Shiloh Baptist Church Agrees to Sell Two of Its Vacant Properties
These vacant properties on the 1500 block of 9th Street NW, owned by Shiloh Baptist Church, would be renovated with funds from the sale of two other properties at 8th and Q Streets under a plan approved by church membership last week. Photo by noahdevereaux
The church membership voted last Wednesday to move forward with plans to sell its properties at 1600 8th Street NW and 1543 8th Street NW, with the hope that the sales will generate enough capital to begin long-discussed plans to renovate a string of units in the 1500 block of 9th Street NW. Plans for the Shiloh-owned 9th Street properties include a senior citizen center and/or housing, and a youth learning center.
"It was a church decision," said Barry Lumsden, an insurance agent with offices on 9th Street and active member of the church who was at Wednesday's meeting. "The members of Shiloh are committed to making a beautiful community." Lumsden also serves on the board of directors of Shiloh's Family Life Center.
Shiloh's properties have laid fallow for decades, stirring tension between neighborhood residents and the church leadership since at least the 1980s. A 1990 Washington Post article, re-posted by the blog Renew Shaw a couple of years ago, provides some insight into how long the church has been promising to convert them back into use. Neighbors (of which this author is one) have long complained that the empty, crumbling buildings were attracting drug users, rodents, and piles of trash that constituted a fire hazard. Shortly after Mayor Adrian Fenty took office in 2007, six of the properties were condemned by the city, forcing the church to perform repair work to make them more secure and bring them up to code.
The church's recent decision is a "great victory for the neighborhood," said ANC 2C01 commissioner Alex Padro.
"These decades-long vacant properties have been a nuisance and a health challenge for the neighborhood for a very long time. They've been filled with termites and rats and are regular targets for graffiti and public urination and defecation," Padro said.
Despite the good news, Padro is concerned that, based on the church's history with these properties, the leadership will attempt to list them far above their actual value, and they could end up sitting on the market for another long stretch of time.
Lumsden agrees that today's real estate market is not the best in which to make a large profit, but hopes to help bring a socially-minded developer to the table.
"It's hard to say," Lumsden said of the current market. "I wish I was as optimistic as the people who are complaining [about the properties] are negative."
The Shiloh-owned buildings are not the only nuisance properties in the immediate vicinity that are seen as contributing to neighborhood blight. The long-shuttered Carter G. Woodson historic home, which is right next to the Shiloh properties on 9th Street, is actually owned by the National Park Service. Another large building at the corner of 9th and Rhode Island, long empty but once plagued by its use by prostitutes, has been sitting on the market for months now.
In the meantime, Shaw residents will have to do a bit more of what they've become accustomed to doing when it comes to these vacant properties: waiting.
"If they do actually move forward, we can start seeing some progress," Padro said.
Repeated calls from DCist to a Shiloh spokesperson were not returned.