Where We Live: Shaw’s boom took a while but it’s a big one

This is a big moment for Shaw. The center of the neighborhood, just north of downtown in Northwest Washington, is for now a two-block-square earthen pit dotted with tall cranes, but eventually the site will include a hotel, apartments and a revamped grocery store.

Across the street, a housing complex that had been shuttered for several years was just demolished and is slated to become a mixed-use building with almost 300 luxury apartments. And another big apartment complex with ground-floor retail and office space is rising along Seventh Street NW, the neighborhood’s traditional spine, just south of the legendary Howard Theatre, which was recently renovated.

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(The Washington Post)

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What you can buy in Shaw: Here’s a sampling of properties for sale in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest Washington.

Those are just the biggies. With a number of smaller retail and residential projects underway and a slew of new restaurants, the neighborhood is in the midst of a serious boom.

For many longtime residents, it’s not a moment too soon. “I always felt eventually things would change,” said Stanley Randolph, 50, a mental health therapist who lives in the brick rowhouse he grew up in on Sixth Street NW. “We were wondering when it’d happen. I think it’s fantastic — anything that’s being built to make the community more comfortable for people who live here.”

In a city that has developed largely from west to east, Shaw has been a bit of an outlier. Even as neighborhoods in almost every direction — Logan Circle, Chinatown, the U Street corridor and NoMa — have seen major commercial and residential growth in the past five years, Shaw has been slower to change, at least in obvious ways.

Sure, house hunters discovered the community’s impressive housing stock years ago — its clusters of brick Victorians and two-story federal-style rowhouses — and a home priced at $700,000 or more hasn’t been unusual for several years. But unlike in many other areas, commercial development didn’t quickly follow residential growth in Shaw. For years, the neighborhood included few sit-down restaurants or the basic retail options that thrive in healthy communities.

In part, that’s the result of Shaw’s history. The neighborhood began as a streetcar suburb. Lacking restrictions on African Americans owning property, the area was extremely diverse, with federal workers living side by side with clerks, maids and immigrants. But when the Supreme Court struck down restrictive covenants in 1948, many wealthier African Americans left, and the neighborhood deteriorated. In 1968, the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. swept through Shaw, destroying property and leaving a number of abandoned buildings and empty lots.

Those holes in the area’s commercial fabric were still there 35 years later, making it tough for small businesses to move in. “We had so many buildings in multiple or individual ownership that were boarded up for so long,” said Alex Padro, a member of the area’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission and president of Shaw Main Streets, an economic development organization. “It wasn’t as easy for potential retailers to come in.”