Ugly! Expensive!

Vacant properties are not a sexy topic, and the Government Accountability Office is no Danielle Steele, but the agency's recent report on the matter is a pretty interesting read for anybody who cares about how all those empty buildings came to be that way and their effect on local governments. Even though loan servicers are supposed to keep foreclosed properties in good shape for banks, cities often end up spending millions of dollars to adjudicate, maintain, and demolish properties. (The cost to neighborhoods of a suddenly-empty home, in terms of community disruption, decline in property values, and decreased safety, is harder to quantify.)

The story for D.C. is a little better. The percentage of our total housing stock that's vacant is slightly below the national average, and the total number of vacancies has increased only 13.2 percent—not bad considering the total growth in the city's housing stock, and the national vacancy growth rate of 43.8 percent. (See a map of where they are here.)

The city isn't sure exactly how much it spends taking care of those properties. According to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, the vacant property unit has two full-time, dedicated inspectors and a $550,000 annual budget, which isn't broken out into the cost of abating nuisance properties. That's not huge, as the general fund goes, but it's a cost that I'd rather not have to pay.

A roof, but no floor. (Maxim Massenkoff)

The endgame of Occupy D.C.'s short-lived attempt to erect a 17-foot-high, wooden-framed structure at McPherson Square featured a strange bit of law enforcement theater: The Park Police called the District's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, which tracked down the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs' weekend duty building inspector, who came by and deemed the building structurally unsound. (As if the Park Police needed that as an excuse to boot occupiers off the roof and dismantle their barn).

At Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger identifies the ostensible problem: The building had no foundation. Of course, the building's designers were explicitly trying to avoid that, in order to at least comply with the letter of the National Park Service's prohibition on temporary structures.

But does a DCRA inspector's word actually carry any weight? Nope: Federally-owned lands aren't subject to D.C. building codes, so the inspector's verdict was merely advisory. "We have no jurisdiction over federal parkland," says DCRA spokesman Helder Gil. "Our role there was basically providing the expert opinion as to whether or not that structure was safe and secure, according to D.C. regulations."

Of course, the Park Service's regulations for buildings it does allow could be fairly similar to the District's. Both are based on the International Code Council's model regs, with slight variations that probably don't include something so...foundational...as the need for a floor. So if the Park Service's inspectors had been available at 4:30 p.m. on a Sunday, the result may have been the same.

One entrepreneur, Shannon Christmas, is hoping that’s enough to drive renovators and builders to seek expert assistance. Over the last few months, he’s launched—wait for it—a “boutique real estate and land use consulting atelier strategically fashioning bespoke positioning, programming, permitting, and pricing solutions that maximize value-per-square-foot for lifestyle-driven, design-oriented developments worldwide.”

Whew.

It might sound like marketing gobbledegook, but the approach has apparently worked in New York City, where Christmas has helped clients like the Trump Organization put together their developments, in a world where local Community Boards are even more powerful than Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. But he also knows the ins and outs of D.C.’s zoning code, having worked as a zoning engineer for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs starting in 2009 (right when inclusionary zoning was being implemented). He found the process of permitting in a politically charged environment so dramatic that he’s working on a novel about it in his spare time.

“It's the politics of zoning that you see in D.C. that you don't see in other places,” says Christmas, who has degrees from Harvard and MIT. “Compliance is not actually a requirement at DCRA, which is actually quite shameful. People can go to a director, or email the mayor, and get an approval for something that they ought not have.”

Often renovators of single family homes don’t know things like what lot occupancy is allowed on their land, and Christmas is charging an all-inclusive $1,500 to help them figure it out. But he's also looking to help out on larger projects. Not as an architect, designer, lawyer, contractor, or broker—just as the guy who tells you how floorplans should be put together, and how units ought to be priced for the market. Because sometimes developers don’t get it.

“It's almost as if developers simply throw up buildings and simply hope that they sell,” Christmas says. He cites the slow-selling Wormley Row in Georgetown as an example.

“If you just look at the flow of rooms for entertaining, for some of the higher-end units, you see that they have a kitchen with a breakfast nook that is disconnected from the butler's pantry and disconnected from the dining room, and then to serve the food that you'd be serving to your guests, you'd have to move through the hallways,” he says. “Small things like that are a big deal, especially to high-end buyers.”

With one foot still in the Big Apple, Christmas is also hoping that some of the more innovative architecture going on there will trickle down to D.C., which has always had a more traditionalist bent.

