Lanier Heights

Quick Answer

Lanier Heights is the small set of row house streets north of Columbia Road, between 16th Street and Adams Mill Road, with Mount Pleasant across Harvard Street. DC lists about 150 row houses here, and about one in three is recorded as converted to two units. Only a handful sell in a year, so any median here describes a few houses, not a market.

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.

With 4 closed sales in the last twelve months, the median of $1.7M rests on very few houses. Read each sale on its own terms: its size, its basement, and whether it is one unit or two.

Columbia Road's shops sit on the southern edge, and 18th Street in Adams Morgan is a short walk south. Price follows condition and size. A separate lower-level unit changes the comparison.

The stock is small and fixed: about 150 row houses. Over the last ten years, about six or seven sold in a typical year. Days on market over the trailing twelve months: 9.

In Lanier Heights, one row house in three is not a single house on the city's books.

DC lists about 150 row houses in Lanier Heights. About 100 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 50 are recorded as converted to two units. Every one went up between 1901 and 1939, six in ten in the 1910s. Nearly all are brick. Half have more than 3,000 square feet in total, and none has under 1,500. Four in ten rise three stories or more. Every one has a basement, and nine in ten have finished it. Six in ten have four or more bedrooms.

In the last two years, about a dozen sold. A house with a separate lower-level unit and a house lived in as one home can look the same from the sidewalk, but they are not the same comp.

Here is what I do with that. I check how the city records a house, and I keep single-family and converted sales apart. I ask the seller in writing whether the lower level has its own kitchen and entrance, and whether it has a certificate of occupancy. When sales run thin, I widen to Mount Pleasant and Adams Morgan houses of the same size and era.

Count the units before you count the comps.

From the Record

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  The Lanier Heights subdivision was created in 1883 by Elizabeth Lanier Dunn and her husband, William M. Dunn, a retired U.S. Army general. Building was slow until an electric streetcar line opened on Columbia Road in 1897.

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  DC's records date every row house here between 1901 and 1939, six in ten of them to the 1910s.

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  The Ontario apartment house went up on Ontario Road between 1902 and 1906 and drew new attention to the subdivision.

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  In 2016 the Zoning Commission granted a petition from residents and ANC 1C to rezone most of the row house blocks from R-5-B, which allowed apartment buildings by right, to R-4.