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The Harper is a high-end apartment building on 14th Street in the heart of one of DC’s hottest neighborhoods. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)
The Harper was almost full — just a couple one-bedrooms still open — but Max Friedman and Eden Turkheimer had options. “There’s a ton out there,” said Friedman, a 23-year-old commercial real estate broker with aviator sunglasses tucked into the collar of his blue-checked button-down. They had just emerged from the marbled lobby of a brand-new apartment building along Washington D.C.’s 14th Street corridor, after having toured one across the street with a rooftop pool and picnic area. Right now in D.C., childless 20-somethings with good jobs like Freidman and Turkheimer have a glut of buildings available to them. But the choices for those a step or two down the economic ladder have severely diminished. How could it be that so much money is going into putting up apartments, and it’s still so hard to find a place to live for so many in the city? Developers, who are offering move-in specials and throwing glitzy open house parties, see the reasons. Economic forces in the city make it all too easy to supply housing for high-income urbanites, not the cheap kind that once was plentiful in D.C. What’s more, even the ways in which the city harnesses the taxes from those luxury buildings — by subsidizing developers who build units affordable to low-income people — hasn’t filled the gap. The dynamic is affecting what the rich and poor pay in rent. The city’s stock of “class A” apartments, which have luxury amenities, expanded from about 8,500 units at the end of 2010 to nearly 14,500 by end of June, an increase of 71 percent, according to Delta Associates. More than 11,000 more are in the pipeline. Rents for this kind of housing are rising, but barely. In Northwest D.C. — one of the most expensive areas in the entire region — the average rent fell by 1 percent, and now sits at $2,648, Delta says. Meanwhile, the vacancy rate for “Class B” apartments, which are older and generally have fewer perks, remained extremely low from 2010 through 2014; it’s now at 3 percent, while the class A vacancy rate has risen to 4.5 percent. The average rent for the city’s older and generally less expensive housing is increasing about 2 percent a year, reaching $1,917 by the end of June. In other words, there are plenty of new homes in the city, but fewer options for those who are strapped, a trend that also is playing out in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities. It’s why, in the short term, prices don’t always respond seamlessly to increases in supply: Capital may flow to one part of the market, while entirely neglecting another.
Hannah Becker, 23, enjoys the community lounge on the roof of the Harper, a high-end apartment building on 14th Street in the heart of one of DC’s hottest neighborhoods, on Aug. 6, 2014. She moved in the building last month. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)
So when Turkheimer and Friedman went house hunting on a recent Friday afternoon, they had choices aplenty. Turkheimer, a tanned, blond 24-year-old teacher, had been living in Arlington, Va.; Friedman had grown tired of sharing a house with roommates in Adams Morgan in D.C. The couple decided to move in together, and with their combined income, they figured they could afford about $2,500 per month for a one bedroom in the center of urban life: Grocery store on the ground floor, metro stop nearby, a new bar or restaurant opening nearly every week. “We’re trying to knock a few out all at once,” Friedman said. “It helps to show up to a building having already been to a few others.” — Back in late May, a bunch of architects, developers, and real estate financiers huddled in the basement of a downtown Washington, D.C. Hyatt to figure out how to target one type of person: The coveted Millennial. Over coffee and limp pastries, panelists held forth on the trendiest apartment designs and must-have amenities, from pet washing stations to floor plans without walls. They needed, after all, to figure out how to rent all those rooms they’d already finished and had planned for the city’s trendiest corridors. After a short dry period during the recession, builders raced back into the market with an almost manic intensity — mostly geared toward young, upwardly-mobile urbanites with healthy incomes and no children to suck it all away. The demand, they’d been told, was insatiable: Cities are back in vogue, and D.C. was as hot as it got. That target audience is now under more financial pressure than it used to be, which may be convincing them to rent rather than buy a home. “We know these young people are making less money, and they have lots of student debt,” said Cindy Clare, president of Kettler Management, after a presentation showing years of negative rent growth in the future. Despite their financial hurdles, these young people are still willing to pay a big chunk of their income for proximity to friends and fun. To keep prices under control, builders are now cramming their buildings full of “,” for people who spend most of their time working or out, coming home only to sleep. And even the “modest” rents contemplated by these new developments are healthy by any standard: $1,500 for a studio, typically, with communal kitchens and gathering places. They’re achievable because often, the demographic they’re going for isn’t interested in spending that money on a mortgage instead. “I just believe in not having debt,” says Friedman.