“In D.C., while there was a boom in development, there wasn't so much experimentation with the types of architecture that you were seeing,” Christmas says. Other than Eastbanc’s project with Enrique Norten, “there just hasn't been thus far much interest in engaging those world class architects.”

Of course, in the District’s contentious approvals process, creative architecture is always a bigger risk.

A misleading calm. (Darrow Montgomery)

The District’s biggest, nastiest, longest-running rent control battle isn’t in a low-income apartment complex, or even a run-of-the-mill building in some gentrifying neighborhood. It’s in a historic art deco tower tucked into the side of the National Zoo, long viewed as one of Washington’s finest addresses—and the fight is finally stumbling toward a close.

For years at the Kennedy-Warren, a handful of holdouts have staged a rent strike, filed lawsuits, and appealed to every relevant authority to prevent longtime landlord B.F. Saul from doing what they thought it planned to do: renovate the old units with cookie-cutter modern luxuries, and then knock as many as possible out of rent control.

Saul’s position: The protests are coming from a small group of comfortable tenants who are just stalling for concessions, and don’t know a good deal when they see one. “A couple of them will find fault with heaven,” says Tom McCormick, the landlord’s chief financial officer and point person for all things Kennedy-Warren.

By now, McCormick has negotiated settlements with all but a few of the most stubborn tenants. In the interim, most of the rest have moved out; only about 60 of the 316 units are still occupied. The empty, renovated apartments began leasing this week, and construction will finish up in the next two months.

Despite the high attrition rate and the reams of paper expended on legal filings, in a few important regards, the holdouts have won: The units retain much of their historic feel, from the original decorative doorknockers to the restored blue-and-white tile bathroom floors. And lucky new tenants will still pay less than what the same unit would have cost if it had been rebuilt. But the cost of that quasi-victory was secret deals and endless delays, cracking apart the harmony that used to exist among those who call the place their home.

“There was all this flag-waving about ‘tenants of the world unite,’” says a tenant who asked to remain anonymous on account of ongoing legal proceedings. “That was all bullshit, because most of them have settled… B.F. Saul just divided and conquered.”

—

To understand why tenants dug themselves in so deeply, you need to get the Kennedy-Warren mindset. Despite the trappings of faded elegance, this wasn’t a playground for the super-rich. It was a place where highly educated, reasonably well-off professionals who didn’t want to buy real estate could live in dignified surroundings—if they appreciated its historic idiosyncrasies.

“You have to be the sort of person who’s willing to live in Washington without central air,” says Christine Burkhardt, a research librarian for a federal agency who’s been living there since 1994. “They’re more bohemian, I guess.”

More bohemian than residents of the new wing, at least. In 2003, B.F. Saul finished a long-planned addition that was identical from the outside, but with much larger, cushier suites on the inside. Rents range upwards of $8,000 a month for the biggest apartments. Strolling through the wing’s common areas, where management had put on an Easter celebration for the well-coiffed tenants and their pastel-clad young children, Burkhardt and I seem distinctly out of place. “I consider myself the working poor,” Burkhardt explains (not entirely convincingly, given her white-collar federal job).

Originally, B.F. Saul’s plans were much grander: A wholesale remodel with altered floorplans and modern furnishings. To pay for it, they asked tenants for a $233 increase on all the units, on top of the annual increase of about 2 percent per year landlords are permitted under rent control rules, and in addition to a $179 rent hike to pay for replacing all the windows. The tenant association, which had supported building the new south wing in 1997 under the condition that the building be improved at no cost to tenants, staged a rent strike.

To end it, B.F. Saul came back with another proposal: They would keep rents the same for all current occupants, as long as they allowed future tenants to be charged market rates. The landlord would even pay lump sums of over $50,000 for tenants to leave the building (it was already more than two-thirds empty, since management hadn’t re-leased apartments that tenants moved out of since 2006). Seventy percent of the tenants would have to agree—but those who disagreed and stayed anyway would also be subject to rent increases.

All but 12, or 87 percent, of the tenants signed off; it was, after all, a pretty good deal. But in March 2008, the District’s then-rent administrator Grayce Wiggins vetoed the agreement, saying it was “patently coercive” and would undermine the purposes of rent control. Almost immediately, she was fired, under circumstances that a subsequent D.C. Council investigation failed to explain (tenant activists, of course, are pretty sure B.F. Saul had something to do with it).

