Shiloh Baptist Church hasn't made many friends in Shaw by keeping a string of five properties on 9th Street NW north of P Street—now prime real estate in the fast-changing neighborhood—vacant for about a decade. The neighbors might not even mind as much if the church were at least open about their plans for the property, but they've been totally opaque (and, needless to say, haven't ever returned my calls or emails).

At Wednesday night's Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2C's meeting, the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs vacant property unit chief Reuben Pemberton detailed the church's delinquence, and got an earful outside when his presentation ended from churchgoers who thought he was singling them out. "There are vacant properties all over the city!" one huffed. "It's not just Shiloh."

Pemberton tried to tell them that the neighbors were getting restless. "If there is a plan, I would suggest moving forward with it," he said. "At the end of the day, you're losing money here." And how! In 2011 alone, they were taxed at the vacant rate, which came to about $325,000 for all five combined (it would have been similar the previous year, but there was no vacant tax rate in 2010 while the D.C. Council was futzing with the law).

So why doesn't Shiloh just sell them? I asked outreach minister Thomas Bowen whether there was a plan, and was told sternly by Holland & Knight super-lawyer Chip Glasgow that I'd know just as soon as everybody else. But the church dropped a hint in September 2010, when they "broke ground" on a community services center—it took another year to actually get started—and talked of building an education and conference center at 1526-28 9th Street, and senior housing at 1532-36.

They're missing one property in the middle: 1530.

That still belongs to brothers Michael and Reuben Marks, whose family has operated an electrical service there for 30 years now. Michael says that Shiloh's approached them on and off over the past decade, but never made a firm offer. "It's too many people that you deal with. You may deal with one group of people this year, and another group of people next year," he says. "Between that time, they come up with a different plan, different price, then you never hear anything from them."

And they need a really good price to leave—Marks isn't ready to give up the business yet, and relocating is expensive. So they wait, while Shiloh decides what to do.

Well, ONE Ministries took that advice, and recently offloaded the property for around $900,000 to small-scale local developer Abbas Fathi. It's actually a long, comma-shaped lot, with more property on 4th Street behind the corner storefront, and Fathi plans to turn most of it into apartments with a cafe on the ground floor (the lot is one of those rare properties in with grandfathered commercial zoning in a residential neighborhood).

If Fathi's name sounds familiar, it's because you've been paying attention to the saga of Shaw's Tavern, which Fathi owned and lost after the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board deemed the business "unfit for licensure." Thus, local ANC people are watching the cafe concept carefully, but still happy to see a borderline-blighted property returning to productive use.

The P Street Residences, they're called.

Valor Development has been banging out projects left and right over the past year, with new things underway and planned in Tenleytown, Logan Circle, Columbia Heights, and Capitol Hill. Now, it's hoping to add Shaw to the list, with a proposal for 66 condos on P Street NW between 7th and Marion Streets, on what's now an empty lot.

The 50-foot-tall building is designed by PGN Architects—also working with Valor on the Maia off H Street NE–and will have retail on the ground floor facing 7th Street. Residential units are small, ranging between 510 and 853 square feet.

It's not a done deal yet, though. One of the two parcels comprising the site still belongs to the District, numbering among several that went through the Redevelopment Land Agency ringer (some, like Progression Place, have since been sold and redeveloped, while others, like Parcel 42 at 7th and Rhode Island Avenue NW, are still waiting). Advisory Neighborhood Commission chairman Alex Padro helpfully provided this capsule history of that piece, which sits on 7th Street:

Formerly the site of the Thyssen house, which was for some time a hotel where farmers from rural Maryland bringing their produce to the Center Market would overnight. In the 20th Century, it was the home of the black Salvation Army, which was the building's use when it was burned down in the April 1968 riots.

It was a pocket park for a while, with shaded picnic benches. A concrete water fountain is still visible on the 7th Street side. There as an unsolicited proposal in the past decade that did not result in any action, and a few years ago, a proposal to include the parcel in a redevelopment of the east side of the 1500 block of 7th Street, to include offices for Torti Gallas architects, but Bread for the City needed to move forward with their expansion plans faster than the proposal would have yielded them the needed space. The site is now home to Clark Construction's trailers for CityMarket at O, though I'm sure Roadside's right of entry could be terminated if there was imminent development.

Here are the plans so far, which will be presented at an ANC 2C meeting tomorrow. I've got a call in to Valor, and will update if I learn more.

Yesterday, CFO Nat Gandhi sent the Mayor a letter apprising him of the situation. The details, if you're into these kinds of things: In order to finance the project, the city floated $43.5 million in tax increment financing bonds. Paying that off requires the construction of a hotel, but at this point, getting the money and completing the designs for the hotel will take at least another 15 months.

"Due to this lag in the commencement of the hotel construction and the uncertainty surrounding the completion of a full hotel deal, the District would need to set aside $1 million in the financial plan annually to cover the potential shortfall in tax revenue available for debt service, beginning in FY 2015," Gandhi writes. "The funds would be required in the event that the hotel is not completed and the projected hotel tax increment is not available to support debt service on the proposed November TIF bond issuance."

Roadside's Armond Spikell says that the city's just being cautious. They do, in fact, have a signed deal for a hotel with not one but two major backers. "It's a cover-themselves letter," he says. "You know, 'we warned you, there's risk.' Is it a significant risk? No."

Spikell has only thinly veiled impatience for how complicated the process has been with the city. "Twenty-five percent of the bond proceeds go to pay teams and teams of lawyers that are on top of lawyers," he said, while praising the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development for "moving things a lot faster than they moved before."

