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WJLA picked up the story that Renew Shaw first reported last week: DCRA now confirms that a handful of controversial, long-vacant properties owned by the trustees of Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw were improperly reclassified as no longer vacant, thus allowing the church to avoid paying additional nuisance property taxes. WJLA cites an official who estimates that the city lost out on $100,000 in revenue due to the error.
So how did this happen? You may recall that Shiloh's vacant properties were condemned in 2007. The church was ordered to perform heavy maintenance work, including installing permanent roofs, fixing brickwork and masonry, installing gutters and down spouts, and cleaning the interiors. After some delay, that work was finally completed. But sometime since then, the church apparently applied for permits for more renovations, at which point the city removed the properties from the vacant list because they believed the church was finally planning to do something with them. As anyone who lives in the neighborhood (and I do) can tell you, there has been absolutely no change in the status of Shiloh's vacants.
DCRA is now saying the properties have all been reclassified back to vacant since this story first broke. That's hard to verify today via the city's Real Property Assessment Database, which is only updated about once a week, and was last updated on March 21. The agency told WJLA it has not decided whether to go after the church for the back taxes -- that will likely depend on whether DCRA determines it was their own fault for reclassifying the buildings prematurely.
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right or wrong, this will be listed as DCRA's fault. shiloh is way too powerful and connected to get the bill for this one.
guess this takes my guarantee that these buildings will be knocked down before the end of the year down to 75% likely, as opposed to 95%. i still think it's the most likely result. shiloh wants a parking lot, and shiloh gets what it wants.
Clearly, I'm the idiot walking in to the argument years after it began.. but could a parking lot be the best solution here? Clearly, you or I have several ideas for better uses of this property. But, sadly, we don't own it.
Would a parking lot encourage even more out of town parishoners to drive in (leaving the street parking situation a wash) or just get current out of towners off the streets (a win, of sorts, for current residents)?
I doubt these will be knocked down. Proximity to the Carter G Woodson site combined with public outrage makes that very unlikely. Probably the goal is to limit vacant tax exposure until the council bill lowering the vacant rate passes/fails. This bill, by the way, is ridiculous. DC is just coming off of a huge real estate boom (which notably increased property values in Shaw) and any party who wanted to profitably sell/develop/rehab has had ample opportunity.
Shiloh Baptist is one of the biggest harm-generating institution in Shaw and hindrance to progress. Whether it is battling the fighting the licensing of new businesses (Queen of Sheeba, BeBar), making streets dangerous by seeking special double-parking privileges for it's (largely Maryland) parishoners, or, here, keeping abandoned buildings, there is not another institution around that holds Shaw back more.
What would it take for the city to eminent domain those properties? I mean, it's not like it's that difficult right? The city's just gotta peddle some halfassed "economic revitalization" mandate like they did with the ballpark, dynamite the whole block, and start putting up $5 cupcake shops, doner kebab stands, and brothels. I mean, what is the city really afraid of here? A bunch of geriatrics from Largo who can't park their Olds 88 without killing half a dozen people? What does the church have on Fenty and the Council? We all know about the Ward 8 councilman's fondness for fresh pink babies, but what about everyone else in this fiasco? Is Fenty's dome wax made from baby tears? Does Jim Graham's VW run on biodiesel rendered from crushed puppy fat? Or maybe it's something more sinister. I always suspected that the real reason the Council doesn't want to cross the churches is because the Council killed a hooker and they swore eachother to secrecy. Except somebody confessed to Shiloh and now they've got the Council's balls in a bear trap. But Phil Mendelson will crack any day now, because they made him chop up the body, and the beating of that cursed heart beneath the floor boards will force a confession.
This would be a superb spot for the city's promised relocation of the bathhouses and glory holes that were eminent domained for the new ballpark.
I would totally patronize a gay-friendly, church-owned, $5 gourmet donut shop called "The Glory Hole." It's got "fabulous" dripping from every oriface.
Washington, DC Government - The Gang who couldn't Shoot Straight.
HIGH-larious! This dovetails quite nicely with the Council removing the nuisance property tax because nuisance property owners complained about it!
