Peter Murray • March 19, 2015

As if anyone needed another reminder about how expensive housing is in the District of Columbia, apartment rental site Zumper mapped the cost of a month’s rent in a one-bedroom apartment in D.C. neighborhoods.

Subsequently, the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute released a report showing, among other things, that rent has increased in D.C. most for low- and middle-income renters and that the number of apartments in the area where monthly rent is below $800 has decreased from 58,000 in 2002 to 33,000 in 2013.

There are few surprises in the Zumper report. Georgetown is the most expensive place to live ($2,600), with Downtown-Penn Quarter-Chinatown ranking in a close second ($2,510). Arlington is more expensive than living in a lot of neighborhoods in D.C. but with a lot less urban character. Ditto on SW Ballpark – Navy Yard, where rent averages are $2,104, hundreds of dollars more than in LeDroit Park – Bloomingdale ($1,550), Capitol Hill ($1,795), Glover Park ($1,760), Petworth ($1,610), Mount Pleasant ($1,650) and a couple of other neighborhoods. The main point here is that it’s not worth living in big-ass, expensive apartment building in a neighborhood with no personality, when there are lower prices in a number of charming (though sometimes in-transition) areas in D.C.

Speaking of charming, in-transition neighborhoods: Zumper’s map shows that despite continued sketchiness and crime, H Street-NOMA and Columbia Heights have officially become expensive places to live with rents for a one-bedroom apartment averaging out at $2,100 per month.

Rents are actually down slightly in Columbia Heights though there is this story from DCist about a building owner increasing monthly rents by more than $900.

The map also reaffirms Logan Circle-Shaw as an incredibly popular, in-demand neighborhood akin to Dupont Circle. What sets the area apart from others with high rent price points like Foggy Bottom, Mount Vernon Square, Woodley Park and Downtown is that the neighborhood currently is not home to massive buildings with market rate — read “costly” — rents. As more of these complexes, including buildings around the Shaw metro station, adjacent to City Market at O and near Logan Circle come online, the median one-bedroom monthly rent will likely shoot up even further. (This seems to defy common sense with regard to supply and demand, but that’s D.C.’s rental market in certain neighborhoods for you.)

So, what does this all mean for you and finding affordable housing in Washington? As D.C.’s real estate market becomes increasingly like those in New York City and San Francisco, finding affordable housing will progressively become a more daunting task but it’s possible, if you’re a savvy shopper. Try living with people — as many as you can — if affordability is your top concern. One-bedrooms might be expensive in Columbia Heights but there are plenty of large, multi-bedroom houses with rents around $1,000 per person in the neighborhood.

Look outside the box in terms of neighborhoods. If you want to live in near Dupont Circle but can’t afford rent there, don’t mosey over defeated to Arlington, check out a group house in Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant or Bloomingdale. If those hoods are still too pricey, check out Petworth, Brookland, Trinidad, Eckington or Capitol Hill.

If real estate trends in D.C., New York and San Francisco illustrate anything, it’s that rundown, crime-ridden areas can quickly become hot, up-and-coming, appealing neighborhoods.

Peter Murray • March 11, 2015

Smoke and power outages plagued Metrorail the weekend of Feb. 20, while on the H Street corridor, a flash fire ignited atop a streetcar during service simulation late Feb. 21.

Problems started for commuters Friday morning when the power went out at the L’Enfant Plaza station, leaving hundreds of commuters in near-pitch-black dark. The outage occurred around 8:45 a.m., and power was not restored fully until the early afternoon. The station remained open during the outage, but the entrance at 9th and D streets NW remained closed until the lights came back on. Metro said in a tweet that the outage was caused by a “commercial power problem.” Feb. 20 was the coldest day of the year so far, with temperatures reaching as low as 5 degrees at Reagan National Airport.

Then, smoke caused delays and evacuations at three Metro stations over the weekend. Woodley Park Station was taken out of service briefly after faulty brakes reportedly filled the station with smoke on the afternoon of Feb. 21. The station was evacuated, with commuters rushing to escape a potentially life-threatening situation akin to the one that occurred at the L’Enfant station on Jan. 12.

Smoke caused by faulty brakes was also reported at the L’Enfant station Sunday. A D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department spokesman confirmed the source of the cause in a statement on Feb. 22.