After that, the combination of the recession and the inability to recover much higher rents down the road prompted B.F. Saul to scale back plans for the building, from a $40 million remodel to a $30 million replacement of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, as well as new appliances. But they would still need to move people around. In July 2009, the landlord requested permission to temporarily relocate tenants to work on their apartments.

The new, acting rent administrator gave the OK in February 2010, and B.F. Saul—which had already begun work in unoccupied units—immediately issued 120-day notices to vacate the apartments where they needed to go next. According to the original phased schedule, some tenants wouldn’t have to move until this summer. But some volunteered to move sooner—perhaps because having construction noise all around you is a powerful motivating force—so Saul tried to accelerate things. Even before that, a handful of tenants had filed a class-action lawsuit to stop the process, and soon a hail of tenant petitions, eviction notices, temporary restraining orders, injunctions, appeals, and motions filled the air above the old building.

“When the construction was well underway in this first zone, that’s when the tenants who were on top of this really began saying well, everything is going to be a fait accompli very quickly here,” says Marc David Block, a five-year resident who has three actions pending before various judicial bodies. “It’s like what they say with regard to the West Bank—‘events on the ground.’”

Hyperbolic metaphors aside, the tenants did win some victories. Blake Nelson, a lawyer drafting document after document on his own behalf, argued that his family would suffer “irreparable harm” if they had to move before the schedule allowed. He got the city’s Office of Administrative Hearings to invalidate one of the notices to vacate, and is still fighting to move at his originally scheduled date, staying through the winter even as his heat was turned off last October to allow renovations to happen elsewhere.

But most people left, taking an offer of four months’ worth of free rent to avoid constant jackhammering, drilling, and sawing. After extensive negotiations, Block took a 9th floor apartment. So did Burkhardt, who recalls a drill actually coming through the wall before she left her old place. “I feel like a Katrina victim,” she says, sitting in a spacious, 6th floor unit, filled with handsome wooden furniture and houseplants. “I got a trailer.”

—

Despite complaints about disruptive construction (lead contamination*, pervasive dust, a water main break), and retaliation for resistance (legal action for a few days’ lateness on rent), the biggest source of rancor is simply B.F. Saul’s attitude. For example, tenants recall a meeting where McCormick explained that he expected the rent administrator to rubber stamp a voluntary agreement signed by more than 70 percent of residents.

“Frankly, within D.C., this is a building in a nicer area, with a population that’s relatively more affluent, the rent administrator says ‘Connecticut Avenue? Kennedy-Warren?’” McCormick made a sharp stamping motion on the table. “Tell me about a real problem in the city.”

Later, in response to tenants’ threats to hold the process up in the courts, McCormick expressed confidence that he and his lawyer—Richard Luchs, generally considered the most aggressive rent-control attorney in the city—would have no problem nudging the bureaucracy their way.

“I think the city administration, with whom we have lots of dealings—I’ll leave it at that—will be sympathetic to moving this along,” McCormick said, in footage posted to YouTube. “D.C. bureaucracies move faster in some instances than others, and I think I can make this one move fast.”

But there were some tenants—at least a silent minority—who were happy to pass on costs to future tenants if necessary, and who didn’t want to take part in a rebellion mostly aimed at fighting inconveniences. One of them, who also asked to remain anonymous, imagines how a representative of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs must have felt listening to people who complained that B.F. Saul was going to bring the building up to code at no cost to them.

“It was such a total mismatch between the tenants and the D.C. person, who spends his entire life dealing with landlords who won’t do repairs in Anacostia,” the tenant speculates. “He was exasperated with tenants who are upset with the repairs the landlord is doing.”

B.F. Saul, meanwhile, has mostly left the battle behind to focus on getting the historic wing leased up. Touring the building, McCormick and Saul’s vice president of building management Tanya Marhefka point out each of the building’s painstakingly preserved details—from the original sinks to latches on kitchen cabinets. Some didn’t even have washers and dryers, at the tenants’ insistence; McCormick can’t help but point out everything they insisted on keeping.

“There were a handful of tenants who insisted on not changing anything,” he says, as we walk through. “They absolutely didn’t want a modern feel, no matter what.”

After increases allowed after vacancies, the empty rent-controlled units aren’t cheap—one 998-square-foot one-bedroom (they’re all at different rates, according to rent increases allowed by rent control) was going for $3,181 per month, and a 549-square-foot studio at $1,693.

