Mount Pleasant's Raven Gets Expansion, Upgrade

On the heels of a renovation to the three-story residences that wrapped up last year, one of DC's best dive bars, the Raven Grill at 3125 Mount Pleasant Street, NW, is now working on getting a new rear addition, plus an upgraded exterior, courtesy of Washington affordable housing developers, Manna, Inc.

"We're trying to make it look like the original. If you look around the Raven and the [neighboring Mount Pleasant Dry Cleaners], you can see that there are still cracks. We need a new coating that looks like original," said George Rothman, President and CEO of Manna, Inc.

Manna’s in-house development, design and construction teams worked with the Raven’s owner, Merid Admassu, for the build-out of the Antonatl Condominiums - a name invoking an El Salvadoran war hero, which you already knew. Manna resurrected the 12-unit, affordable condo out of the charred remains of 13 fire-gutted apartments above the fabled watering hole, built in 1928 and gutted by fire in 2003. Work on the Raven itself will include a 300 to 500 square foot addition to the bar’s rear, primarily for storage space. Both projects should be completed in one fell swoop.

“The [condo] construction was probably completed in December and people have been living in it…We haven’t finished the front of the building yet because we’re finding a sub-contractor to do the specialized work with those windows,” said Rothman. “Everything inside is finished and the outside, we’ll probably do that when we’re doing the addition in the rear to the Raven.”

For those fearful that their designated hangout for three dollar PBR’s might lose some of its old-school DC charm, Rothman emphasized that the bar won’t be going anywhere and should be keeping normal business hours when work gets underway in the next four to six months.

“The Raven is an institution. It will stay. That’s always been important to us” he said.

Room and Board Buys into 14th Street

Minneapolis-based home furniture retailers Room and Board have purchased a vacant, four-story building at 1840 14th Street, NW and plan to transform it into a fully rehabbed, 33,000 square foot flagship location - their first in the DC metro area. According to the broker who facilitated the purchase, Wayne Dickson of Blake Dickson Real Estate, the retail chain has big plans for the re-emergent 14th Street corridor and will use the entire space for their showroom.

"Room and Board is expecting this to be a regional draw for them...Through their catalog sales, they did a zip code analysis of where the majority of their customers were.  The building at 1840 14th Street was just about dead center in that customer base," he said.

Known to some as the Taylor Motor Building, 1840 14th Street began its life as a Ford Model A showroom, and, in subsequent decades, went on to to serve an array of uses, including stints as an arts space and church. Most recently, the building was slated for a residential makeover by Four Points, LLC, which paid some $10 million for the site. Plans for that project, the so-called T Street Flats, (or "Rapture Lofts") were announced in 2007, but never made it past the planning stages.

"Blake Dickson Real Estate has been working on that property for the better part of two years…It was most recently a church, called the Church of the Rapture, and then the initial plans by Four Points, LLC had a condo element,” said Dickson. “They bought that building at the top of the market and then later decided to go all commercial with it.”

As purveyors of handcrafted, American-made furniture, Room and Board will be among the latest in a string of upscale chain retailers, including Bang and Olufsen and Whole Foods, to set up shop along the once unfashionable 14th Street corridor - the same strip that recently lost its Storehouse furniture retailer, only to gain Mitchell Gold in its place. One block over at 14th and S Streets, NW, the JBG Companies also have plans on the boards for a new mixed-use complex with ground-floor retail. (Once that Apple Store gets announced, consider gentrification complete.)

Room and Board have retained omnipresent DC architects, Eric Colbert and Associates, to design the extensive renovation, which Dickson described as a “gut job.” The build-out is expected to take between 12 and 18 months.

Washington DC retail real estate news

Industry Insight: Steve Schwat of Urban Investment Partners

Since co-founding Urban Investment Partners (UIP) at the turn of the millennium, UIP principal Steve Schwat has overseen a diverse portfolio of real estate and development projects in Washington, DC and Prince George's County. In addition to owning and/or managing roughly 2800 rental units throughout the city, the firm has developed several for-sale condo projects, including The Archbold in Glover Park and Providence Square on Capitol Hill.

As the area condo market began its steep descent a few years back, UIP turned its focus to a practice Schwat calls the "value add" - a program that provides "substantial rehabilitation" to blighted or vacant buildings with updated amenities and streamlined utility systems. Schwat spoke with DCmud about UIP's expanding list of services and the state of DC development in general from their newly acquired Connecticut Avenue offices, directly beneath one such "value add" property currently under renovation: the historic Macklin apartment complex at 2911 Newark Street, NW.