Here's a hint, out-of-town churchies, absentee landlords, and d-bag nuisance property squatters: the tax is there for a reason. $h!t or get off the pot. Boo freaking hoo, you're stuck with $h!t property in a recession. You shoulda thought about that $h!t during the boom years when suckers were paying half-a-mil for a bombed out crater with Nazi corpses in the bottom. I really have a hard time summoning any sympathy for any party involved in this fiasco. I've got more sympathy for the dead Nazis at the bottom of the crater. I mean, those guys are deliberate a$$holes who stood for something. The churchies and the slumlords seem content to blame everyone else for their problems, then try and game the system. And when they get caught, you know they're going to blame it on the newcomers. I can't wait for the chorus of racebaiting and "those newcomers got me like Jesus." Christ, I need a goddamned drink.
Pour us all one.
You're half right.
A bunch of rich bastards sit on undeveloped property for years, contributing to urban blight.
But thanks to a totally different set of uber rich bastards that brought us truly unregulated capitalism, many of us that do have property in DC can't get construction or development loans, even offering to have sex with anyone that would actually give us a loan. Or, alternatively, to promise not to have sex with them.
Thanks to the mortgage meltdown banks have totally changed how they calculate rental income, development potential, etc.
In short, if you don't have a huge pile of cash, you ain't renovating or developing anything. Not for the foreseeable future.
Couple that with the fact that trying to get anything developed in DC is VERY difficult. What should take a couple months to get approval for can sometimes take years (especially if there are tenants rights or historic preservation issues).
So we are going to have to reach some sort of compromise here. Otherwise a whole bunch of property owners will end up losing their property to the city, which will of course do nothing with them for decades.
And no one can buy these properties now, as they can't get a loan.
So, yes, you can blame the upcoming fairly huge inventory of blighted buildings in DC (particularly in 'up and coming areas') on the douchebags that gave us credit default swaps.
Namely Phil Gramm.
I bet you ever other "nuisance property" owner who paid their taxes is gonna be pissed. Why should they have to pay up when Shiloh gets to walk? Or double park as the case may be. Those churchies are really giving nuisance property owners a bad name. Maybe the Council needs to spend a little more time on oversight and less time cutting up the corpses of dead prostitutes and burning Nazi corpses. Because the silence from Phil "Chopper" Mendelson's Department of Evidence Disposal and De-nazification regarding this matter is deafening.
I wonder how many other properties have "accidentally" been reclassified as non-vacant? How very convenient... Has anyone actually paid higher taxes under the nuisance property tax?
It depends on what you mean by "pay." If you mean "transferred to Harriet Walter's Cayman Island offshore holding company," then, yeah, plenty of people "paid."
This is f**king hopeless. If DC can't be bothered to collect $60 million in ambulance fees, what makes you think they'll get around to collect a measly $100,000? That won't even pay for the rent on Harriet Walters' fur coat storage. I swear, DC's tax office has its head so far up its a$$, it's farting Q-tips.
You must remember that not all of DC's employees are as good at what they do as Harriet Walters.
100k could buy a nice wine cellar addition to one of Vivek Kundra's people!
Despite being adjacent to our backyard, our parking space is a separate property...and about five years ago, it was "accidentally" reclassified as vacant, and we were hit with the higher rate. It took about a year just to get them to switch it back to the proper classification. Then again, we're not a church.
Ed - how much were they charging you when the parking space was considered vacant? I think the tax bill for my parking space is high ... perhaps that is the problem?
The owner of 1819 10th St., NW recently got his tax rate reduced. No idea how; the house has been vacant for at least 20 years now.
Any given sunday, the people that run Shiloh park their BMWs/Hummers/Porsches in front of fire hydrants. F*&k that church.
Yeah, how about the DC government buy Shiloh a nice empty parcel of land out in PG in return for all their DC holdings and call it all even?
It's up to The Gays to drive Shiloh out. We need way more public display of gay affection. If you could really gay up the neighborhood Shiloh would eventually leave.
Hell, they're already doing public-sex-for-crack exchanges in the back ally. What more do you need? You want them doing it on the floor of the Starbucks? Because that's one of the few things that would make me patronize a Starbucks.
"avoided" really? I guess that guy on Maryland Avenue "avoided" letting his wife and her sons live another day.
This persistent problem of "slumlord" behavoir is of coure only attributable to (www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ae4957e8-1a5f-11de-9f91-0000779fd2ac.html) blue eyed devils.
And you know this... mayne!!!