But some of those who stuck it out are still paying less than $2 a square foot—which, for a room in the Old Lady of the Avenue, is probably the best deal in the city.

“Yeah, God bless ‘em,” McCormick says, shrugging.

—

* Updated to reflect the fact that lead was indeed found in old paint. According to the District Department of the Environment, which dispatched inspectors at least 35 times in response to tenant complaints, "management and their contractors worked quickly to address DDOE’s Notice of Violation and took subsequent corrective actions."

B.F. Saul's Tanya Marhefka and Tom McCormick tour through revamped apartments. (Darrow Montgomery)

Settling in. (Lydia DePillis)

What are some of the biggest improvements that DCRA has made in the last few years under your predecessor Linda Argo?

I think we’ve made advances in terms of customer service, in terms of our website. A lot more information is given to the public, so they don’t necessarily have to call us, they can go on the website. Michael Rupert just did wonders on the website, designing it. And also, Michael was big on Twitter, so you got a lot of information electronically. He participated in some of the blogs, I guess you would say blogs. So in real time, a person would send in an email, or send in a tweet I guess you’d call it, and say 'hey I need a permit, how do I get it?' and he’d say 'this is what you need to do.' So you didn’t have to come down and stand in a long line, only to be told ‘you didn’t copy a certificate of occupancy, so go stand in that line.’ They would come in knowing exactly what the needed.

Also during the past few years, part of which was under [former director] Patrick Canavan, vacant property. We did a block by block survey in 2007 of the entire city to survey vacant properties. And I think we went from an inventory of about 600 or 800 to 3000. So we required owners to register vacant properties, to maintain them according to law. And we thought that was a tremendous accomplishment. Because we found that a lot of police service calls, and a lot of DCRA calls are for vacant properties, which become nuisances.

Also, in terms of IT, we increased the public’s ability to apply for some building permits online, which happened under Director Argo’s leadership, but it started under Patrick Canavan. In fact, there’s a kiosk at Home Depot where you can get some building permits. That reduces the number of trips you need to make to DCRA, and it reduces the amount of staff we need.

Before taking this job, you were essentially the agency’s public face, dealing a lot with individual problems. Do you like getting yelled at?

Well, I see myself as a communicator. I’m still an attorney. And as a litigator, I’ve had to argue before judges and juries. And as deputy director for community service, I would attend hundreds of community meetings, a lot of which were on behalf of Director Argo. I think it’s just in how you approach people. What I found is that people just don’t know. And because the agency’s so complicated, you can’t just go to one person and get an answer. In most cases, I know the answer. But you can’t walk into DCRA and say ‘I want to start a business, what do I do?' In fact, a lot of the time, you have to go to an attorney. So a lot of people get frustrated, thinking they’re going to come down here and one person’s going to be able to answer all of their questions.

Sometimes I get yelled at, but that didn’t bother me, it’s part of my job. I’m a civil servant. Some people don’t use that term anymore, but it used to be that what be called them. I work for the people. I have to treat them with respect, no matter what, and I have to try to calm them down.

Sometimes, people don’t understand. I had a guy come in yesterday, he was the owner of a condominium unit. And some condominium owners, they call themselves tenants. They say, ‘I have a housing code violation,’ and I say, ‘who’s your landlord?’ And they say ‘well, I don’t have a landlord.’ 'Well, you have to have a landlord if you’re a tenant.' ‘Well, it’s a condo.’ ‘Do you own the unit, or are you renting?’ ‘I own it.’ So this person is upset that the roof is leaking, he wants to blame the developer. But the condominium was built in 2006, and the burden is on the condo association to fix that roof, because they’re private homeowners. I can’t force the association to fix the roof.

We don’t get a lot of that, but we get enough to know that people just don’t understand.

I always make the comparison with our inspections and the DMV, where you get your car registered. They do a superficial inspection, and see that there are no life safety issues. That your brake lights are working, that your windshield wipers are working. They don’t check your transmission. They don’t check your engine. And that’s what we do, we make inspections for life safety issues. But people want us to do a lot of things that we can’t do, or that they need to go to court for. People don’t understand our limitations.

Sometimes we react to the public to appease the public, and we’re wrong. We get sued. In one case, neighbors didn’t want a group home. And under the Fair Housing Act, group homes can be situated as a matter of right anywhere, up to seven occupants. But people don’t want group homes. I’m amazed that people will actually say, we don’t want them in our neighborhood. We don’t want Section 8 people. We don’t want ex-offenders. We don’t want juveniles in the juvenile system.

