Forest Hills

Quick Answer

Forest Hills is the Ward 3 neighborhood between Connecticut Avenue NW and Rock Creek Park, from Tilden Street NW north to Chevy Chase. It is mostly detached houses. DC also lists about 71 row houses, most on Upton, Tilden and Fessenden Streets. Van Ness-UDC station on the Red Line sits on its western edge, and Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens is on Linnean Avenue.

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.

Row houses rarely sell in Forest Hills: two in the last two years and twelve in the last ten. The median of $1.2M rests on very few sales, so treat it as a data point, not a market.

Closed volume here is too thin to support a list-to-sale read. Judge a Forest Hills row house on the specific house and the specific block. Pull comps from row houses of the same size and era just outside the neighborhood line.

Forest Hills has row houses, and they are big ones. More than half have over 3,000 square feet.

DC lists about 71 row houses in Forest Hills. About 66 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 5 are recorded as converted to two units. About three in four went up between 1901 and 1939, most of those in the 1910s and 1920s. The rest came in the 1950s. Every one has a basement, and about nine in ten have finished it. About one in four rises three stories or more. The typical house has about 3,200 square feet in total on a lot of about 3,900 square feet. Nearly six in ten have four bedrooms or more.

Two sold in the last two years. A median built on two sales says little about the next one.

Here is what I do with that. I adjust the last ten years of Forest Hills sales for time. Then I add row houses of the same size and era from just outside the line, matched on the basement and the floors. I ask the seller in writing when the lower level was finished and what has been replaced since: the roof, the windows, the HVAC.

Two sales are a starting point, not a price.

From the Record

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  Soapstone Valley Park, which follows a tributary of Rock Creek through Forest Hills, was acquired for Rock Creek Park under 1924 legislation meant in part to protect the creek's watershed.

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  Marjorie Merriweather Post bought the Hillwood estate on Linnean Avenue in 1955. It opened to the public as a museum in 1977.