Can you tell us a bit about how UIP came together and the work you do here at the firm?

I’m one of the original principals. There are three of us. We started back around 2000 and I have been in Washington since 1980, when I went to school at GW. I’m serial entrepreneur of sorts. I’ve owned a number of different businesses and I have a background in sales. My initial interest in real estate was doing single-family homes, and then I did my first condominium project in the early 80s, by renovating an older historic-type building. I sort of caught the renovation bug.

I enjoy starting companies, administrating companies and getting them running. What been as a hobby in real estate turned into a full blown career. My two partners, both of whom are Dutch, have been in real estate for a very long time. There was a combination of their deep experience in real estate investing and my knowledge of Washington and ability to create a functioning operation.

UIP doesn’t only operate as developer, but offers general contracting and property management services as well. Can you profile the organization for us?

UIP was always the rental group and all of our rental properties are owned under some kind of UIP entity. Drummond Development was our for-sale company and, if we do a for-sale project, it’s done under Drummond – just to keep the different types of investment separate. Then we have Urban CM, which is our construction group, and we currently do our own construction on projects up to $5 million. That may expand sometime in the next year or so if we do bigger projects.

Our property management group started in January of this year. We hired Dave Barton, who was running Randall Hagman’s residential management group, and when he resigned, they sort of sent him off with his staff and about 700 apartment units. So, we now manage our own properties. Before that, we were hiring third-party property managers…[but] we’d always envisioned having our own property management company, simply because we were constantly dissatisfied with the level of performance we got from other companies.

As it turned out, as the industry changes and the capital markets change and businesses are consolidating, we’d been considering it for so long that it didn’t seem like a consolidation move. In the end, in a market where you’re starting to worry about your ability to do as many deals this year as you did last year, it’s certainly a benefit to bring a fee-based entity in. You were giving away 5% before and now you’re bringing it in yourself. That’s not to say property management is highly profitable business. For us, it’s not yet, but it’s highly profitable for us as asset holders and asset managers.

How do you go about finding and selecting properties for rehabilitation? They all seem to be historic, yet something with an architectural history like the Macklin seems like a more obvious choice than say, 1921 Kalorama.

The prominent history, from an investment perspective, is probably fifth down on the list of the top five priorities. It’s certainly more fun to do architecturally significant buildings than it is to do historically insignificant buildings...What we look for in a property if we’re going to do a "value add" is “Can we increase the rents? Can we decrease the expenses? Does the building need the improvements that we’re talking about? And is there a method within DC rent control that’s going to allow us to achieve those goals?”

That’s really the key when you’re marketing inside a rent controlled environment like the District of Columbia. It’s not a matter of looking for loopholes; it’s a matter of utilizing the system in a legal way, taking buildings that are in need of substantial rehabilitation, putting it all together, and, in the end, doing what is a justified renovation of the building.

But, in that, you have two things that directly conflict. One is the city’s desire to maintain affordable housing. [The second is that] if you’re going to pour a million dollars into a building to renovate it, that’s something that will cause you to increase, not decrease the rent. Dig one level deeper and that conflict becomes a reality where you have people living in grandfathered buildings with antiquated heating, cooling, and electrical systems…If you were to build that building today, it would never meet code. But because it’s been grandfathered in over so many years, it technically gets past the code. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe or that the electrical system doesn’t need to be replaced.

Within rent control, there are a number of tools you can use to increase rents. But you can’t just take a crapped out building and increase the rent because it’s still crapped out. You can’t take a building that you wouldn’t live in…and just raise the rents because that’s not very moral. So there’s a balance of working within the rent control environment and achieving that perfect storm of, “Is the property currently requiring improvement? Is the property currently renting below market rate? Is there a tool within a rent control that we can use to increase the rents while working with the Office of the Tenant Advocate and the Rent Administrator?...[That is] separate from my political opinions on what preserving and providing affordable housing should be. That is not to say that I agree 100% with the District, but there is the law and you have operate within it.

That said, some of the District’s rent control laws are antiquated and somewhat backwards in their thinking. The concept of maintaining affordable units in an otherwise upscale building has some inherent issues that are problematic...If you build $700,000 houses or condominiums, is it appropriate to have a $200,000 condominium in that building? Issues like amenities and monthly maintenance fees are also in direct conflict with one another.

