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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, it’s what will cause the equity in your house to rise. Are you supposed to be the last gentrifier allowed in?[/quote]

+1 to the second sentence. There’s something so disingenuous about well off (most likely) white people objecting to further development in their previously poor neighborhood. [/quote]

Is this some kind of weird Orwellian joke? This stuff is *only* allowed to happen in black neighborhoods. If a developer went to DuPont Circle or Georgetown or Alexandria or Friendship Heights and proposed tearing down a single-family home and covering every square inch of the yard with condos, people would be in the streets with pitchforks. Of course, that never actually happens, because people in those neighborhoods have already engineered their zoning laws to ensure that developers can never do any such thing. So the developers come to poor black neighborhoods where zoning laws basically don't exist, and no one will complain. [/quote]

This makes zero sense.  OP is in Petworth.  That is a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and most homes sell for close to $1M.  Sure, it's not old-money Georgetown, but let's please not act like it's nothing but poor black folks.  [/quote]

Lower income African-American families are selling the properties to the developers. These properties have been in their families for decades and they are realizing a very nice profit (so long as they don't have reverse mortgage or something crazy like that). Poor black folks in rental units are getting pushed out en mass from Petworth as values skyrocket.

And yes, the nicer WOTP neighborhoods have engineered their zoning to be much more restrictive. I live in a rowhouse in an R-20 zone in Burleith. No single plats can be sub-divided into multiples deeds in my zone, i.e. a single house cannot be converted to multiple condos. It's banned in my zone. So what happens? Developers build a 4-story home with with a roof deck and sell it for $2.5m. They blast it out to the max height (35 feet) and lot coverage in the R-20 zone. However, it doesn't really create any new housing as the home cannot be legally sub-divided into multiple units.

The restrictions in the historic districts - Georgetown and Foxhall Village  - are even more strict as they can regulate aesthetics and ban roof decks/elevated terraces, along with lots of other restrictions.

These types of zoning shenanigans ultimately drive up the cost of housing. I follow the RE market fairly closely. About 50% of the work in Petworth is tasteful and the other 50% is god awful shoddy work by fly-by-night developers looking to sell $750K condos to GS-13's scrapping together every last dollar they have. The only ones winning are the awful developers who cut corners and leave others to hold the bag.

The developers who do the right thing - work fairly with their neighbors, take time to build to code, spend money on aesthetics - get a bad name. They are out there, but operate mostly in nicer neighborhoods where their reputation actually matters. [/quote]

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