Fire struck a streetcar around 11:45 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 21. Officials said, “The sparks extinguished very quickly on their own and fire suppression was not required by the first responders on the scene.” No one was injured during the incident but Mayor Muriel Bowser said in a brief statement issued Sunday that D.C. Streetcar would not open to the public until “we know it’s safe, and not a moment sooner.” The as-of-yet not fully operational streetcar has had nine minor accidents since it began simulating service in Oct. 14, with the latest occurring in early January. No one has been harmed in any of the accidents.

Also on Sunday, smoke caused by an electrical arcing event in the third rail led emergency crews to the Foggy Bottom station around 6:30 p.m. A driver alerted authorities after noticing the smoke coming from the tunnel leading from Foggy Bottom to Rosslyn. Smoke did no reach surrounding stations, but officials instituted single-tracking by closing off the tunnel until 7:40 p.m.

A number of other smoke incidents have created problems on Metro in recent weeks, notably causing evacuations at the Dupont Circle and Court House stations in early February. However, Metro officials say that smoke incidents are on the decline, with 120 occurrences in 2012 to only 40 in 2014. There is no official count for 2015.

These safety problems for Metro come at a bad time, on the heels of reports by the Washington Post that Metro’s federally funded alarm system that contacts emergency response radio does not work properly in subway tunnels. Emergency response officials say Metro never notified them that about this critical flaw; they discovered it on their own in 2014 and pressured Metro to fix the problems to no avail. The radio defect held up D.C. firefighters’ rescue efforts at L’Enfant station when smoke killed one and injured more than 80 people on Jan. 12.

Peter Murray •

With 16 years of success under their belts, Tom Anderson, Dana Landry, Bill Moody and Marc Schappell at Washington Fine Properties are marking their “Sweet Sixteen” with tech savvy and style.

In business since 1999, the firm has made waves in Washington’s real estate market by brokering deals on some of the most luxurious homes in the District. During that time, the internet experienced explosive transformation, transitioning from just another means to communicate to a vast source of data and information utilized by businesses and individuals alike.

The internet revolution hit the real estate market in a big way. “Statistics show that 98 percent of people buying homes use the internet as a tool in their search process,” Landry points out. He goes on to say that the web has revolutionized the house touring process. Prospective buyers’ “first appointment is all online and if they like what they see on the web, they’ll come see the house.”

So WFP fine-tuned their site, gearing it “towards the properties, not the agents,” by blowing out their photography, embedding video (sometimes filmed by drones flown by ex-military pilots) and information about nearby schools and, most impressive, bringing Google Street View-like technology to virtual tours of homes on the market through Matterport 3D Modeling. Landry describes it, saying, “If you click on circles in the pictures, it takes you right through the room and you can walk through the whole house.” (Take a tour for yourself here.)

Then, he says, there’s the “dollhouse version” feature on the new site, allowing prospective buyers – or just those with high aspirations or a lot of curiosity – to look through the house in “layers,” with a simple click putting you inside any room in the house. Landry boasts that no other real estate firm in the area is using this technology (yet).

In addition, four weeks ago WFP launched a new in-house app that connects their team, bringing brokers together to better serve the firm’s clients. Landry says, “When we can get our whole team working on an assignment for one of our clients, the power of the team is incredible.” He compares it to Facebook, saying that agents can push notifications to one another about new listings or a client’s specific needs.

The app also stores “critical information” previously only accessible by PC, such as essential forms and lists of home inspectors, appraisers and settlement attorneys.

Landry notes that WFP’s tech upgrades weren’t cheap, but that they have paid off with regard to bringing in and streamlining business. With a relatively small 130-person team, Landry says, “We’ve always prided ourselves on being agile and able to implement effective tools for our agents.” WFP is doing just that with their new web tools.

Peter Murray •

Glover Park Hardware owners Gina Schaefer and Marc Friedman announced on March 3 that the store is reopening at a new location at 2233 Wisconsin Ave. NW.

The old location at 2251 Wisconsin Ave. closed on Jan. 15, after Schaefer says lease negotiations fell apart when the space’s landlord made a “last-minute” decision to lease the location to another tenant.

Schaefer and Friedman are hoping to open the new store, housed in the same building as Einstein Bagels (and only a few doors down from the old store), sometime in April. They said in a press release, “We love our Glover Park Community and we were committed to reopening in this neighborhood.”

Peter Murray • February 26, 2015

“I’m not willing to let law enforcement off the hook,” FBI Director James B. Comey said in a Feb. 12 speech about policing and race Thursday at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall. The speech marked the first time an FBI director has spoken on the topic and comes on the heals of nationwide unrest spurred by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and others who were killed at the hands of police officers.