Does UIP view new construction as profitable arm of the business? Or is the company content with sticking to renovations culled from DC’s vast inventory of vacant buildings?

Well, a vacant building is what we see as a “value add” building. So, yea, we’re all over that. And, yes, potentially for condominium sales, I think the market – although it dropped off precipitously at some point after 2005 and has remained low – still has absorption in DC. There are still people looking to buy condominiums. For instance, The Shelby at 1706 T Street or The Macklin at 2911 Newark Street, both have condominium registrations associated with them, so they could be sold as a condo at some point in the future. But that’s not our plan or the way we underwrote them. We underwrote them as rental properties and we renovated them as rental properties.

Ironically, coincidentally, fortuitously, though, a renovation of a rental property…is very similar to the renovation you do for a condominium because you have to self-contain utilities and make it simple, so that someone can own it. There’s a lot of synergy there in renovating a building for rental, where you’re reducing your expenses. Part of our whole “value add” strategy is not only increasing the rents, but also decreasing your expenses from five, six grand per unit per year to something less than three grand because you’re not heating the building with a highly inefficient furnace that burns all day long…as opposed to replacing it with a self-contained unit that the tenant is responsible for. It’s amazing how green a technology that is…If leave, I turn it off; I come home, I turn it on.

The definition of “value add” is in how you exit and, if there’s one thing I’d like to say, it’s that “It’s the exit, stupid”…I like to talk about my condominium experience because we did a lot of “value add” renovations with condos. People go, “Oh no, condos,” but the sale of a condominium and the sale of an apartment building is the same thing. It’s just a contract selling one on a wholesale basis and another selling condominiums on a retail basis. A condominium unit is generally worth more than a rental unit, but, the point, is it’s a really a matter of what the equity wants and what the market is saying.

We have a friendly competitor that recently completed a condominium building on Vernon Street and they’re having a really high velocity of sales. We just finished an apartment rental two blocks from there and we rented out all our units in less than a month. There are strong market indications for both. We thought we’d start to see the rental ceiling – what’s the highest we can rent these units for – and we haven’t seen it…With the inventory higher now than it was two years ago, people have a choice. If you’re building something in a bad neighborhood or an undeveloped neighborhood or uncharted territory, I think you’re going to have problems. The only time you didn’t have problems was when supply and demand were so imbalanced that people were writing contracts just based on paper plans…We’re certainly a lot closer to reality today than we were three years ago. Three years ago, it was more important what the appetizers at the opening party were than how people wrote contracts.

With a well located property, you can sell condominiums today. We’re just over the last few months, after two years of not even mentioning the word condominium, I actually had a meeting with an equity partner who said, “We’re not afraid of condos. If you show that you think it’ll work, we’ll do condos.” And I think the market is saying just that.

Does that mean we’ll being seeing more from-scratch, new development from UIP in the future?

We’re just starting to look at ground-up construction. We’re starting to look at developable property that we stopped looking at for a year or so - some as rental, some as condo. For a while, you couldn’t buy developable land for a price that you could rent at. Seller anticipations are starting to come into line with buyer expectations. There was that time when if you had a vacant building for sale, it was a hundred grand a year because it was assumed you’d do a condo and sell it out at three hundred grand a year…Now you got the guys that bought the buildings for a hundred, paid a little more money to get rid of the last two or three tenants…carried it for a year and they now have a vacant building – with a big fat tax bill, a nasty interest carry cost each month and nobody that is willing to finance a condominium.

Ok, so go rental? But if you’re on 10^th Street, NW, an area that’s not supporting $2000 or $3000 a month rentals, how are you going take a hundred grand a unit, spend another seventy grand to renovate it and then rent it for $1200 a month? You’re losing money, so no one’s going to finance that.

There’s a lot of that type of property out there and that’s the type of property that we’ve been looking a lot at lately. There a lot of distressed owners – I won’t call them sellers yet – and they’re trying to figure out how to get out.

Given the tumultuous state people like that have found themselves in, what advice would you give to fellow DC area developers?

