The Historic Preservation Office has had to deal with some gnarly demolition-by-neglect cases recently. In deciding whether to grant a landlord's request to take down their decrepit building, staff have to weigh how much historical integrity the structure retains, how egregiously the owner has allowed it to deteriorate, and whether it would be possible to [...]

Last August, I wrote the story of a small church on Sherman Avenue that had been trying for a decade to buy the falling-apart house they're attached to. When I visited, Pastor William Spence told me how it was dragging on the foundation and sending water into the basement, not to mention making community members [...]

Via David Garber, here's a rendering done by UrbanAdvantage for the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road SE in Anacostia, where a mural is being dismantled after the building behind it became dangerously unstable. The Department of Housing and Community Development, headquartered across the street, bought the corner lot early [...]

Mayor Vince Gray's pick to head the Department of Housing and Community Development has been on the job for four weeks, and already had to deal with a massive Washington Post series critical of both his former and current employers. And he's moving in to a new apartment tomorrow! As has become Housing Complex habit, [...]

Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a long expose of the federal department of Housing and Urban Development's HOME Investment Partnership program, which has distributed $32 billion to state and local organizations since 1992 to build or refurbush affordable housing. According to the Post's analysis, $400 million of that has gone towards 700 projects [...]

The budget rundowns continue! This time with housing stuff and economic development stuff.
Councilmember Michael Brown's Housing and Workforce Development committee was the target of lobbying from affordable housing advocates over the yanking of $18 million from the Housing Production Trust Fund, and other issues. The report, which passed unanimously today, does the following things:

Recommends the [...]

Like the new Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, Mayor Vince Gray's pick to head the Department of Housing and Community Development is an outsider, hailing most recently from Glen Valley, Virginia. Here's John Hall's dossier from his last appointment before this, to be the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development field office [...]

The Departments of Real Estate Services, Housing and Community Development, and Transportation are all rather important agencies in Housing Complex's world (and yours!). And all of them, four and a half months after Vince Gray won his election, are still without permanent directors. Advocates and staff alike have heard not a peep from the administration [...]

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 [...]