Barista Pablo Manani prepares a beverage at The Wydown, which opened on 14th Street in mid-June. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)
To really understand why developers only build for the higher end of the market, consider the situation of Toby Bozzuto. His family-owned company has built and maintains
in the D.C. area, but he can’t get anything out of the ground without convincing someone to underwrite it. Though the District has large, developable areas outside the bustling core, the city’s professional newcomers don’t stray far from the familiar. Neither do the banks that make construction loans: Having never heard about the District’s farther-flung neighborhoods and their potential, they tend not to look far beyond statistics like incomes in the immediate area and distance from the White House. If other buildings in those areas have performed well, they’ll go in on a project that has exactly the same specs. “Any new development needs investors, and we cannot get that if the reward doesn’t justify the risk,” says Bozzuto. “Affordable housing, by its very nature, when it’s built, the return is de minimis. What you’re seeing is, capital flows to where it works. So what’s left is public subsidy.” The D.C. government has . Building with public subsidies, though, is no cakewalk — and they certainly haven’t kept up with the burgeoning demand. First of all, they’re not always available when they’re needed most. In D.C., the main source of money the city uses to fund affordable housing projects is supplied by taking a slice of the fees charged on property when it’s sold. During the real estate crash of 2008 and 2009, almost nothing was changing hands, so the fund wasat a time when low-cost units were disappearing at an alarming rate: , the city lost half of its apartments priced at less than $750 between 2000 and 2010, while the number of those costing more than $1,500 tripled. Second of all, even when subsidies are available, not many builders have the patience and expertise to work with them. The city’s housing fund has money now, refilled by a gangbusters housing market. But the process for getting it out the door takes time, since everything has to be competitively bid, and other funding streams like federal low-income tax credits are complicated to manage. (It doesn’t help, of course, when the process is mismanaged, as it sometimes .) Meanwhile, the very fact that a project is subsidized makes it a target for opposition from communities that don’t want more low-income people next door — and also gives them more points of leverage to hold it up in the public approval process. That’s especially true in places where it’s cheapest to build, where existing residents often
rather than subsidized units, thinking that wealthier people will attract more restaurants and retail. Community resistance can hold up housing projects for years, and sometimes torpedo them altogether. But wait: Must “affordable housing” be synonymous with “subsidized housing”? In a time when the federal government’s funding for traditional public housing has largely dried up, the private sector is going to have to deliver more of it. Isn’t there a way to expand the supply of relatively inexpensive units by building cheaper, and thereby gaining access to a whole new market? Not as much as you’d think, in a place like D.C. Sure, you can streamline permitting processes, and allow developers to build more densely than zoning allows in exchange for keeping a certain percentage of units below market rate (Montgomery County has done this su the District’s program is ). And there are also
for creating housing targets through immutable comprehensive plans that weaken the power of communities to resist development. In D.C., you could even ditch the large historic districts that make it extremely difficult to build anything substantial in many desirable neighborhoods. Those approaches, however, are a huge political lift. Affordable housing advocates haven’t gotten behind them, preferring instead to push the shorter-term fix of more subsidies. With the number of jobs on the low and the high ends of the wage spectrum increasing, and those in the middle decreasing, they argue that the public needs to fill in the immediate gap. As a result, more radical reforms that could allow the market to organically supply more units at a lower rate over time — like removing the city’s height limit, which the city
— are essentially off the table. Short of a comprehensive rethinking of how the city approaches development, Tim Chapman, who’s done several subsidized projects in Southeast D.C., thinks there’s not much the city could do to speed things up — most steps in the process are there for a reason. “What regulation do you want to cut?” he asks, rhetorically. “Getting frustrated about it is like getting mad at a dog when it barks.” Some of the city’s newest residents, though, have no reason to be frustrated. For their last stop of the day, Friedman and Turkheimer swung by the CityMarket at O Street, a shining new complex with a grocery store, hotel and the sleek, modern front desk with a suited concierge now typical of the city’s new developments. They sit with one of the building’s leasing agents, before ascending a glass staircase to tour a unit with distressed wood floors and white granite countertops. It’s got everything — not to mention a month’s free rent — but Friedman still quibbles with the slightly less buzzy location. “There’s just not as much to do over there,” he says later. “It’s the bones of an amenity base, but the surrounding area is still very much residential.” It’s no problem, though, really. They have options.
There is still a lot of construction and development along 14th Street. (Andre Chung/For The Washington Post)
Lydia DePillis is a reporter focusing on labor, business, and housing. She previously worked at The New Republic and the Washington City Paper. She's from Seattle.
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Next StoryOlugbenga Ajilore &Why learning Arabic is so hard.
Why learning Arabic is so hard.
When I walked into Arabic class last week, Karam, my teacher, cheerily asked me how I was doing. I said, "Tamaam, hamdulillah," which means, "Fine, thanks be to God." But I was lying. I'd just spent a full day at work and was sitting down at a desk for two hours of mind-bending grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. I knew it would be a long night.
I am not one of those people who dreads the thought of learning a foreign language. While everyone else was partying in high school, I was learning the Spanish past subjunctive and loving it. I studied German, French, and Portuguese in college. I speak decent Russian and have taught myself some half-decent rudimentary Japanese. Languages are usually fun. But Arabic is really killing me.