I’d go back to the basics and say that the money is in the buy. You can’t underpay for a property, you can only overpay. And once you’ve overpaid for that property, only time will help you erase that. So you have to buy property…and look at it on an income producing basis. The question is, “Can I buy it, fix it up and rent, while staying cash positive?” If you can’t, nobody’s going to finance it. And if no one’s going to finance it, why would you invest a million dollars of your own money to generate fifty grand a year in income? There are plenty of alternative places to put that money.

Where do have to be these days? DC is faring a lot a better than other areas these days, but investors don’t want to invest in DC real estate unless...you can assure them going in. I don’t see much stuff being sold for less than seven (cap rate). Maybe some AAA, pension quality development, like Mass Court, will go…but there’s not a lot of that kind of product out there. But if you’re talking about the kind of stuff that we buy – 20, 30, 40-unit buildings and small retail stuff – you’d better be at an eight cap.

[Look at] the 14^th Street corridor or U Street or Adams Morgan. Christ, look at 18^th Street and the vacancy right here in Cleveland Park. You’d better have a pretty good deal – a good buy, a good tenant and reasonable cap rate – if you’re getting into a small retail or small apartment building. And the interesting thing is that’s what we like to do. We like to find that opportunity.

With that in mind, what’s next for UIP in over the course of the coming year?

I see us moving forward with a very aggressive and very prolific acquisition strategy. Last year, we acquired some $60 odd million worth of real estate and bought five buildings with our equity partners. This year, we’ll be closing on two properties over the next couple weeks. We sold one or two earlier this year, which was opportunistic and advantageous…I see us making between half a dozen and dozen acquisitions over the next six to eight months.

I’ve got a stack of potential properties. We’ve got a couple deals that are small retail, a couple deals that are small residential, we have a couple big, multi-hundred unit deals and a couple that are potential bank deals. And they’re all in DC. We own property in PG County – Hyattsville, Riverdale – and we are good at managing those garden-style walk-ups as well. We own a bunch of that and we’re looking a lot of it too, but I’d say that’s probably 20% of what we do. The 80% of what we look at is DC, from Southeast to Northwest, and distressed owner deals, bank deals, failed condo associations, failed tenant associations and failed development plans. We’re looking at a lot of that.

We’re looking at some properties that are owned by non-District headquartered companies. There are a lot of larger commercial real estate companies that got into the District and are now trying to get out. They hate the District, they hate rent control, they hate TOPA. We don’t love rent control either, but we’re damn good at it and we’ve been doing it for ten years.

DHCD Seeks Developers for Vacant DC Properties

Washington DC's Department of Housing and Community Development's (DHCD) Property Acquisition and Disposition Division (PADD) has issued a Solitication for Offers for six long-neglected sites throughout the city with the intent of redeveloping them into a mix of affordable units and workforce housing. All of the residential properties are either vacant lots or dilapidated residential complexes: 3401 13^th Street, SE; 4 -14 Q Street and 14-16 Florida Avenue, NW; 1715-1717 28^th Place, SE; 1335 R Street, NW; 922 French Street, NW; and, lastly, 1713 New Jersey Avenue, NW – the latter being a site initially purchased in January's vacant property auction, but returned to DCHD after its would-be owner defaulted on the first payment.

"For some [of these properties], this isn’t their first showing. This isn’t the first time they’ve been out there. We’ve been looking for opportunities to…convert them into affordable housing…We’re stepping up our efforts to re-introduce these properties, so they don’t just sit and cost the city money to maintain,” said DHCD spokesman Angelita Colon-Francia, who also detailed for DCmud just how and why these six sites were selected from the District’s hundreds-strong catalogue of vacant properties.

“Some were eminent domain, some were tax foreclosures, some were inter-agency transfer of property, but, basically, these are properties that have been in our inventory for a long time…What we’re trying to do is to get them back into use and generate affordable and workforce housing out of them,” she said.

Prospective developers are welcome to bid on as many, or as few, properties as they see fit. The scope and size of the various revitalization efforts, however, will depend on area zoning statutes, as some sites are designated for single-family use, while others are zoned for multi-family development. The wide variety of locales and regulations governing the various sites hasn’t allowed DHCD to predict exactly how much housing will be generated after the projects are awarded – but nonetheless, they’re adhering to strict set of guidelines that makes a clear distinction between which will sites will be required to host affordable and/or workforce units.

“The bottom line is that all of them have a requirement that all buildings have 30% of the units identified as affordable at 60% or less of the Area Median Income (AMI),” said Colon. “There are two exceptions to that: the New Jersey Avenue property and the one on French Street. For those, we’re looking more at workforce. They’ll have to be at or below 120% AMI.”

