Posts about Housing

"This is one of the best abandominiums around," Alston-El said, peering through an opening into one of the building's basements, spotting scattered drug paraphernalia. "This is where they come to shoot the dope at. They jump in and jump out."

Walking the streets of Anacostia, at the turn of every corner, Alston-El is greeted with shout-outs and recognition. Speaking authoritatively about his community and its problems, Alston-El says, "When people talk about the good things happening in Anacostia, I wonder who they are talking about. They're not talking for me or people I know."

The people he speaks for are those who occupy Anacostia's vacant homes and apartment buildings and convert them to their own safe houses.

"On a scale of 1 to 10, Anacostia's abandominiums are a 2," says Bill Jackson, the last occupant of 2228 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE. "But the reason folks run up in abandominiums is because they get tired of the shelters with their rules and regulations. If you find an abandominium uptown people notice, but in Anacostia nobody seems to notice or care."

Sadly, "they're safer than shelters," Alston-El says. "You don't have to worry about fighting with somebody. You don't have to worry about rats, because there's no food."

The misfortune is not in the people who squat in abandominiums, but those who own them and let them scar the neighborhood, say Alston-El.

1401 Bangor Street SE

Behind the three vacant High Street properties, across the alley, is another vacant building on Bangor Street SE.

While looking in the open rear basement door a neighbor calls out at me, "Hey, what are you doing? I'm calling the police! Get on!" I quickly identify and introduce myself.

The neighbor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, opens up about the ongoing problems with the property, a nearly 4500 square foot red brick building built in 1945.

"This building used to be for seniors, but they moved everybody out and tried to flip it," the neighbor said. "But that didn't work and it's been vacant since."

According to tax records the multi-family property was sold in November 2002 for $75,000 and was last sold in April 2005 for $288,000. The building and the 1/8 acre lot it sits on are assessed at $385,700 according to city records.

"It's a problem with the drug boys, the homeless, the prostitutes, you name it," said the neighbor. "I called DCRA after calls to 311 went nowhere. They did come out and board up all the openings. But you can see that didn't last long."

In the small room leading from the open door beer cans are strewn on the floor alongside cigarette butts and empty packages of Backwoods cigars, used for rolling up weed. A hot water heater remains intact adjacent to the door.

Back outside on Bangor Street, two neighborhood men pass by. I ask them about the building and its impact on the community.

"If you're living in the streets, a vacant house is a roof over your head," said Jerry. His friend Maurice added, "Gray and all them, they could fix these places up. But see the thing of it is, is that you got money they sending across the water instead of taking care of your folks at home."

Walking past the Bangor Street building on a recent evening, I notice a light on on the second floor. On its east side three separate power lines run into the domicile. With a second floor rear window open, a bucket propped upside down on the ground below providing a step to ease entry to and fro, this abandominium is apparently occupied.

"When you find one with power and water you stay put," Alston-El says, "because you're living like a king. You turn that place into the 'hood version of a five star hotel. The only thing missing is room service."

1700 - 1720 W Street SE

While taking pictures of a boarded-up apartment complex on the 1700 block of W Street SE, two blocks from the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, someone calls out, "You guys finally going to get started?"

After explaining ourselves, Kirk Clark, a contractor who lives across the street, shared his memories of the collection of derelict three story buildings. Ivy is slowly encroaching on the banner pledging "Spacious 2BR/2 Bath Homes Coming Soon" at the Buxton Condos.

"When I got locked up in '87 it was open," says Clark. "I came home in '91 and it was closed. It's been closed ever since." The only other activity he's seen in and around the property, other than neighborhood children, has been the coming and going of Anacostia's displaced souls.

"They got a lot of homeless people out here who don't have nowhere to go. And when you leave a lot of abandoned buildings around that's where people are going to go so they can go sleep," Clark said.

Walking around to the back of the property, Alston-El and I ascend the stairs to the second level of one of the units and enter a former one bedroom apartment, stepping over a door that's been kicked in. A few wayward t-shirts and Gatorade bottles show someone has recently been here.

"Look," Alston-El says reaching up, "you can see they've cut all the copper out. I know how it's done because I used to do the same thing."

The properties, owned by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, have an assessed value at just over $2.2 million.