We had a situation in the attorney general’s office where somebody wanted to paint their house pink, some loud color. People say, ‘We don’t want this pink house in our neighborhood.’ Look, the law requires that we not discriminate. They say, ‘we don’t care about that. Put it somewhere else.’

We had two fair housing cases where we lost in federal court, and in one case, the judge criticized us, the DCRA, for delaying. In Tenleytown, they criticized us for holding up the certificate of occupancy to give in to the neighbors. Peaceoholics was the exact same thing. It was like, ‘we don’t want them here, no matter what.’ And our position was, we don’t have the authority to deny somebody who, as a matter of right, can situate a building, business home or whatever, because by law, we cant discriminate.

With the pawnshop on Georgia Avenue, Councilmember Bowser amended the law for her constituents to say that ANC commissioners have to be given great weight with respect to issuing a pawnbrokers license. With licenses, our role is ministerial. You come in, you say ‘I want to open a pawnshop.’ If you meet all the requirements, we’re required by law to give you that license. There’s no deliberation involved. Alcohol licensing, the alcohol board has the discretion to issue or not issue an alcohol license. We don’t have that authority. Except now with the new law, we have to at least give ANCs great weight. And I think that’s the only license on the books where we have the authority to deliberate. In that case, the ANC opposed it, and they gave their reasons, and the business rebutted it, and we looked at both sides, and we found no compelling reason not to issue the license, and we issued the license.

The pawnshop applied for the license, and spent a lot of money renovating the property. It was only after they did all that that they got the opposition. So I think it would be grossly unfair to say, you spent $100,000 to renovate it, and after that the commission opposes it, so we’re not going to give you a license. Hands down, we would have lost in court. I’ve been a litigator for 20 years. If we did that, the pawnshop would have gotten a hefty judgment by either jury or judge.

A lot of times, people just don’t understand. And it’s incumbent on us to make them understand. In most cases, we follow the law correctly here. If someone doesn’t want a pink house in their neighborhood and somebody else does, we have no authority to say you can’t have a pink house, but somebody’s going to be upset if we don’t stop the pink house, or we don’t stop the group home. And people want to blame somebody, and it’s typically DCRA.

One of the complaints I hear about DCRA is about business regulation: There are too many fees to pay and hoops to jump through. Do you plan on cutting down at all on red tape?

We don’t enact laws. That’s done by the legislature. I can’t think of a law on the books that says ‘you must do this’ that I think is antiquated, that shouldn’t be. I think we should move more towards information technology, allowing people to apply for things online. But I think the laws are designed for safety and welfare. And I think once you start stripping requirements, then you are making it more risky for a visitor or a tenant or whatever.

Now, we also have a code coordinating board that’s revamping all of the laws. We’re going to be among the first jurisdiction to revamp all of its codes. So I think we’re on track to be a model for other jurisdictions. We have looked at the laws on the books and we’ve modified some, and some of them might be antiquated, so we’ve gotten rid of those.

What are your biggest challenges going forward?

When I started here in 2005, we had 80 inspectors, 40 commercial, 40 residential. Today we have 23 inspectors. All of whom aren’t doing inspections; there are a few supervisors. That’s a huge challenge. We’ve had to do reductions in force over the last few years. When I started, we had 400 employees, now we have 270. It’s stressful in two ways: One, the thought of having to be reduced or terminated. There are employees who are currently on board who fear, ‘am I going to be reduced because of the economy?’ That same employee is stressed out because their work load has increased. If you have more customers coming out to be serviced, that’s more stress on the customer. They have to wait longer to be serviced. Big challenge. You have less people answering the telephones. Instead of waiting a couple of minutes of waiting, now you have to wait a long time.

What directives have you gotten from Mayor Gray yet, if any?

Mayor Gray wants us to be more transparent. We had our first cabinet meeting, and one of our marching orders is to be more transparent, to engage the community. We’re changing the way we do business, to get the community’s input. And to that end, I’ve reached out to the ANC commissioners and asked if we can have a training session, and explain to them the processes. And I think if we educated the ANC commissioners, I think knowledge is power, and they can say ‘this person is building an addition to their house. You may not like it, but it’s allowed as a matter of right by law. Don’t blame DCRA for enforcing the law.’

