourself some coffee or something and try to focus for a second.
Here's the thing: For a few years now, the Office of Planning has been working on revamping the rules that govern how the city looks and feels. Regulations that dictate how many parking spaces [...]

It's a tentative plan, but a plan nonetheless: Lincoln Westmoreland Housing Inc. is moving forward with a 50-unit apartment complex on 7th and R Street NW, right next to the 10-story behemoth constructed right after the 1968 riots.
The new building, designed by Shalom Baranes architects, could not be more ideally located: It sits directly above [...]