Columbia Heights

Quick Answer

Columbia Heights runs from 16th Street east to Sherman Avenue, and from Florida Avenue north to Spring Road. Its center is 14th Street, the Columbia Heights Metro station and DC USA, the shopping center with Target and Best Buy. DC lists about 2,000 row houses here. Nearly all went up between 1901 and 1939.

How We Calculate $/sqft

$/sqft is calculated on above-grade finished square footage, the standard used by DC appraisers, MLS systems, and most market participants. Properties with finished below-grade space (English basements, rental units) carry that square footage as additive value, but appraisers typically apply a discount of 50 to 75 cents on the dollar relative to above-grade space. Blending the two into a single $/sqft figure would make a home with a finished basement look cheaper than it is and obscure the real comparison. When a property has significant finished below-grade square footage, both metrics are presented in context so you understand the full picture before the appraiser does.

The current row house median here is $875K, against $1.4M in Logan Circle and $1.9M in Dupont Circle. Houses sell in a median of 13 days at 97.4% of list price.

Shaw's median is $1.1M. The houses are not the same: about three in four Shaw row houses were built before 1901, with a median under 1,800 square feet. Columbia Heights houses went up mostly between 1901 and 1939, at a median of about 2,400 square feet.

Columbia Heights houses are big, and big houses are where bedroom counts drift.

DC lists about 2,000 row houses in Columbia Heights. About 1,500 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them. Nearly all went up between 1901 and 1939, half of them in the 1910s. The typical house has about 2,400 square feet in total. Small ones are rare: about 3 in 100 have under 1,500, and more than one in five has over 3,000. Nearly every house has a basement, and two thirds have finished it. Nearly half have four bedrooms or more.

The other 500 are recorded as converted to two units, and they run taller: half rise three stories or more, against about one in four single-family houses.

A listing that says five bedrooms may be counting a lower-level room with no window an adult could climb out of. The comps you choose depend on that count, and so does the price.

Here is what I do with that. I count bedrooms by DC's code, not the listing. A bedroom has at least 70 square feet, measures at least 7 feet each way and has a 7-foot ceiling. Below ground, it needs an egress window with 5.7 square feet of opening and a sill no higher than 44 inches. Then I compare on that count.

A room is a bedroom when the code says so, not when the listing does.

From the Record

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  In 1881 and 1882, Senator John Sherman bought the land north of Boundary Street, now Florida Avenue, between 10th and 16th Streets. Much of it had belonged to Columbian College. He subdivided it as Columbia Heights, and Sherman Avenue carries his name. Streetcar extensions along 11th, 14th and 16th Streets in 1902 set off a building boom. Nearly all of the row houses standing today went up between 1901 and 1939.

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  The federal government bought the Meridian Hill site in 1910. John Porter had built a mansion there in 1819 and named it for the meridian line. The park was built between 1912 and 1936, with a cascade of linked basins down its lower half. The name Malcolm X Park followed a 1969 speech there by Angela Davis, and Congress never changed the official name.

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  The 1968 riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. damaged 14th Street NW through Columbia Heights. Many storefronts and houses on the corridor stayed vacant for decades.

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  The Columbia Heights Metro station opened in September 1999. DC USA, a 546,000-square-foot shopping center anchored by Target, opened across the street on March 5, 2008.