Shaw

Quick Answer

Shaw is a Victorian row house neighborhood in Northwest DC, running from the Convention Center at M Street north to Florida Avenue. About three in four of its single-family row houses are recorded as built in 1900 or earlier. The median sale over the last 12 months is $1.1M, and the median house sells in 20 days.

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.

Shaw's median sale over the last 12 months is $1.1M. The median house sells in 20 days at 99% of list price. Logan Circle, to the west, sits at $1.4M and 20 days.

The single-family houses began much alike: two stories, about 1,800 square feet, on lots of about 1,400. The spread in price comes from what was done since. A three-story house with a finished basement and a two-story house with none can share a block and a build year.

Shaw looks like one Victorian neighborhood. In the public record, it nearly is.

DC lists about 1,100 row houses in Shaw. About 850 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them. About three in four are recorded as built in 1900 or earlier. The city enters 1900 when it does not have the true year, so many are older still. Almost nothing was added between 1940 and 2000. The typical house is two stories and about 1,800 square feet in total, on a lot of about 1,400 square feet. Half have a basement, and about a third have a finished one. Fewer than one in five rise to three stories.

The other 270 are recorded as converted to two units, and they run taller: about a third rise three stories or more, against fewer than one in five single-family houses.

That sameness is useful. Two houses on the same block often started as the same house. What separates them now is what happened since: a third floor, a finished basement, a rear wall pushed back. Nearly two-thirds of the records show a remodel at some point. Those changes, more than the front, are what a buyer pays for.

Here is what I do with that. I start with the record: the year built, the stories, and the basement as the city has them. Then I compare the house in front of me to what the record says it should be. A finished basement or a third floor the record does not show is a question for the seller, in writing, before it is a line in the price.

In Shaw, the record tells you where the house started. The house tells you what happened since.

From the Record

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  Shaw takes its name from Shaw Junior High School, named for Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. In 1966, planners used the school's enrollment boundary to define the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area. Until then the area was called Midcity.

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  Howard University was chartered by Congress in 1867. Its campus sits just north of Florida Avenue, across from Shaw.

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  The Howard Theatre at 620 T Street NW opened in 1910 and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974. It closed after 1968, and a restoration reopened it in 2012.

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  The 1968 riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. damaged the 7th Street and 14th Street NW commercial corridors. Shaw's population fell from about 34,000 in 1950 to about 15,000 in 1990.

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  The Walter E. Washington Convention Center opened in 2003 on the blocks between 7th and 9th Streets, from Mount Vernon Place to N Street, at Shaw's south edge.