In addition to race, Comey touched on technology, community policing and trust as areas that police needed to improve upon, but he also argued that most police officers are “good people” who are “overwhelmingly doing the right thing and making the right choices.” He also highlighted his “affection” for law enforcement.

On the increased militarization of police forces, Comey argued, “It’s not the stuff [the equipment]. It’s about the training and the discipline and how we use it.” He asked rhetorically, “Do we use that stuff to confront people who are protesting in a crowd? Do we use a sniper rifle to see closer in a crowd?”

In a strong condemnation of how police report law-enforcement-involved deaths, Comey said it was “ridiculous” that such deaths are harder to find information on than “how many people went to the emergency room with fly symptoms last week.” He said it is impossible to “understand or address these issues” without more data and details on how police shooting incidents occur. Comey critiqued the current system of voluntary reporting in such incidents and said, “Without complete or accurate data, we are left with ideological thunderbolts.”

Speaking on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Comey harked back to the nation’s history of slavery and law enforcement’s “complicity” in that history, calling it “our inheritance as law enforcement.” He said the “mental shortcut” of assuming “everyone lies and everyone is guilty” is “easy but… false,” yet “irresistible.” He went on to say that if law enforcement can’t change their “latent biases” they can at least change their “behavior in response to those instinctive reactions.”

Comey implied that fixing the ways police use technology and react to minorities will help law enforcement regain the trust of the American people. He called the current lack of trust in minority communities “corrosive” to the “entire justice system.”

However, Comey also took swings at law enforcement’s critics, saying that broader societal problems lead poor kids to “inherit a life of crime” and that body cameras will not solve “a host of problems” in the criminal justice system.

Comey closed out his remarks on a conciliatory note, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. in saying, “We must learn to live as brothers or we will perish together as fools,” adding, “Relationships are hard. Relationships require work. So let’s begin that work. It is time to start seeing each other as who we really are.”

Peter Murray •

A new Condé Nast Traveler feature has ranked D.C. as the top American city for “music lovers,” above New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, Austin, Memphis, Detroit and more for the top spot. This ranking defies common sense and logic.

No doubt the District is a great place to be a music lover with venues like the 9:30 Club, the Kennedy Center, the Black Cat, the Historic Synagogue at Sixth & I, the Lincoln Theatre, the Howard Theatre, U Street Music Hall, Gypsy Sally’s, DC9 and Echostage, to name a few. D.C. is the home to great music genres like go-go and hugely talented musicians like the Foo Fighters, Fugazi, Thievery Corporation and, more recently, Paperhaus, Will Eastman – with a stable of young electronic acts he has helped raise – and Wale.

But Condé Nast only scratches the surface of that history. Here’s what they had to say about our city:

“Despite its staid reputation—or maybe because of it—the nation’s capital has fostered thriving underground music scenes for decades, including go-go (the funky genre’s driving force, Chuck Brown, was from D.C.) and hardcore, led by bands like Bad Brains and Fugazi. Today there are plenty of places to see live music in D.C., including legendary venues like Bohemian Caverns, where Miles Davis and John Coltrane once played; the 9:30 Club has hosted everyone from Arcade Fire to Rob Zombie. D.C.’s museums are also filled with music history: The National Museum of American History, for instance, has old cassettes and other pop-culture ephemera in its collection.”

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Arcade Fire and Rob Zombie have nothing to do with D.C. other than that they got paid to play here once or maybe a handful of times. Also, why shout out Rob Zombie over pretty much every other major music act that has played at the 9:30 Club at some time or another?

Sure, “old cassettes and other pop-culture ephemera” are cool, but are they a reason that D.C. should be the number one city for music lovers in America? Absolutely not. Music lovers would probably prefer more local acts, more venues, more music festivals, more recording studios and more of an industry infrastructure to support all of that than technological artifacts.

D.C. is a great city for music lovers and should certainly make this list – and be proud to make it – but by putting the District at the top, Condé Nast calls their entire ranking into question. In all, the publication comes off as more patronizing to the District than anything else.

New York City or Los Angeles deserves the top spot on this list. Both are home to hundreds of venues not to mention all of the country’s major (and most of the minor) record labels and the music media. Massive pop stars and bright-eyed, aspiring musicians alike call both cities home. For Christ’s sake, bands move to those places to get their careers started. They don’t move to D.C.; they move away from D.C. to those cities.

