Sixteenth Street Heights

Quick Answer

Sixteenth Street Heights runs from 16th Street east to Georgia Avenue, between Columbia Heights to the south and Brightwood to the north, all in ZIP code 20011. DC lists about 850 row houses here. Nearly all are brick and went up between 1901 and 1939, most of them in the 1920s. Detached houses and duplexes share the streets. The median row house sale is $1.1M, at 19 days on 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.

Row houses here sell at a median of $1.1M. Across 16th Street, Crestwood's row houses are larger and rarely sell. Across Georgia Avenue, Petworth sells the same era of brick row house at $789K. Brightwood Park to the northeast is at $708K.

The median house sells in 19 days at 97.8% of its list price, across 33 trailing-year sales. That is a market where a correctly priced house goes under contract inside a month.

DC lists about 795 single-family row houses here and about 55 more recorded as converted to two units. About 60 sold in the last two years. With sales that thin on any one block, comps come from the surrounding streets and from houses of the same size and basement.

A Sixteenth Street Heights row house is bigger than its front suggests. About a third of its space is below the street.

DC lists about 850 row houses in Sixteenth Street Heights. About 795 are single-family houses, and the figures here are for them; the other 55 are recorded as converted to two units. Six in ten went up in the 1920s, and most of the rest in the 1910s. Nearly all are brick, two stories over a basement. The typical house has about 2,600 square feet, 1,800 of it above ground, on a lot of about 2,600. One in four has more than 3,000. About three in four basements are finished. Six in ten houses have four bedrooms or more.

Two houses with the same front can differ by a full floor of living space. The listing total does not say which floor.

Here is what I do with that. I price the space above ground and below it separately, and compare houses on both numbers. I check ceiling height and exits before I count a bedroom downstairs. I ask the seller in writing when the basement was finished and whether it has taken water.

A square foot underground is not worth a square foot upstairs.

From the Record

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  Much of the land was Maple Grove Farm, an 80-acre nursery John Saul bought in 1854. By 1892 his son, Bernard Francis Saul, had founded the B.F. Saul Company to sell it off in lots as Saul's Addition, bounded generally by Buchanan Street, Piney Branch Road, Gallatin Street and Georgia Avenue.

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  Saul's Addition required detached houses and barred commercial and apartment buildings, and much of that survives in zoning. Its deeds also carried restrictive covenants, which the Supreme Court made unenforceable in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer. The Fourteenth Street Terrace subdivision to the north allowed semi-detached houses. The streetcar extension up 14th Street in late 1906 sped building on both.

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  Carter Barron Amphitheatre opened across 16th Street in Rock Creek Park on August 4, 1950, for Washington's 150th year as the capital. Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Bruce Springsteen played it. It has been closed since 2017, when an inspection found the stage could not carry the load.