Let’s end this Housing Complex Day down at 941 North Capitol Street with nod of credit to where credit is due—that is to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs for making some undeniable strides in how they deal with the city’s permit seekers.

The centerpiece of that is the new permit center, which spokesperson Michael Rupert explains opened in 2007. It brings all sorts of reviews into once place—structural, electrical, mechanical, water, historical, and zoning (”That’s what really causes people delays,” Rupert says), to name a few. As mentioned before, there’s a comfortable waiting area, complete with TV. Behind the scenes, there’s been a big effort to make all sorts of different computer systems talk to each other, to make the process smoother. And, now, more than 60 of the simplest permits can be applied for online—saving you a trip here.

Read More “The New DCRA: Walk-Through and Wrap-Up” »

Jim Conner strolled out of the permit center today at about 4 p.m., and he says he’s just “tickled to death” by how easy it was.

The 20-year-veteran electrical contractor says he’s averages five visits a week to 941 North Capitol, and he says the new permit center is a big improvement over the old process, where you’d “wait and wait and wait.”

“Love it here,” the cheerful Conner says—there’s not as much waiting, and there’s a numbering system in place.

Read More “The New DCRA: More Bodies Means More Money, Says Contractor” »

Lance Robinson came down to 941 North Cap today to get his new business in order. It’s called LRL Services—a home-based operation to sell various merchandise, jewelry and gifts and such online. Getting such an operation in the good graces of government means (a) registering a trade name, (b) procuring a business license and dealing with the Office of Tax and Revenue, and (c) getting a permit for having a business in your home.

Robinson came showed up at about 1:30 p.m. today with his sister, Lenya Perkins, who owns a 16th Street Heights beauty salon. She’d been through the DCRA rigmarole before. What they found was pleasantly surprising: Less than two hours later, Robinson had left to do was pay for his home-business permit.

“We got great customer service from every office,” Perkins says. (So good in fact, that they were identified as satisfied customers by DCRA spokesperson Michael Rupert and ferried over to speak with this reporter.)

Perkins contrasts the experience with the opening of her hair salon last year; the building had been a salon before, she says, so “I thought it was a switchover.” Not so. Then after she got all of her building issues in order, she found out she still needed a basic business license. That took another three weeks, she says. In the end, she planned to open in August, but it didn’t happen till October.

“I waited a long time,” she says. But not today!

The older gentleman exiting the permit center with a thick roll of plans looks like he might have been through this a time or two.

Indeed he has: “You know who you’re talking to? You talking to someone who’s been doing this since 1958.” In fact, he says, he’s the original architect of record for Ben’s Chili Bowl, the U Street institution founded the year he started in business. He declined to give his name—you don’t spend 50 years as an architect in this town, apparently, by pissing off the authorities.

Read More “The New DCRA: Ben’s Chili Bowl Architect Says Blame the Boom” »

Sometimes, it’s all about perspective: Ask Melvin Crenshaw.

A draftsman, he’s been dealing with D.C. permitting since 1985. Today, outside the newly refurbished DCRA one-stop permit center, he says, “It’s a whole lot better than it used to be.” The customer service, in particular.

He would know: He remembers hanging out for hours in the agency’s old Chinatown facility, waiting in line in a hallway for hours for the one engineer who could approve his plans to approve his plans. Now, he says, there’s a plush waiting room with lots of light. “They even got a TV!” (Now showing Bobby Flay’s Boy Meets Grill, incidentally.)

“Night and day,” he says.

Today, he’s hanging around to pull an old electrical permit. A DCRA inspector had actually already been out to the job site in question and gave the approvals. But the agency, he says, was supposed to send the approvals to Pepco, so they could come install electric meters. But Pepco never got ‘em, and now it’s time to install the electric meter.

Not that Crenshaw holds any grudge against DCRA for the mishap: “It was our fault, too.”

And how’s this for perspective—Crenshaw says he actually likes coming down to 941 North Cap. “That means I’m working,” he says. “I’m getting paid!”

If anyone should know how to navigate DCRA’s permitting bureaucracy, it’s Allen David. He worked for the agency for 31 years as a draftsman engineer, involved in various aspects of the permit review process.

These days, though, David does construction designs and drawings, and he also works as a builder’s agent to get the permits in place. Today, he’s trying to get a permit for a fence for a Georgetown client.

He got here, at 941 North Cap, at 10:30 this morning. At 2:15 p.m., he was still here, going down to the first-floor cashier to pay for his permit. He still wasn’t sure when he would be done. Read More “The New DCRA: Agency Old-Timer Not Happy With Fence Approval Process” »

One woman exiting the DCRA permit center this afternoon wasted no time expressing her displeasure: “This place sucks!” she said. “Fenty sucks!”

She’s an architect whose been dealing with DCRA for five years, and she finds herself here as many as five times a week. And, she says, it’s rarely a quick or pleasant experience. (She doesn’t want to give her name, because of her frequent visits: “Then I’ll be blacklisted!”)

“You have some people who really want to do their job, and you have people who don’t,” she says. And the system, she says, demands some familiarity. Not that that will get you that far: “I know how to navigate the waters, and I’m still frustrated.” Read More “The New DCRA: ‘I Hate This Place,’ Says Permit-Seeker” »

For decades in this town, no city agency generated as much citizen grief as the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. The Brobdingnagian agency, responsible for everything from corporate registrations to business license to housing inspections to surveying to weights and measure to elevator licensing, by the late ’90s had been widely recognized as a particular hellhole in a hellishly dysfunctional government.

Since then, though, under Mayor Anthony A. Williams and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, the agency’s made a lot of strides in improving its image. But no DCRA activity generates as much continuing grief as procuring a building permit. Call it the last frontier for the new DCRA. Read More “The New DCRA: Still a Hellish Experience?” »

On Friday, Mayor Adrian Fenty and other city leaders debuted these new steel barriers at 1515 Rhode Island Ave NE, an old apartment building that has been secured four times in the last four months, due to break-ins from squatters and neighborhood ne’re-do-wells, according to Mike Rupert, spokesperson for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA).

The announcement calls the unveiling a “60-day pilot project,” but it’s more of a demonstration. The mayor has already asked DCRA to draft legislation with criteria determining which buildings would be good candidates for this type of system. Read More “Fenty and Co. Test Steel Barriers on Vacant Properties” »

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Adrian M. Fenty is the closest D.C. has ever come to an imperial mayor. He refuses to answer questions about various business and personal trips. He hogs baseball tickets. He snaps his fingers and people get fired.

On April 23, the mayor appeared to be at it again. On a walk-through of Eckington, Fenty fixated on a “once beautiful, but very dangerous Victorian house,” as described in an e-mail from Alice Thompson, the mayor’s outreach coordinator for Ward 5.

The home at 1811 3rd St. NE was a dilapidated gray house with a spacious front porch, a sizable lawn, and a serious problem with squatters. According to the e-mail, it was “by far the worst property he had seen.” Read More “Fenty Orders Eckington Demolition That Was Already Ordered in 2006″ »