There's still another big hurdle for one piece of the project, though. To construct the 80 units of senior affordable housing, Roadside had been counting on a $7.5 million loan from the city's Housing Production Trust Fund—which, you may recall, is pretty much empty until deed recordation taxes pick up again. So they're looking at other sources, like low income housing tax credits, to finance the project and begin construction on schedule. There's a strong incentive to do so: Besides the cost of restarting construction later, the city will exact financial penalties for breaking deadlines (which might have been useful for some other projects I could name).

Gradually, gradually, the city is scrapping Adrian Fenty-era-and-earlier plans for redevelopment projects on government land—either killed by the economy or fumbled by the last administration—and throwing them back out for bid. Up this week: Parcel 42, otherwise known as the big empty lot on the northeast corner of 7th and Rhode Island Avenue NW, kitty corner from the Shaw Library.

Back in 2008, the city made a deal that entailed not only giving the land to the developer, but also about $10 million worth of subsidies, allowing all of the 94 rental units to be affordable for people making less than 60 percent of the area median income. As the economy tanked, the Fenty administration tried to back off that ambitious goal, spurring a tent city protest on the site.

The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development killed the deal entirely last spring. This time around, the city isn't offering anything in subsidies besides free land, and can't make any promises about how affordable the apartments will be—very likely, developers will want to go as market rate as possible. "I can't make the project any more feasible than it is," Deputy Mayor Victor Hoskins told Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2C this evening. Developers are still asking for money to do the project. "I'm not even going to tell you how much they told me they needed to develop this site," Hoskins said.

They expect to issue a request for proposals next month, it'll take 90 days to get responses back, another three months to make an award, and a few months after that to get it past the Council and go through any zoning procedures. In the mean time, probably nothing will happen on the site—the proposed angelic art project was pushed off until next year.

Image from last year's tent city on Parcel 42, by Lydia DePillis.

A big check. (Lydia DePillis)

You know all those guys walking around in purple hats and T-shirts for the past few days? Those were the Omegas—members of the Howard University-based Omega Psi Phi fraternity, which was having its centennial bash in the city this weekend. On Saturday morning, their agenda included a rally near the former residence of Carter G. Woodson, the man known as the "father of black history"—and, according to the fraternity's website, an Omega himself.

The house, where Woodson lived from 1922 until 1950, then became the home of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History until the early 1970s, after which it stood vacant and deteriorating. The National Park Service bought the property and the two addresses directly north in 2005 and stabilized it before embarking on the long process of actually turning it into something usable.

That, however, will require several million dollars. Yesterday, the third district representative to the Omega Psi Phi Supreme Council (very hierarchical, these brothers) proudly presented a $5,000 check towards the building's rehabilitation. With power players like Harry Thomas Jr. defender Fred Cooke Jr. looking on, many words were said about the need for Congress to put a line item in the budget to take care of the rest—which, in light of the current goings on in Congress, seemed like a tragically doomed request.

Could the District step in with that kind of money? Perhaps, at some point. It might be easier for the city to find funding for such projects if the other big vacant property owner on the block, Shiloh Baptist Church, paid the property taxes they still owe on the five empty and boarded up buildings that they still own directly south of the Carter G. Woodson home—or just sold them. Could the Omegas get their influential network to work on that?

To understand what this means in concrete terms, consider Kelsey Gardens, the long-empty strip of brick buildings on 7th Street NW in Shaw that's supposed to be developed as "Addison Square." The owners have gone through many rounds of trying to find financing, and they're getting close—but higher interest rates could kill the project. Shaw Main Streets coordinator and local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Alex Padro had this update on their progress:

If the Feds default, all bets are off for everything in play. Interest rates will rise, and things could be further delayed. What I can tell you is that the budget that is awaiting the Congressional waiting period includes the tax abatement for the project, so it will be 60 days before that's final and the banks can move forward.

What does Congress' intransigence mean? It means that developments that should happen will be harder and take longer, and developments that could happen just probably won't. Thank you, American political system.

A woeful corner! (Lydia DePillis)

Hoagie House: The red building on the corner of 4th and N Street NW in Shaw that's been vacant and boarded up as long as most people can remember. Finally, the top tax rate for blighted property taxes is kicking in, and the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission is supporting the owner's bid for a break on the bills, figuring that's the only way they'll finally get it developed.

After buying the property for $620,000 back in 2004, ONE Ministries LLC wanted to renovate it for their K-12 after school programs. After getting plans approved, they couldn't get financing to finish the job, letting the building languish. It was even a finalist for ABC's Extreme Home Makeover, but the T.V. show wanted to do more to the building than historic preservation restrictions would allow. Now, they own ten percent of the building's current value—$1.026 million—which is way beyond the reach of the faith-based non-profit to pay.

You might argue that the organization should just sell the building and make a $400,000 profit. But ANC 6C decided they were making a good faith effort to get it developed, and will support their appeal to the Office of Tax and Revenue for a six month break from the blighted rate, with an option to extend if there's progress.

So in a year, maybe, we might see some movement.

An old plan for the renovation–the new one will be much smaller. (Douglas Development)

It's always going to be hard to say whether any given plan for Douglas Development's Wonder Bread Factory on 7th and S Streets NW will be the last, given the number of iterations it's been through. But the company's Paul Millstein seems pretty confident about his latest proposal: A 60,000-square-foot speculative office building (which means it'll be built with no tenants yet signed) with some ground floor retail. The designer is R2L Architects, which are also doing a few other Douglas projects in the area.

Could this be the end?

After signing off on the request, Shaw's ANC commissioners and civic association leaders demanded proof of Douglas' beneficence, and the company finally produced a list: $93,000 local contributions in 2009, and $13,000 in 2010, plus the turkeys and other in-kind donations. The 2009 number includes $25,000 to the Trust for the National Mall. Not a bad payoff, all things considered.