Hill East

Quick Answer

Hill East runs from 15th Street SE east to the Anacostia River, south of East Capitol Street. Its row houses are brick and mostly from the 1920s, a generation younger than many of the blocks to the west. It sits east of the Capitol Hill Historic District. Stadium-Armory Metro is inside it, and so is the former RFK Stadium site, where a new stadium is planned.

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 median sale in Hill East is $915K over the last 12 months, from 39 closed sales. Homes sold in a median 9 days at 99.3% of list price.

Capitol Hill, to the west, has a median of $1.1M. Part of that gap is the house itself. Hill East is mostly 1920s two-story brick, and many of the blocks west of 15th Street are older and built to a different plan.

Hill East shares Capitol Hill's name and much of its look. It does not share its age.

DC lists about 1,300 row houses in Hill East. About 1,200 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 65 are recorded as converted to two units. Almost none are recorded before 1900. Nearly all went up between 1901 and 1939, and half in the 1920s alone. The typical house has about 1,300 square feet above ground and about 1,850 in total, and one in four has under 1,500. Seven in ten have a basement, and more than half have finished it. Almost none rise to three stories.

The house a few blocks west is often older and built to a different plan. A 1925 two-story house and an 1890s house with the same bedroom count are different comparisons, whatever the neighborhood name says.

Here is what I do with that. I comp a Hill East house against Hill East sales and the 1920s blocks around it first. I look west only to check the ceiling.

A shared name is not a shared comp.

From the Record

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  Hill East was built mostly in the early twentieth century. DC records date nearly all of its row houses between 1901 and 1939, half of them in the 1920s. The name is recent: it came into use in the mid-2010s for the east end of Capitol Hill, outside the historic district.

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  Congressional Cemetery was established in 1807 at what is now 1801 E Street SE. More than 65,000 people are buried or memorialized there.

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  RFK Stadium opened in 1961 as District of Columbia Stadium and was renamed for Robert F. Kennedy in 1969. Washington's football team played there through 1996, and the Nationals from 2005 to 2007. It closed in 2019, and demolition followed.

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  The District is redeveloping Reservation 13, the former DC General Hospital campus, under the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative. Congress transferred the RFK land to the District in January 2025, and the DC Council approved a new stadium there in September 2025, with housing and shops planned around it.