There’s a great opportunity to add housing on Capitol Hill

New housing is going up on a Capitol Hill site that was once meant for a higher education project that never got off the ground. The plan is to make it a mix of condos and rowhouses, but it might be smart to make it all condos.

The site, at 1325 D Street SE, backs up to the Safeway on Kentucky Avenue, and is roughly a half mile in either direction from the Eastern Market and Potomac Avenue Metro stations.

Two of the four buildings will become 41 condominiums, while the other two buildings will be demolished and 41 rowhouses—with garages— will go up in their place.

In the rendering above, the white building on the far left is the Safeway. Long term, I could see this site becoming higher density housing with a new Safeway on the ground floor, such as what was done at the Safeway on Georgia Avenue two blocks from the Petworth Metro station.

A nicely designed six-story building could fit in well at that site and would extend the range of housing offered in a neighborhood where there will always be greater demand for housing than supply.

In a city where housing prices are escalating rapidly, we need to maximize housing production in a way that achieves a number of things.

Given the proximity to the Metro stations, I believe that, while it would probably generate tons of resident opposition, more high-density condominiums or apartments would be a better use of the land than rowhouses. My reasons are:

1. More people on the site would mean getting more out of its transit accessibility.
2. A more diverse housing stock (type of dwelling and who lives there) in that part of Ward 6, which is dominated by single family rowhouses.
3. More residents to the area, generating more support for retail and community improvement and more income tax revenue.
4. The property would yield higher property tax revenues (this is likely even though, depending on the final design, rowhouses would likely sell for $1.5 million to $2 million, depending on the final design.

Adding rowhouses with parking is somewhat disadvantageous from a sustainable mobility standpoint because even though the site is well located for transit use, and arguably is still walkable to the US Capitol (albeit at a distance) and more distant points, the housing is likely to appeal foremost to potential residents who prefer to use cars, because each unit will have on-site parking, an amenity that is not available to most residents in Capitol Hill.

On the other hand, if it’s hard to find on-street parking, it’s more likely the buildings will attract residents who get around by some way other than a car.

At a minimum, the rowhouses could include basement apartments, which would extend the amount and diversity of available housing in the area and help provide a mix of owner-occupied and rental housing.

This post originally ran on the author’s blog, Urban Places and Spaces.