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, [...]
The Post's Debbie Cenziper just dropped the latest installment of her investigative series on the nation's subsidized housing foibles, with a particular focus on the District. This one zooms in on D.C.'s Home Purchase Assistance Program, which provides five-year loans with really low interest rates to bring homes within mostly first-time homebuyers' reach. Just like [...]
It's as predictable as the sunrise, from Petworth to Congress Heights to Truxton Circle to Hill East: A social services organization tries to locate a facility in a neighborhood, the neighbors feel blindsided, and the battle is joined. This time, the drama is about to play out again in the heart of Anacostia's business district, [...]
It's been a rough ride for Ivy City, the neighborhood just north of Gallaudet University. It used to be known for open air drug markets, and the population decreased by a third in the 1990s, before investment started trickling in during the real estate boom. In the early 2000s, the Department of Housing and Economic [...]
A few months ago, we learned that the Department of Housing and Community Development had bought up the decaying houses along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE known as the "Big K" properties, after their long-time owners, Ann and Lenard Kushner. The pair had been trying to raze the buildings, but since they fall within [...]
While we're all mourning the loss of the TIGER II grants, which would have funded transit improvements from Bikeshare to Union Station, today brought something to celebrate in the world of federal largesse as well: A $3 million chunk of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Sustainable Communities funding, awarded to the District's Department [...]
It was the kind of deal nobody in her right mind would refuse: It’s 2005, and the owner of an apartment building in Columbia Heights wants to sell. But instead of dealing with a new landlord, the District of Columbia government offers residents an alternative. Waiving its normal credit standards and contribution requirements, the city [...]
Two District entities will consider action on two different properties in the next couple of days, both significant projects that have flown under the radar for quite a while now.
The first is a DHCD hearing tomorrow on the proposed disposition of a city property at 5734 13th Street NW to the District of Columbia Students [...]
Jauhar Abraham proudly surveys the ongoing construction at 1300 Congress St. SE last Friday afternoon, standing back to avoid clouds of dust.
“It’s gonna be nice,” he says—all-wood floors, ceramic tiling, private bathrooms. “Not the way all these projects are set up.”
The crew performing the renovations looks somewhat different from the one working on developer [...]
After writing yesterday about the four vacant, city-owned homes recently listed for sale, I talked to the real estate agent for the properties, Matt Cooper of Alex Cooper Auctioneers, which ran January's auction of roughly 30 similar houses. (These four homes, in fact, were snapped up during the initial auction; but the buyers couldn't follow through.)