As of Tuesday, 11 potential bidders have taken up DHCD on their solicitation and Colon encourages developers and non-profits “with the capacity and qualifications” to apply. To that effect, DHCD will be holding a pre-bid conference on June 8^th to “fill in the blanks.” The meeting will begin at 2 PM at DHCD headquarters at 1800 Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, SE.

In the meantime, the solicitation is available in hard copy format only and can be picked up at the DHCD offices. Final proposals are due to agency by 3 PM on June 24^th. Colon-Francia says the selection process timeline will be contingent on the number of responses received.

District Officials Decry Condos, Celebrate Affordable Housing in Columbia Heights

A cadre of District officials, including Mayor Adrian Fenty and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, gathered in Columbia Heights today for the re-opening of the 230-unit Hubbard Place affordable housing complex (formerly the Cavalier Apartments) at 3500 14^th Street, NW. Spearheaded by the Somerset Development Company and the 3500 14^th Street Tenants Association, the $52 million renovation has not only reinvigorated a Washington building recently added to the National Register of Historic Places, but has secured - and ensured the longevity - of a once notorious Section 8 public housing project as well.

"Just a few short years ago, fire marshals had to stand on each floor to assure the safety of the residents. It was dangerous to walk in the halls or ride the elevators…This building has been made safe again for the residents who live here…But this time with a twist,” said Somerset principal Nancy Hooff. “It has affordable rents [and] it’s near public transportation and shopping. Smart growth, indeed.”

According to the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, residents of Hubbard Place can look forward to updated amenities that include “new elevators, the creation of new community spaces and a computer lab, secure access, new kitchens and baths, windows, roof and all new common areas.” The city block-straddling development also includes a new home for the Latin American Youth Center, which provides educational and vocational services to area youth, as well as two new businesses: the Black Lion Deli and George’s Shoe Repair. In the view of Eleanor Holmes Norton, the dramatic shift in Hubbard Place's fortunes can be attributed directly to tireless efforts of the building’s residents.

“There is no way in which the city and the federal government could have done a thing with Hubbard [Place], if there had not been a determined band of residents who said, ‘We’re not going to let this place go’…I’m just pleased to see something that I can point to that [the US Department of Housing and Urban Development] has done these days,” said the congresswoman, not quite jokingly.

The local government, however, did play a prominent role in gathering the formidable sum required for the large-scale renovation procedures, as overseen by the architects of Kann Partners and the project’s general contractor, Hamel Builders. Out of the development’s $52 million budget, the Department of Housing and Community Development provided $8.5 million for the acquisition of the property, with the District of Columbia Housing Authority pitching in an additional $4.6 million for historic preservation. The building upgrades were funded primarily through $26 million in tax exempt bonds issued by the District of the Columbia Housing Finance Agency. It’s a role that District officials, like Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham, were eager to hang their hat on.

“We have enough condos,” said Graham. “We can build condos where there once vacant lots surrounded by hurricane fences. But we are going to keep our diversity and we’re going to keep our low-income housing. We’re going to build new low-income housing…We’re going to do all this because we care.”

Hubbard Place is the second such affordable housing renovation opened by the city in as many weeks. Last week, Mayor Fenty presided over the grand re-opening of Jubilee Housing, Inc.’s Ontario Court project at 2525 Ontario Road, NW, in nearby Adams Morgan. New condos are being built in Washington DC.

"America's Front Yard" Gets Stimulated

While the Associated Press reports that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar directed $55.8 million in federal stimulus money to restoration of the National Mall this past Earth Day, plans for making over America's designated spot for both protest and play have been brewing for quite a some time. The National Parks Service (NPS) - the government agency tasked with overseeing all things Mall-related - recently released the details of their Preliminary Preferred Plan for the 309 acre site and it envisions a few nip-tucks that (gasp) may actually require some demolition.

On that note, NPS calling is calling for both the National Sylvan Theater and Capitol Reflecting Pool (not, as they are quick to point out, the iconic Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool) to be razed. While the latter would simply be replaced by another “water feature,” the Sylvan Theater – which hosts annual Military Band Summer Concert Series and the occasional fair-weather rally - would make way for a “multipurpose entertainment facility,” full details of which have yet to be disclosed. Union Square at the Mall's eastern end would also undergo a redesign, while the deteriorating District of Columbia War and Ulysses S. Grant Memorials would get the old toothbrush and brass polish treatment. Reps for the Department of the Interior also repeatedly emphasized the need to for restoration of the Jefferson Memorial’s sea wall, which spokesman Hugh Vickery described as “crumbling” against an ever encroaching Tidal Basin.

