Why my family left 16th Street Heights

When I first moved to my lovely basement rowhouse apartment on the corner of 15th and Buchanan in the Sixteenth Street Heights in 2012, my then roommate and I had few criteria on where to live. We were looking for an apartment with high enough ceilings so he could practice the upright bass, and I wanted to be near the S or the 50 bus lines.

But in those eight years, staying in that same apartment, I along with my (then-girlfriend, now) wife of 4 years, and our small spunky West Highland terrier Rosie, came to love our 16th Streets Heights neighborhood, whether it was sitting on our landlord’s porch during Halloween giving out candy to trick or treaters, eating an entire pie from La Villa Pizzeria (RIP), swimming as much as humanly possible at Upshur Pool, or the camaraderie and solidarity we have felt with our neighbors during our current public health crisis.

But when my wife and I decided we wanted to purchase a home, we quickly realized we could not afford to live in the neighborhood we have called home for so many years. And at the end of the year we ended up moving to our new home in Rockville, Maryland. But it didn’t have to be this way.

Just how unaffordable was our old neighborhood for potential homeowners? According to Zillow, single-family homes in this neighborhood are valued at nearly $830k and are forecasted to rise to just under one million dollars by the end of 2021.

According to the DC Policy Center, our neighborhood has some of the least affordable “starter homes” in the city (further to the right on the graph is less affordable), and this is especially the case when taking into account how large the single-family homes are in our neighborhood. (Note: Starter homes is a controversial term, but is used to refer to single-family homes of a certain size and price point for a family of four in this context.)

This gets to the crux of the problem. There isn’t enough dense and or missing middle housing, which can include townhouses, duplexes, and cottage court buildings, and thus more affordable housing in our area. This is because square footage prices are too high but also because there are too few houses in our neighborhood to put downward pressure on prices (if the supply went up).

Our elected officials have failed us by not acting to address this issue over the past few years as our city has become more prosperous but housing has grown to be less and less affordable.

When I asked my councilmember about how they would address the lack of housing stock during a listening session in my then neighborhood, I received an answer based on the possibility that companies could abandon office building stock and convert it to housing downtown. While I doubt that this is something that will happen in the near term, that had little to do with our neighborhood, which is nearly all residential homes.

I have learned to be disappointed by politicians on this front, but I have often felt more disappointed by some of the people in this neighborhood. In the eight years that I have lived in 16th Street Heights, I have observed countless active efforts to fight/oppose the building of modest amounts of new housing in our area. Members of our community fought to stop development of more housing on an undeveloped hidden green space that only benefits neighbors whose homes abut it (even as their homes are a stone’s throw away from Upshur Park). If we don’t find a way to increase the housing supply, how can the neighborhood ever be a welcome place for new residents?

There is a lot of good research on this topic, even adding an increased supply of new, fancy, renovated housing can decrease the price of housing overall as older homes that are in need of upgrades, decrease in value in comparative terms. We need more housing of all stripes, and if we can’t even get newer sometimes pricier housing built here then how will we ever build the kind of housing needed to help families afford to stay here.

Here is the kicker. My wife and I both have jobs that pay well above the median income in the region and families who would support us if we needed it. If we aren’t able to do this, then how will people who have not been conferred these advantages in life do this?

DC prides itself on being a progressive, inclusive city and where we strive to build collective prosperity and create a more just and equal city. That is why it pains me to see no action on this. We would have loved to stay in 16th Street Heights for another eight years, but it just wasn’t possible for young couples like us who are looking to buy their first home together.

We miss our old apartment already. And though I love our new home, I still feel that sense of loss and sadness of what could have been.