"The most important matter," says Alston-El, "is that these places don't do anyone or the city any good. They don't generate any taxes and they don't generate any jobs."

"We got all these people, working people who need some place to live and can't find anything, yet this stuff is allowed by the city. They want to build something new, why not fix what's been here?"

All the while, across the river, a new tower crane pops up every few weeks. Is it any surprise some people in Anacostia feel resentment?

What I found most striking was the drop in the county's young adult population. According to the Planning Department, Montgomery County has 15% fewer adults between the ages of 15 and 24 than we did in 2000. There are 17% fewer 25-to-34 year olds, along with 20% fewer 35-to-44 year olds.

The first two age groups belong to the Millennials (or Echo Boomers or Generation Y, whichever you prefer). As I've said before, we're now the largest generation in American history, due to being the kids of the Baby Boomers, America's previous largest generation. Yet their ranks in MoCo have swelled over the past 10 years, while my cohort has shrunk.

Why is this?

Some readers didn't agree with my post last June about my newlywed friends who grew up in Montgomery County, then moved elsewhere in the region. A lot of people didn't like my post last week about the difficulty of finding housing in MoCo for Millennials, which now has over 200 comments. But these are connected. Montgomery County is an expensive place to live, and some of us (like my friends) have found that neighboring communities have more jobs, cheaper housing, and more stuff to do.

This is a problem. Montgomery County thrived because of the Baby Boomers, who found life so good here that they never left. (A few of them, it seems, like it a little too much.) But if 30% of the county's population is over 65, as the Planning Department estimates will happen by 2030, we're not going to be able to manage. If we want the county to continue prospering, we have to draw young people.

"What" draws young people is pretty simple: Jobs, reasonably priced housing, short commutes, proximity to shopping and entertainment, and increasingly, neighborhoods where you can walk/bike/take transit instead of driving.

The "how" is more challenging. But we should start going after those solutions now rather than waiting until it's too late.

Richard King, the director of this year's event, said he wants to educate the students and the public about the many cost-saving opportunities presented by clean-energy products. "This event demonstrates to the public that renewable energy is possible, and all that you might pay up front evens out on the back end," he said.

He also pointed out that the capital costs of these sustainable features are dropping. "What you normally pay on average now, more than likely isn't what you're going to pay in five, 10, 20 years," King said.

"One of our key successes with the project is our relationship with D.C. government. We are very happy and exited to have support across the board; not only from our partner, the Department of Housing and Community Development, but agencies like DDOT, DDOE, and DCRA. All across the board people have come together, because of our project, and sat at the same table when they normally would not have that conversation," said Heather Zanoni, student and media contact for the Parsons Team.

In July ground was broken for the project to be placed in Deanwood. Administrative personnel from Parsons, Milano, Stevens Habitat for Humanity of DC, and Deanwood ANC commissioner Sylvia Brown participated.

For team member Amanda Waal, "bringing Deanwood and Habitat for Humanity into the discussions surrounding the Solar Decathlon has been very important to us."

Zanoni hopes to see DC government use the home as a model in establishing new policies with building codes for future homes around the District. The team is excited about moving the energy efficient home across town because even transporting the home will be sustainable. Not much energy will be used to transport it.

Zanoni added the Empowerhouse a is passive house, a very well-insulated, virtually air-tight building primarily heated by passive solar gain and internal gains from people, electrical equipment, etc. The more bodies in the building, the warmer the home gets. Energy losses are minimized and any remaining heat demand is provided by an extremely small source.

The home has won first place in the DOE's affordability category with a final cost of $229,890.26, and is currently in 4th place overall. Event attendee and local conservationist Gregory Simms said that knowing the home won in that category should inspire more Washingtonians to strongly consider Empowerhouse as a real model for the future. "Passive homes hold the country's highest energy standards and cuts heating and energy usage of any building by leaps and bounds. The Parsons team has shown that an energy efficient home can be affordable," he said.

A passive house is a comprehensive system. "Passive" describes well this system's underlying receptivity and retention capacity. Working with natural resources, free solar energy is captured and applied efficiently, instead of relying predominantly on 'active' systems to bring a building to 'zero' energy. High performance triple-glazed windows, super-insulation, an airtight building shell, limitation of thermal bridging and balanced energy recovery ventilation make possible extraordinary reductions in energy use and carbon emission.