And that’s just the way Mayor Gray is. He’s honest, he’s open, he’s deliberate, in fact he gets criticized for being deliberative, which is a good thing. You should listen to both sides. 'This is your viewpoint, this is your viewpoint,' and we’ll make a decision based on what’s right, and that’s the way he is. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m glad to be working in his administration, because we think alike.

Linda Argo’s departure came as a surprise to a lot of local government watchers, since it didn't seem like anyone was publicly calling for her removal. Do you know why you were chosen to replace her?

Well, I heard that the transition team recommended me. I heard that people told the mayor that I would be a good fit for director. There’s some synergy between Mayor Gray and I. We’re both native Washingtonians, we’re products of the public school system. He’s called on me in the past when he was a councilmember and when he was chairperson, I was very responsive, he liked that in me. He liked the fact that I had the law background.

And it’s political. I have nothing bad to say about Linda Argo, but it’s partly political, and it’s part that synergy. It’s no reflection on competency of the former director. It’s more about me, going forward. As the mayor he has the prerogative to choose the people who best fir his goal and his mission, and I think that it was me.

And again, the Mayor and I go way back. When I was at Forest Haven, [when Gray was director of the Department of Human Services,] he was very demanding, to make sure those citizens were treated fairly. We knew who Vincent Gray was, because we better have done the right thing for those citizens that were under our care. Our paths have crossed for 30 years.

Pawn shop incoming! (Lydia DePillis)

It's been more than half a year since community members launched their crusade against a proposed pawn shop on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Fern Street NW, which resulted in a minor overhaul of money lending regulations and granted ANCs "great weight" in deciding whether or not a pawn shop gets licensed.

Well, turns out that doesn't count for much. Even after ANC 4B voted to oppose Famous Pawn's application, the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs decided last week to grant the license, dismissing the commission's concerns about crime and lowered property values (as did a Superior Court judge, on November 22). In doing so, DCRA sends a message that as long as businesses dot their eyes and cross their tees, the mere fact that an ANC doesn't want something in its neighborhood amounts to a hill of beans.

"I think of it as a really offensive Christmas present," said Commissioner Sara Green, who spearheaded the opposition. "This is really an enormous slap in the face."

In its letter, DCRA's Business and Professional Licensing Administration wrote:

DCRA concludes that the applicant has demonstrated the financial responsibility, experience, character and general fitness as to command the confidence of the community and to warrant the belief that the business will be operated honestly, fairly, and efficiently....DCRA agrees that Famous Pawn did a poor job of communicating with the community and has failed to establish a trust bond with the ANC. However, it does not follow that Famous Pawn's failure to communicate with the community reflects a lack of the requisite character such as to be unable to command the confidence of the community. DCRA concludes Famous Pawn's failure to engage the community is not indicative of a character flaw. Rather, this failure was a communications and marketing error.

DCRA was very careful on this one–Famous Pawn, a national chain, could very well have sued if it found any toehold. Perhaps a smart decision by the agency, but it raises the question: Would a small business have had the kind of resources necessary to achieve the same result?

Not doing so hot. (Lydia DePillis)

It's been five months since the Office of Planning firmly denied Milton McGinty's request to demolish the Takoma Theater, his long-shuttered venue on 4th and Butternut Streets NW. Since we spoke in early June, he first insisted that he would sue in Superior Court to reverse the decision, and then backed off that promise. "I really don’t want to spend the money filing a suit and then have no money left to build the building," McGinty told me in late September.

In the mean time, the 87-year-old building has fallen even deeper into disrepair. In a mid-August letter to interested parties–including the Takoma Theater Conservancy, which has been trying to buy and renovate the theater for years now–McGinty said that he would be putting no more money into maintenance. Then came the heavy rains, which didn't help the mold that makes it hard to breathe inside the theater. According to a visitor in September, there's also a resident cat.

Until about a decade ago, nothing would have forced McGinty to do anything with the property, as long as he didn't actively knock down the theater. But under D.C.'s "demolition by neglect" statute, he's actually forbidden from allowing the building to fall so far into disrepair that it's no longer salvageable. The Conservancy's Loretta Neumann knows that the more the roof leaks and the mold festers, the more expensive it will be to renovate.

Neumann has convened a meeting tonight with Councilmember Muriel Bowser, the Historic Preservation Office, and DCRA to figure out what to do next. It's at 7:00 p.m. at the Takoma Education Center.

