Mount Pleasant

Quick Answer

Mount Pleasant is the Northwest DC neighborhood between 16th Street and Rock Creek Park, with Harvard Street at its south edge. DC lists about 1,250 row houses here, about 960 of them single-family, and nine in ten went up between 1901 and 1939. Mount Pleasant Street carries the shops and restaurants. The nearest Metro is Columbia Heights, east of 16th Street.

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 here is $1.5M, against $875K in Columbia Heights across 16th Street. About 75 single-family row houses sold in the last two years. Almost none have been built since 1940, so supply turns on owners deciding to sell.

The gap to Columbia Heights is part house and part location. Compare matching houses first, on stories, the basement and the bedroom count. What is left is what the location costs.

Nine in ten row houses here went up between 1901 and 1939, and the neighborhood is a historic district. The stock does not grow, so prices move with demand.

Mount Pleasant gets called Victorian. Nine in ten of its row houses went up between 1901 and 1939.

DC lists about 1,250 row houses in Mount Pleasant. About 960 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 290 are recorded as converted to two units. Two in five date to the 1910s. Only about one in thirty carries a year built of 1900 or earlier. The typical house has about 2,700 square feet in total, and about one in three has more than 3,000. Nearly all have a basement, and about three in four have finished it. Three in ten rise three stories or more. Among the converted houses it is half.

From the street the brick fronts look alike. A three-story house with a finished basement and a two-story house with a raw one can share a block. About 75 sold here in two years, enough to match on both.

Here is what I do with that. I pick comps on stories, the finished basement and the bedroom count before I look at the street. I set a converted house against other conversions, never against single-family sales. I ask the seller in writing when the basement was finished and whether the house was ever used as two units.

Matching fronts are not matching houses.

From the Record

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  A streetcar line opened along 16th and a half Street, now Mount Pleasant Street NW, in 1903. Most of the row houses went up over the next three decades, two in five of them in the 1910s.

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  Shops followed the streetcar onto Mount Pleasant Street after 1903. The neighborhood became a DC historic district in 1986 and was listed on the National Register in 1987, so exterior changes go through historic review.