Is Capitol Hill too Awesome?

Sold! In just a few days. Photo by Sharee Lawler.

Not possible, right?  How could our neighborhood be too amazing, too spectacular, too much fun??  Well, all those things mean buying a house is also getting too expensive.

Last March, my husband and I started looking for a new house and we were adamant about wanting to stay on the Hill.  We had outgrown the two bedroom house we bought in Northeast in 2001 just over a year after we were married (and when our proximity to H Street was NOT a selling point), so we started hunting for a four bedroom that would better accommodate two people working from home and the possibility of little Lawlers in our future.

When we purchased our current home, we thought it would be a good house for a five year time horizon.  Well, 12 years later we learned our lesson and decided that we’d be better off focusing on finding a place we could see ourselves for the next 20+ years.  With that in mind, we made a list of ‘must haves’:  10 minute walk max to metro, closer to the Capitol/House/Senate (for my husband the lobbyist), garage (later compromised to off street parking), and four bedrooms in at least 2,000 sq ft and, of course, within our budget.  A tall order, to be sure, but when you’re looking for the house you’ll be in until its time for the condo in Boca, might as well get what you want.  And we weren’t in a rush, so we could be patient.  Which is a good thing because we would need it in spades.

There is a statistic that homes sold between March and June fetch a higher selling price than at other times of the year.  That explains why you see so many houses going on the market in the spring so, though voluntarily paying a higher price isn’t exactly economically rational, there’s theoretically more inventory to choose from and we would also be selling a house so we’d like to get our house on the market in that window too.  We went into search mode from March to May and found … nothing.  Not that there weren’t great things available, but everything we were finding didn’t meet enough of our ‘must have’ criteria to make it worth while.  Often, if it was near metro and the Senate, it didn’t have parking or four bedrooms, and vice versa.  If it did have everything, then the price was astronomical.  $1.5 million was starting to sound like a normal price!

When we worked our way through the skimpy inventory, we decided to start looking at fixer uppers.  If that’s where you think you’ll find a good deal, forget it.  There are two big renovators, plus a handful of smaller ones, that gobble up houses like that all across the neighborhood.  They will pay more than the traditional buyer and they pay cash.  So we couldn’t even compete for the $650,000 shell we looked at in Northeast that would eventually go to a developer for close to $800,000 and be on the market again in two months for $1.3 million.  These developers were taking the houses that were in our price range for purchase and renovation and turning them into renovated houses we then couldn’t afford at all.  I knew I was starting to loose my grip on reality when I asked our agent about this “fixer upper” on Massachusetts Avenue that was featured in Urban Turf and eventually sold for $1 million.

We were getting frustrated but would have kept at it, until this happened.  Life stopped in July, and remained suspended in a bubble until November.  The thing about having your life turned upside down is that once it gets righted, you stop thinking of excuses not to do those big things that are important to you.  House hunting was the furthest thing from my mind when my husband showed me a place he liked back in November.  Its one of the ways I knew he was starting to feel like himself again, and that he finally could see that he’d make a full recovery.

By January, we started getting back up to speed on the status of the market, but not much had changed.  There was so little new inventory, on a whim I expanded my search to the entire city.  I couldn’t believe what I found.  House prices on the Hill were, in many cases, comparable to those in Georgetown.  We could get a detached house (with a HUGE yard and garage!) three blocks from Cleveland Park metro for the SAME price as 4 bedroom on North Carolina Avenue with no parking that was closer to RFK Stadium than, well, anything else.  I couldn’t believe that our neighborhood had gotten so … fancy.

On a lark, we looked at a couple of places in Northwest one weekend and that was it.  We were finding better value there and getting all but one thing on our ‘must have’ list.  We had to admit that we were officially priced out of Capitol Hill.  We ended up putting a contract on a house in Adams Morgan, on a quiet street less than 10 minutes from Woodley Park metro and in the Kalorama Triangle Historic District.  We also got the garage (and a micro back yard) along with 6 bedrooms and 4,000 sq ft in one of the city’s best school districts.  We couldn’t believe it.  The most comparable Hill house I’ve seen just came on the market recently and it only served to reinforce our conclusions:  we paid far less and got more for our money because the only investment we need to make is some fresh paint.

We are, quite literally, mourning the loss of the Hill.  It is such a fantastic place to live, and I certainly never imagined myself living anywhere else, much less Adams Morgan.  But we are so connected to this community, I don’t think we will be leaving it completely behind.  We remain involved with the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, have been dedicated supporters of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation and have season tickets to the Folger, not to mention this blog and all of our closest friends.  So while it may be farewell to the Hill as home, it is certainly not farewell to the Hill.

 (Up next:  So what is making real estate so crazy in the city and our neighborhood??)