Park View

Quick Answer

Park View runs east from Georgia Avenue to the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home, with Columbia Heights to the west and Petworth to the north. Nearly all of its houses are brick row houses built between 1901 and 1939, six in ten of them in the 1910s. Two Green Line Metro stations sit just outside it: Georgia Avenue-Petworth to the north, Columbia Heights to the west.

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.

Over the last 12 months the median row house sold in 26 days at 97.4% of its asking price, on 45 sales. That pace gives a buyer room to negotiate on a house priced above its condition. A seller who prices to the market does not wait long.

The median price per square foot here is $500. Compare Park View, Columbia Heights and Petworth on price per square foot, then adjust for condition. The houses are close in size, so the work done since is what moves the number.

Nearly every lot was built on by 1939, and the eastern edge is federal land. New supply comes from owners selling, not from new houses. That rewards a seller who prices to the condition of the house and a buyer who moves on one priced right.

Park View was built, almost all of it, in one decade.

DC lists about 1,550 row houses in Park View. About 1,400 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them. Nearly all went up between 1901 and 1939, and six in ten in the 1910s alone. The median lot is about 1,650 square feet. The typical house has about 1,900 square feet in total, and one in five has under 1,500. Most have a basement, and six in ten have finished it. Almost none rise to three stories.

The other 170 are recorded as converted to two units, and more of them have a third floor: about one in seven, against almost none of the single-family houses.

The age, the size and the layout barely vary. What separates two sales is the work done since. Look at the systems, the kitchen and baths, and the lower level.

Here is what I do with that. I sort Park View sales by condition before I look at price, in three groups: original, partly updated and fully renovated. Then I compare inside the group.

Same decade, same plan: the work done since is the price.

From the Record

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  Congress established the Soldiers' Home in 1851. General Winfield Scott set aside $100,000 of the tribute he levied on Mexico City in 1847 to found it. Its first land was the country estate of banker George W. Riggs.

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  President Lincoln lived in the Riggs cottage on the Soldiers' Home grounds, just east of Park View, during the summers of 1862 through 1864. He worked on the Emancipation Proclamation while living there. The cottage is now President Lincoln's Cottage.

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  In 1886 Benjamin H. Warder of Ohio bought Whitney Close, the former estate of Asa Whitney, and divided its 43 acres into building lots. That tract and the subdivisions around it were organized as one neighborhood, named Park View, in 1908.

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  Georgia Avenue began as the 7th Street Turnpike, built in 1810 to connect Washington with Rockville. Congress renamed it Georgia Avenue in 1908.

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  The name comes from the Soldiers' Home grounds, which were open to the public as a park. The Home closed its southern gates in the 1950s and closed the grounds to the neighborhood in 1968. The northern blocks, from Otis Place to Rock Creek Church Road, began as Princeton Heights: builder Edgar S. Kennedy put up 162 row houses there between 1909 and 1919.