Not to be outdone by Salazar’s show of Earth Day bravado, the National Capital Planning Commission’s (NCPC) “Blue Ribbon Panel” of landscape architects has also released its critique of NPS’ plan for the Mall. While praising the restoration maneuvers as a “heroic effort,” they repeatedly refer to the site as both “America’s Front Yard” and an “international embarrassment.” Informed by the latter, they support “a standing ban on any new memorials or museums not already in planning stages (read: the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Eisenhower Memorial) and call for the relocation of tourist services off-site – citing the long-vacant Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building as prime contender.

To carry out these long-term goals of both the federal government and the NCPC, NPS has enlisted the aid of architects Wallace Roberts & Todd LLC and landscape architects DHM Design Corporation to outline their proposed modifications. With each contributor bringing their own roll of red tape to the table, could this be a case of too many cooks in the kitchen? There’s no telling at this point, but the renovation procedures could begin as early as this coming August.

Correction: The "Blue Ribbon Panel" mentioned above as extension of NCPC is, in fact, an "independent initiative" of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). Says Stephen Staudigl, NCPC Public Affairs Specialist:

ASLA took the lead to establish the Blue Ribbon Panel that included members from the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Institute of Architects and the American Planning Association...NCPC supports some of the ASLA panel’s key findings, such as the National Park Service’s “heroic” effort to improve the National Mall based on the public’s call for improved conditions and better services.

Adams Morgan Fixer-Upper Gets Fixed-Up

The Kalorama / Adams Morgan neighborhood will soon have one less dilapidated tinderbox for neighbors to revile. Located at 2110 19^th Street, NW, the three-story apartment building at the site has gone from bad to worse over the past half-decade. Luckily for area preservationist aficionados, however, renovation (if you can call throwing out everything except the facade a renovation) is currently underway and, once completed, this real estate ugly duckling will emerge a swan - courtesy of DC apartment developer and management company Keener Squire Properties and the architects of Eric Colbert and Associates.

Originally known as the The Hilltop, residents of the then 15-unit tenement - described by The Washington Post at the time as a "badly deteriorated building" - were bought out of their leases in 2005. Another District development company, Nicol Development, then tried their hand at culling 22 condominiums out of the building shortly thereafter and summarily failed, leaving nothing but a condemned husk of a building in what was (ironically enough) one of the District’s more desirable neighborhoods. But then 2007 happened, and Nicol lost control of four local projects, this one to the lender. The property had been informally floated above $5 million by Nicol, then more formally listed at $3.8 million but still no takers. Cut to the summer of 2008, when Keener Squire was able to pick it up at the “fixer-upper” special rate of $2.1 million.

“My client bought it at auction,” said architect Eric Colbert. “Someone had tried to develop it a while back, but they didn’t know what they were doing and wound up abandoning the project…It must have been at least five or six years [since people lived there.]”

That's about to change. Keener-Squire is currently projecting a 12-month timetable for a complete renovation of the once-roughshod apartment complex. The building’s original 25,000 square foot shell will receive an extra 5,000 feet during the course of the build-out, allowing for a total of 35 new residential units and two new floors. Keener-Squire’s in-house general contractor, Wayne Construction, is overseeing work at the site. Sources say the building is being designed as rental apartments, but, as always, market forces will ultimately dictate the final outcome.

Dupont Apartment Building Reopens After Renovation

In keeping with its past successes buying and renovating historic but neglected apartment buildings, Urban Investment Partners (UIP) is putting the finishing touches on their $1.8 million renovation of the Absecon Apartments - now named The Shelby - in Dupont Circle. Located at 1706 T Street, NW, the Shelby is just one of the century-old rental properties in the area that's been blighted by years of mismanagement and poor upkeep. According UIP’s Steve Schwat, the condition of the building took even the seasoned real estate professionals by surprise.

"When [buildings] are fully furnished have a nice young couple living in there, they don’t look so bad. But everything in the building is at twice its expected useful life,” said Schwat. “[At T Street], we had units in the basement that were built but never permitted…It was just crazy in there - holes in the floor, holes in the walls. It was as bad as I’ve ever seen it.”