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I'm one of a growing wave of people trying to come to grips with Arabic, a language long neglected by Americans in the years before Sept. 11. Since then, the CIA and the military have tried to recruit Arab-American "heritage speakers." The federal government has spent tons of money, both teaching Arabic to spies and soldiers at its specialized schools and encouraging university students to study it. College enrollment in Arabic classes doubled between 1998 and 2002, with much of the increase coming in a patriotic spike after the World Trade Center attacks. As a foreign-affairs writer, I thought it would be good to give it a shot.
But these patriotic students are probably finding, as I am, that learning Arabic is complicated. The first challenge, the script, is a tough one. But it is by no means the biggest. Arabic has an alphabet, so it's easier than, say, Chinese, which has a set of thousands of characters. There are just 28 letters, and it does not take long to get used to writing and reading right-to-left. (Though it still feels odd to open my book from what seems like the back.) Most of the letters have four different forms, depending on whether they stand alone or come at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Even then, so far so good. But in Arabic, as in Hebrew, people don't include most vowels when writing. Maktab, or "office," is just written mktb. Vowels are included as little marks above and below in beginning textbooks, but you soon have to get used to doing without them. Whn y knw th lngg wll ths s nt tht hrd. But when you're struggling with comprehension to begin with, it's pretty formidable.
Then there are the sounds those letters represent. I do not recommend chewing gum in Arabic class, because a host of noises articulated in the back of the throat makes it likely that the gum will end up in your lungs. Arabic has one "h" akin to ours, and another that has been described as the sound you would make trying to blow out a candle with air from your throat. That's not to be confused with another sound, the fricative kh familiar to German-speakers as the sound in "Bach." There's also 'ayn, a "voiced pharyngeal fricative," which is like the first sound in the hip-hop "a'ight." Unwritten in Roman-alphabet transliterations, it's actually a consonant that begins many common words and names, including "Arab," "Iraq," and "Arafat."
The sounds are tough, but the words are tougher. An English-speaking student learning a European language will run across many familiar-looking words, but English-speaking Arabic students are not so lucky. Merav, an Israeli classmate, should have a leg up on us: Arabic and Hebrew both use a nifty, three-letter root system for word building. The three-letter root represents a general area of meaning, and different prefixes, vowel additions, and suffixes can make it into a person engaged in that activity, the place where it goes on, the general concept, and so on. Most famous is slm, which generally means "peace." Salaam is the noun for "peace," Islam is "surrender," and a Muslim is "one who surrenders." (In Hebrew, this can be seen in shalom.) Ktb functions similarly for writing: Kitaab is "book," kaatib is "writer," maktaba is "library."
Merav is fine with this, though the rest of us are struggling. But the ferociously unfamiliar grammar sets us all adrift. Arabic is a VSO language, which means the verb usually comes before the subject and object. It has a dual number, so nouns and verbs must be learned in singular, dual, and plural. A present-tense verb has 13 forms. There are three noun cases and two genders. Some European languages have just as many forms to keep track of, but in Arabic the idiosyncrasies can be mind-boggling. When Karam explains that numbers are marked for gender—but most numbers take the opposite gender from the word they are modifying—we students stare at each other in slack-jawed solidarity. When we learn that adjectives modifying nonhuman plurals always have a feminine singular form—meaning that "the cars are new" comes out as "the cars, she are new"—I can hear heads banging on the desks around me. I want to do the same.
Karam sees the wear and tear on us, and so sometimes we pause and have a cultural chat. Arabic is peppered with a lot of God—even secular Arabs will append insha'allah, "God willing," to almost any statement of intent, as in, "I'll file my story by 3, God willing." Sometimes Karam tries to teach us how to work various niceties like this into daily speech. "Thank you" is usually just shukran. "But," Karam tells us, "that is sort of boring, so if someone gives you food it's nicer to say, 'May your hands be blessed,' or …" This is way too much information for my skill level, so I squeeze my eyes shut and hope that Karam's flourishes don't enter my brain and dislodge something vital, like, "Where is the bathroom?"
The State Department reckons that it takes 80 to 88 weeks (roughly a year in the classroom full-time and a year in-country) to get to a level 3 on a 5-point scale in Modern Standard Arabic, the language I am learning. But there's a twist. MSA has about the same role in the Arab world that Latin had in medieval Europe: It's the language of writing, religion, and formal speeches, but it is no one's native spoken language any more. Arabic has long since become a series of "dialects," which are actually more like separate languages, as many varieties are mutually incomprehensible. Arabic spoken in Morocco is as different from Arabic spoken in Egypt and from Modern Standard as French is from Spanish and Latin. When Arabs from different regions talk to each other, they improvise a mix of Egyptian Arabic (which is understood widely because of Egypt's movie industry), Modern Standard, and a bit of their own dialects.
So, if I go to Egypt or Lebanon in a year, having managed to get some near grip on my classroom language, I will be walking down the street asking people for a bite to eat in something that will sound almost as conversationally inappropriate to them as Shakespearean English would to us. Most literate Arabs know the Modern Standard from schooling, newspapers, television, sermons, and the like, though, so hopefully they will not laugh too hard as they help me out and respond in something I can almost understand. And that is if I work my tail off for the next year. Insha'allah.
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