Hopefully this changes and D.C. eventually – and rightfully – becomes the best city in America for music lovers. A stronger industry presence or festivals on national park land (cough, cough, the National Mall and Meridian Hill Park) could change that. More venues, like the one proposed by I.M.P. at the Wharf development in Southwest, could help too. For the District to reach this title, in essence, D.C. needs more reasons for musicians to stay put. A list put out by Condé Nast meant to throw a curveball at its readers just isn’t going to do it.

Peter Murray •

Initiative 71 goes into effect on Feb. 26, legalizing marijuana possession and cultivation in the District.

If only it were that simple.

The law goes into affect in light of Congressional inaction to block it during a 30-legislative-day window in which they have to privilege to do so. The law legalizes the possession of up to two ounces of marijuana and six marijuana plants (two of which can be mature). It also allows for the gifting of up to one ounce but includes no provision for sales. However, Congress in its latest spending bill has forbidden the Council from using funds to “enact” any legislation easing marijuana prohibition or establishing a legal market in the District.

Mayor Bowser’s office released the guidance below to help District residents and police navigate the complexities of D.C.’s new marijuana laws. The following is an abbreviated transcript of the District government’s “Initiative 71 and D.C.’s Marijuana Laws: Questions and Answers” document:

Q: When will Initiative 71 become law?
A: 12:01 a.m. on Thursday, February 26, 2015.

Q: What is legal under Initiative 71and D.C.’s Marijuana laws?
A: It is legal for adults 21 years of age or older to: Possess two ounces or less of marijuana; Grow within their primary residence up to six marijuana plants, no more than three of which are mature; Transfer one ounce or less of marijuana to another person as long as: (1) no money, goods, or services are exchanged; and (2) the recipient is 21 years of age or older; and Consume marijuana on private property.

Q: What will the law still prohibit?
A: Even with the enactment of Initiative 71, it will remain a crime for anyone to: Possess more than two ounces of marijuana; Smoke or consume marijuana on public space or anywhere to which the public is invited; Sell any amount of marijuana to another person; or Operate a vehicle or boat under the influence of marijuana.

Q: What is the impact of Initiative 71 on persons under 21?
A: Anyone under 21 years of age is still prohibited from possessing any amount of marijuana. If marijuana is found in the possession of a youth under 21, police will seize the marijuana. If the person has more than two ounces, the person can also be arrested.

Q: How will Initiative 71 apply to federal property in the District?
A: It doesn’t. It will continue to be illegal to use marijuana in public anywhere in the District of Columbia. Under federal law, federal law enforcement officers may arrest anyone in the District for possession of any amount of marijuana.

Q: Where can marijuana be bought for personal consumption?
A: Marijuana can be grown at home or shared; it can’t be sold. Home grow; home use. Home cultivation is permitted of up to 3 mature plants or 6 mature plants in a household with multiple adults who are 21 and over. Up to one ounce of marijuana can be shared so long as there is no exchange of money, good or services.

Q: I thought the District was going to tax and regulate marijuana?
A: Congressional interference means the District can’t enact any regulatory framework for the sale or taxation of marijuana. So, for now, marijuana cannot be sold, or taxed.

Peter Murray •

Georgetown residents, police and retailers have come to rely on the Business Improvement District’s GroupMe messaging account to get up-to-date information on thefts, fires and other safety concerns in the neighborhood. The BID and the Metropolitan Police Department launched the “Georgetown Business Public Safety” GroupMe account last March as a way for the community to stay in touch with law enforcement. The BID is in charge of adding new members to the messaging group.

When the group started, most messages came from police officers alerting community members and retailers about things to watch out for. But as the group has evolved, more and more messages come from people working at local shops reporting “suspicious activity,” theft and general disorder in the area. Sometimes these messages are accompanied by photos of those suspected to be causing trouble.

To such messages, police officers on the message chain usually reply ‘omw’ (on my way) or tell the retailers to call 911 for immediate assistance. (As with most messaging media these days, spelling and grammatical errors abound and abbreviations – like ‘bolo’ for be on the lookout – are plentiful.)

Rachel Cothran from the BID says the message board has “been enormously helpful to the merchants. They’re better connected to one another, and they get immediate responses from officers.”

It is unclear what happens when the police arrive at these scenes, but it’s likely that their presence wards off thefts and in some cases arrests have been made. Sales associates at local stores frequently ask for police walk-throughs to deter “suspicious” characters from committing theft or other crimes. Cothran says an exact number of thefts precluded or arrests is “hard to quantify.”

GroupMe was launched in 2010 and acquired by Skype in 2011. Having purchased Skype, Microsoft now owns the app.