Luckily for prospective renters and the neighborhood in general, the developer - working in tandem with Bonstra Haresign | ARCHITECTS and their in-house general contractor, Urban CM – has succeeded in completely overhauling the once dilapidated building and its 24-units. Said Schwat: "The entire building was renovated, we performed selective demolition, all new electric, all new plumbing, all new separately controlled HVAC, granite counters and stainless steel appliances. It’s pretty much condo-grade finishes, but it’s a rental building."

Additionally, UIP has taken it upon itself to reincorporate original elements of the building’s façade that vanished from lack of upkeep over the intervening decades. As a contributing site to the Strivers Historic District of Dupont Circle, the development team will be outfitting the Shelby with a steel and glass version of its original awning. Other architectural flourishes, along with a new front entry door, will round out the renovation for what Schwat calls an “Ian Schrager, boutique hotel kind of feel." The Shelby is currently leasing up with occupancy set to begin on May 1^st. Open houses for potential residents are scheduled for April 17th, 18th, and 19th, 9-5 each day. For more information call 202-244-3811.

UIP is doing much the same with two other concurrent rental renovations in the District: at The Macklin at 2911 Newark Street, NW and a second at 1921 Kalorama Road, NW.

Washington DC real estate development news

New Condos for U Street Corridor

Bonstra Haresign ARCHITECTS (BHA) is currently spearheading a top-to-bottom renovation of two neighboring, historic U Street area townhomes at 2029-2031 13^th Street, NW – across the street from The Ellington’s retail enclave and caddy-corner from the proposed site of JBG’s U Street Hotel. According to Bill Bonstra, founder and managing partner of BHA, despite the prominent location, the project has presented a few unique challenges.

“[It] is a dual 3-unit conversion with rooftop addition to two townhouses. A tough project as it needed historic approval with the Historic Preservation Review Board (HPRB) and any addition to townhouses, in that regard, is frowned upon strongly by the Board,” said Bonstra. “We had to clearly show them the addition was not visible from the street.”

Following completion of interior work, as well as the rear and rooftop additions cleared by the HPRB in 2006, the property’s owner, Negasi Gebreyes, will be marketing the six condos culled from the site for sale. According to Bonstra, work should wrap up “in a few months.”

UIP Moves in on Historic Connecticut Ave Space

Urban Investment Partners (UIP) is currently two months into their $1.9 million renovation of The Macklin – the 70-year old, 17-unit apartment building straddling the same stretch of Connecticut Avenue as some of Northwest’s most beloved destinations, including the Uptown Theater and the Ireland’s Four Provinces Restaurant and Pub.

Located at 2911 Newark Street, NW, the Macklin will receive a thorough 21^st century upgrade, courtesy of Bonstra Haresign Architects. The development team is completely overhauling the building’s aging heating and cooling units, plumbing system, baths and kitchens – the latter of which UPI boasts will include “all-new wood cabinetry, granite or stone countertops, under-cabinet lighting, stainless steel finish appliances including mounted microwaves and dishwashers, and new tiles.”

Additionally, the Macklin’s floorplan also includes the 11,000 square feet of retail space directly below the building at 3400-3412 Connecticut Avenue, NW, which now houses the new UIP offices after their relocation from Arlington.

The Macklin renovation is ambitious if only because it seeks to improve upon the original designs of Mihran Mesrobia – the architect behind such DC landmarks as the St. Regis and the Hay-Adams Hotels, as well as the one-time chief designer for iconic, early 20^th century developer, Harry Wardman.

Nonetheless, UIP succeeded where others had failed in mid-2008 when they acquired the formerly rent-controlled Cleveland Park building for $9.5 million. Earlier, in 2006, the Macklin had been the subject of a failed attempt at redevelopment by the Hastings Development Corporation, which sought to more than double the amount of units on site and install a parking garage beneath the property. Faced with the resident and community opposition, the proposal never made it beyond the planning stages.

According UIP’s Steve Schwat, the renovation is currently scheduled to wrap up in October. UIP’s own in-house general contractor, Urban CM, is overseeing construction.

The Macklin is the third such historic renovation currently that UIP currently has underway in the District. The others can be found at 1921 Kalorama Road, NW and 1706 T Street, NW, both in Adams Morgan.