When the Deanwood home is completed, it will actually be a duplex. A second family is still needed for the other unit. "We haven't found the second family yet, so if anyone thinks they might be the qualifications please reach out to us," she said. "People should come out to Deanwood. There are great green areas there, and history, along with beautiful homes along Pennsylvania Avenue SE."

The Decathlon continues through Sunday. If you haven't had a chance to visit, you might want to stop by West Potomac Park this weekend.

This is a recurring argument among writers like Ryan Avent, Matt Yglesias, and Ed Glaeser. They say that the housing market suffers from a supply/demand imbalance. There isn't enough supply, and that's the reason why so many neighborhoods in so many cities are unaffordable. If only we could boost the supply of housing to meet the demand, we could bring down, or at least stabilize, rents.

This idea rests, first and foremost, on the assumption that housing is a commodity. Consider a different commodity market—wheat. If wheat prices are very high, one way to bring them down is to boost production and flood the market with more wheat. This works because wheat actually is a commodity. Every unit of wheat is more or less the same as every other unit, so the price is whatever price the market dictates.

Housing is different. There are many unique types and styles of housing, some of which are more desirable than others. When demand for housing rises in a neighborhood, rents will rise, regardless of the type or quality of the housing. A neighborhood might have century-old rowhouses, 1970s apartments, and brand new luxury buildings. If demand is rising in that neighborhood, rents for all types of these units will rise.

But what if a neighborhood doesn't have any vacant land sitting around waiting to be developed? How do you increase the supply of housing when there's no place to build new housing? Basically, you have to knock something down and replace it with higher density housing.

Let's imagine that a developer is proposing to level some not-so-great '60s-style townhouses in an urban neighborhood. In their place, the developer is going to build a multi-level apartment complex with a gym, pool on the roof, and ground-floor retail. Perhaps the developer is going to knock down 10 low-quality units and replace them with 50 high-quality units, for a net-gain of 40 housing units.

Even though the number of housing units in the neighborhood goes up, it's virtually guaranteed that the market rents for those new units are going to be higher than the rents for the old units. So the folks who might have been able to afford one of the '60s-style townhouses no longer can afford a luxury-apartment in the neighborhood.

From a developer's perspective, this is a no-brainier. The biggest cost in constructing housing is building the structure itself. The cost of making the units look cosmetically luxurious is marginal, but the price that people will pay for a "luxury unit" makes it more than worth it for developers.

For this reason, it's understandable why some people oppose development, and it's not so simple as sitting them down and saying, "Don't you get it? There's not enough supply to meet the demand in your neighborhood, and that's what's driving your rents up! Once we increase the supply of housing, everyone will be better off."

The truth is that increasing the supply of housing units in a single neighborhood might not have its desired neighborhood-level supply/demand effect, because housing isn't necessarily a commodity. But city-wide, and metro area-wide, it might actually accomplish something.

Unless a developer is going to replace 10 low-quality units with 50 low-quality units, there's going to be a change in the structure of the neighborhood housing market that's different from the impact on the metro area housing market.

Avent argues in The Gated City that homeowners often engage in NIMBYism because they are conservative, risk-averse, and are cautious out of fear that the project might fail. But it goes a bit beyond that. Renters often engage in the same behavior, not because of fear it will fail, but because they're afraid the same project might actually succeed.

Some areas have housing costs below the 30% threshold, but when adding in transportation, the total housing plus transportation exceeds 45% (shown in red below). In other areas, mostly in DC and Arlington, housing costs are higher than 30%, but the low transportation cost pulls the total down below 45% (green):

This analysis reinforces two conclusions. First, we need to continue to add housing in the areas with lowest transportation costs, including close to jobs. Not only is it greener, but it's the only way to achieve the least possible H+T cost for households.

Second, when talking about building and maintaining affordable housing, some argue that people should just move out to somewhere like Laurel or Bowie where housing is cheap. It might be, but transportation costs also rise, wiping most most or all of the gains and ultimately creating an outer boundary on how far people can move to actually save money.

The most affordable H+T places are the east side of DC, especially east of the river, and Prince George's County inside the Beltway. That's why it's most critical to add housing capacity to the underutilized Metro stations and other places where, historically, developers and banks have been unwilling to invest.