Ethical Homes» dc

Kojo Nnamdi discusses the Southwest Waterfront redevelopment

sweth — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 12:09:58 +0000

Kojo Nnamdi recently hosted an interesting discussion of the ongoing redevelopment plans for the Southwest Waterfront area of DC.

In addition to audio at the link above, a full transcript is also available.

Interested in finding our more about these redevelopment plans, or finding out about homes that you might be able to purchase in that area? Contact us and we’d be glad to help you out.

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Great Resource For Landlords With Basement Apartments in DC

sweth — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:20:10 +0000

Are you worried about whether that basement apartment in your home (or the home you are thinking of buying) could be legally rented out? Even worse, are you already renting your basement out and are worried that DC inspectors might cite you for not doing it right? DC has unveiled a great new web page to help answer all of your questions.

That website, Rent My DC Basement, features a comprehensive checklist of everything that you need to know to make sure your basement unit is rentable, including links to zoning maps so you can make sure that you’re even allowed to rent out your basement apartment in the first place. DCRA is also being very responsive to suggestions in the comments on that site and via their Twitter feed, so expect more useful info to show up on the site.

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Easily Contact Hypothermia Shelters in the DC area

sweth — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:35:38 +0000

As we prepare in the DC area for what’s expected to be our first big snowfall of the season, many of the area’s homeless population will find themselves without adequate shelter; here are some phone numbers that every local resident should keep handy so that they can request assistance for anyone they see who might need it during the upcoming weeks.

DC’s hypothermia hotline is the model that all other local jurisdictions should seek to emulate; if you see a homeless person in need of assistance inside the District, just call their hotline and they will send someone out to provide them with blankets, gloves, etc., as well as transportation to the nearest shelter if needed.

DC Hypothermia Hotline: 800-535-7252

Unfortunately, most Northern Virginia jurisdictions appear to rely solely on individual (often privately-run) shelters to assist with hypothermia during the winter and do not have any sort of specific centralized hotline that you can call. In our experience, however, calls in those jurisdictions to the local non-emergency police numbers will usually result in an officer at least checking on the person in need of assistance and often assisting in getting them to shelter. Those non-emergency police numbers are:

Alexandria Non-Emergency Police: 703-838-4444
Arlington County Non-Emergency Police: 240-777-4000
Fairfax County Non-Emergency Police: 703-691-2131
Falls Church Non-Emergency Police: 703-241-5053

Local Maryland jurisdictions do have centralized hotlines, but the staffs at those hotlines often can’t assist in the pickup of people in need, so we are providing the numbers for both the hotlines and the local non-emergency police dispatchers:

Montgomery County Community Crisis Center: 240-777-4000
Montgomery County Non-Emergency Police: 301-279-8000
Prince George’s County Homeless Hotline: 888-731-0999
Prince George’s County Non-Emergency Police: 301-333-4000

(These are the contact numbers for the jurisdictions closest to Washington DC; if you know of the appropriate contact info for other jurisdictions in the Metro DC area, please let us know and we would be glad to add them to this page.)

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Foreclosure Listings Temporarily On Hold

sweth — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:54:16 +0000

Due to some technical issues that we’re currently trying to resolve, we’ve had to put the public foreclosure listings on hold temporarily; in the interim, if you’re interested in seeing the foreclosure listings for a specific area, please contact us and let us know what area you’re interested in and we can send you those listings directly or set you up with an automatic search to email them to you regularly.

For those who are interested, the specific problem is that MRIS, the local multiple listing company through whom we were posting those foreclosure listings, recently added some features to their software, including the ability for users to tag properties that they might be interested in. The problem is that for public listings like these, that “feature” was more of a bug, since there is no way for their software to distinguish between the hundreds of different anonymous visitors who were reviewing the listings; as a result, everyone’s “favorite” properties were all mixed together, so that everyone could see each others’ listings and there was no way to know which ones were yours.

Unfortunately, there’s currently no simple way to turn those features off, and the confusion among the people who were contacting us after they saw other people’s listings in “their” list was just too much to deal with, so for now we’ve had to suspend the public listings. It’s a perfect example of unintended consequences–MRIS had simply never thought about the possibility that more than one person would be viewing a particular posted set of listings–and we’re busy working with them to get this resolved in a way that will let us resume those postings, hopefully this week.

Again, if you’re interested in seeing the foreclosure listings for a specific area, please contact us and let us know what area you’re interested in.

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Neighborhood Spotlight: DC Capitol Riverfront

sweth — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 15:32:22 +0000

Although its renaissance has been slowed some by the downturn in the economy, the DC Capitol Riverfront is a neighborhood that definitely has potential to see booming growth in years to come.

