Via H-DC via Richard Layman, I recently got wind of a handy new tool for snooping on buildings from the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs–a fairly user-friendly web application that looks up permits on any given address, and includes easy links to Bing maps, Google street view, inspections, remodels, most everything you'd want to [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]