Near Northeast / NoMa / H Street

Quick Answer

Near Northeast is the row house neighborhood around H Street NE. It runs from the railroad tracks behind Union Station east to 15th Street, between F Street and Florida Avenue. DC lists about 2,500 row houses here, and most went up between 1901 and 1939. H Street is the commercial corridor through the middle. NoMa, near the northwest corner, is mostly apartment and office buildings around the NoMa-Gallaudet U station. Price the block, not the name.

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 $849K, against $1.1M on Capitol Hill to the south. The median house sells in 17 days.

Near Northeast is a neighborhood of small houses on small lots, and very few of them have grown.

DC lists about 2,500 row houses between NoMa, H Street and the blocks around them. About 2,100 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them. Three in ten are recorded as built in 1900 or earlier. Most of the rest went up between 1901 and 1939. The median lot is about 1,250 square feet. The typical house has about 1,900 square feet in total, and three in ten have under 1,500. Fewer than one in ten rises to three stories. Nearly all are brick.

The other 440 are recorded as converted to two units. About one in eight of those rises three stories or more, twice the share of the single-family houses.

When a house has little room to grow, the space it has is most of the story. The lower level is where the extra room went: about half the houses have a finished one.

Here is what I do with that. I price these houses per finished square foot, with the space above ground and the space below it counted separately. Then I compare like with like: a two-story house with a finished lower level against the same, never against the rare one with a third floor.

When a house cannot grow, every foot it has is priced.

From the Record

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  The Columbia Railway, chartered by Congress in 1870, ran horsecars along H Street to the city boundary at 15th Street NE. H Street NE grew into one of the city's busiest commercial streets, with Washington's first Sears, Roebuck store.

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  Union Station, begun in 1907, brought the railroad tracks across H Street. A 1902 plan would have cut the street; the Northeast Washington Citizens' Association won a tunnel instead. Today H Street crosses the tracks on the Hopscotch Bridge.

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  Businesses on H Street NE were severely damaged in the 1968 riots, and the street did not begin to recover until the 2000s. The Atlas Theater, a 1938 movie house on H Street, closed in 1976.

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  The DC Office of Planning began a plan for the H Street NE corridor in 2002. The Atlas reopened as the Atlas Performing Arts Center in 2005. In 2015 the Capitol Hill Historic District was extended north of F Street between 2nd and 4th Streets NE, stopping short of the H Street frontage. The streetcar opened on February 27, 2016, the first in the city since 1962, and ran until March 31, 2026.