The Capitol Riverfront area of southeast DC is one that has been neglected for the last few decades, in large part because of the construction of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway that cut the waterfront off from the rest of the Capitol Hill neighborhood. In recent years, however, the lack of available affordable real estate in Capitol Hill itself plus the consolidation of many jobs from surrounding areas to the Navy Yard facility in the middle of the Capitol Riverfront as part of the 1995 Base Realignment and Closure initiative led to renewed interest in the Riverfront.

In 2006, redevelopment plans for the area were kickstarted when it was announced that the Washington Nationals baseball team would be building their new stadium in the Capitol Riverfront area; development in the area really took off in 2007 when the DC City Council created the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District, which has helped catalyze plans to transform what was until relatively recently something of a wasteland into what is hoped to soon be a thriving mixture of retail, office, and residential space, with many green features including multiple LEED-gold buildings and plans for extensive greenspace.

Local blogger Jacqueline Dupree has done a great job of documenting the progress in the neighborhood; here are some “then-and-now” pictures showing how abandoned buildings have been given new life.

And as this map from the Capitol Riverfront BID (PDF) shows, the development that has already happened is just a small portion of the planned development for the area.

The Capitol Riverfront BID has also done a great job of giving people a reason to start coming to the neighborhood even while the development is ongoing, including regular events such as outdoor movies as well as hosting the 2009 edition of Artomatic, an annual 5-week-long multimedia arts festival.

Some caution is needed before buying in the Capitol Riverfront area, of course–as with most “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, there is no guarantee that this one will definitely cross that “tipping point” and become a new destination neighborhood, especially since it got its start so late in the process as compared to other neighborhoods that were able to ride the crest of a booming real estate market. For buyers with a longer (5-10 year) timeframe to hold a property, though, and who are interested in what might end up being a culturally thriving area, though, the riverfront is definitely an area worth considering.

Interested in potentially purchasing something in the Capitol Riverfront? Let us know and we’d be glad to help you learn about the available options there.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Washington, DC (Week of 8/2/09)

sweth — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:15:42 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Washington DC for the week of 8/2.

Basic information for each new or changed bank-owned property from the last week is provided in that list, as well as pictures and virtual tours (if available); we also include the address, so if you are potentially interested, you can feel free to drive by the property to take a look from the outside on your own.

(If you’re new to our bank-owned inventory lists, be sure to check the archives for any listings from previous weeks that might still be available.)

If you would like more details about any of these properties or would like to explore your opportunities for purchasing one of them, let us know.

We are also in the process of setting up regular tours of all of the foreclosure inventory in DC; if you would be interested in participating in one of those tours, please contact us and we’d be glad to notify you when those tours begin.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Washington, DC (Week of 7/26/09)

sweth — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:42:05 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Washington DC for the week of 7/29.

(If you’re new to our bank-owned inventory lists, be sure to check the archives for any listings from previous weeks that might still be available.)

If you would like more details about any of these properties or would like to explore your opportunities for purchasing one of them, let us know.

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Sustainable Real Estate Roundup

sweth — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:07:16 +0000

Here’s a quick overview of some recent area news of interest to people interested in sustainable/green real estate and communities.

On the more directly real-estate-related front, the “700 SIX” office building just opened in downtown DC as a LEED Platinum building, indicating that they are at the cutting edge of sustainable design and construction. DCmud has some more details on the new development in DC’s still-gentrifying Chinatown. (Another recent LEED Platinum building to open in DC is the headquarters of the USGBC; since USGBC is one of the driving forces behind LEED, though, that’s not nearly as good of an example of how the local market is embracing green construction in general and the LEED system in particular.

Much of the rest of the sustainability news recently has been focused on transit issues. Greater Greater Washington gives a good roundup of recent bicycle transit-related news from DC’s Department of Transportation (DDOT), including the addition of new bike lanes, and proposed legislation to require office buildings to allow people to bring bicycles in with them if they bike to work. Meanwhile, DCmud notes that as part of the deal to have DC subsidize the construction of the long-delayed Marriott Marquis adjacent to the DC Convention Center, DDOT is asking Marriott to install new SmartBike stations.

On the rail transit front, Arlington County announced that they are going to attempt to have the Columbia Pike corridor removed from Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) control in order to give them more freedom to move forward with light rail plans for that corridor. In less encouraging area light rail news, though, one analyst predicts a five year wait before DC finally opens light rail lines along the H Street corridor, despite the fact that DC has already purchased the cars for those lines.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Washington, DC (Week of 7/19/09)

sweth — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:23:16 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Washington DC.

Basic information for each property is provided in that list, as well as pictures and virtual tours (if available); we also include the address, so if you are potentially interested, you can feel free to drive by the property to take a look from the outside on your own. If you would like more details about any of these properties or would like to explore your opportunities for purchasing one of them, let us know.

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Bank-Owned Foreclosure Inventory in Washington, DC (Week of 7/12/09)

sweth — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 12:50:29 +0000

As a public service for buyers, Ethical Homes is glad to publish a list of all of the available bank-owned foreclosure properties in Washington DC.

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