Plaintiff Capital Auto Sales – Urban blight?

A couple of years ago, fueled by neighborhood complaints, the Fenty administration went on a jihad against used car lots all around the city. A city investigation had found that many were not selling cars at all: Rather, about half of the 106 dealerships investigated were being used as storage facilities hile the cars were marketed outside the District, and even abroad. Those that actually did sell cars were typically cited as out of compliance with one city regulation or another.

But the city didn't stop at shutting down 23 car lots and yanking the licenses of hundreds more. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs also passed a raft of new regulations, forbidding more than four cars to be stored outside in commercially-zoned lots, requiring all dealerships storing more than five cars outside to post a $50,000 bond and obtain another $1,000 business license, plus a ton of nitpicky things about minimum lot size, landscaping, curbs, paving, etc.

Ten of those dealerships–especially those that felt they were operating on the up and up–weren't going to take that lying down. They retained Anthony Rachal (who's represented such feel-good figures as BP Amoco Oil and Exxon) to sue the city, and then appeal when Superior Court ruled against the dealerships.

All for naught, it turns out. Yesterday, the Appeals Court batted the businesses down again, saying that the conditions DCRA had found at all those nasty used car lots fully justified the new regs. But the rules don't apply to new car lots or to rental parking lots. The court reasoned:

A new car dealer is subject to the standards of the manufacturer for which the dealer has a franchise, and a new car is less likely than a used one to be in disrepair or to attract pests. A rental car company is also likely to be affiliated with a national chain that imposes standards for vehicle upkeep....The Director could reasonably conclude that these and similar businesses pose less of a danger to the public health and safety than do establishments licensed as used car dealers.

The demonstrated undesirability of many used car lots aside, this has got to be the kind of thing that drives small businesses insane. In ruling against the independent used car dealers but exempting new car dealers and rental lots explicitly because they are part of larger companies that have standards for upkeep, the judge essentially throws out the rights of those responsible independent dealers that weren't part of the problem in the first place.

A manager at plaintiff Capital Auto Sales on Brentwood Road NE, who declined to give his name because he wasn't the owner, says the car dealerships are feeling hunted.

"They are harassing all the dealers because the mayor is trying to get rid of small businesses and make room for large corporations," he said, when reached by phone. "How could a business survive selling four cars?"

To bring you up to speed: Soon after their rally on the corner of 29th and Garfield, ANC 3C unanimously voted to oppose the building project and to join an appeal to the Board of Zoning Adjustment. Last Friday, the neighbors met with officials from the Mayor’s office, DCRA, the Urban Forestry Administration, the Office of Planning, and Councilmember Phil Mendelson to try to sort things out, and learned more about how the Zoning Administrator had done little or nothing to evaluate the potential effect of upscaling the woodsy corner.

On Monday, however, the neighbors were dealt a disappointment: DCRA Director Linda Argo said that the Zoning Administrator’s decision to use his “minor flexibility discretion” in subdividing the lot for two homes was “appropriate and correct.” Still, Argo said that the permits would be reviewed by all relevant agencies, including DDOT, WASA, and the Department of the Environment. DCRA will also be meeting personally with the developer to ensure compliance with all regulations.

The Woodley Parkers sent their letter to Mayor Fenty the same day, asking basically the same thing—a stay on all construction until the BZA appeal had been heard. The letter was signed by Councilmembers Cheh, Mendelson, David Catania, Michael Brown, Kwame Brown, and chairman Vince Gray.

“It’s going to be a long, hot summer,” neighborhood spokeswoman Lisa Mitiguy says.

A little bit more than nickles and dimes. (Lydia DePillis)

If you're applying for any sort of permit or license right now, you're going to wish you hadn't procrastinated so long: Yesterday a host of new fees went into effect that will make everything from throwing a "lawn fête" to starting a bowling alley a little bit more expensive. You can read through the list of permit fees here, and license fees here.

Among the new surcharges are $158 per day for a carnival or street festival, $102 per table in a billiard hall, $2,392 for a live theater, $91 per ambulance, $2,730 for an ice cream manufacturer but $289 for a grocery store. Plus a 10 percent hike in basic business licenses, certificates of occupancy, and corporate registration to cover technological enhancements for permit processing.

The fees, which Mayor Adrian Fenty imposed by executive order last week, will generate $7.5 million in the last four months of fiscal year 2010 to stop a little bit of the bleeding–but it's not much in the $220 million scale of things.