Terrence Blackwell and his fiancée, Cheryl Ward, want to move back to the District from Hyattsville to be closer to their jobs and their families.
Their ideal home to start out married life would be a single-family detached house they could grow into with a yard. They want to spend less than $225,000.
They know that that's not easy in many parts of the District. They've narrowed their search to what they say is the perfect area for them: Brookland, a lively close-in Northeast neighborhood in the shadow of Catholic University, near where they grew up.
"We're both native D.C. people," said Blackwell, who tends bar at Colonel Brooks' Tavern near the Brookland Metro station. Ward is a mammography technician at nearby Providence Hospital. "Brookland is the perfect neighborhood for us now. It's mid-point between my job, her job and her mother's house. And we might be able to find something there that we can afford . . . one of those old Victorians with a wraparound porch would be nice."
For first-time buyers such as Blackwell and Ward, a neighborhood such as Brookland still provides an opportunity to buy a detached house with a large yard and even a porch -- with easy access to downtown, a Metro stop and a lively commercial strip of retail -- for a more moderate price than in many other parts of the District. While the housing stock is solid, though, there are still issues such as crime.
The real estate boom of the past two years hasn't hit Northeast as aggressively as it has Northwest -- prices haven't gone up as much in the eastern part of the District as they have west of Rock Creek Park, real estate agents say.
Brookland, loosely bordered by South Dakota, Michigan and Rhode Island avenues on three sides and Catholic University on the other, is an eclectic pocket of varied single-family houses surrounded by more architecturally homogeneous neighborhoods.
Real estate prices there and in the rest of Northeast have long been lower than in affluent Northwest, providing homes for working-class and middle-class, mostly black, families. In the 1990s, Northeast and Southeast lost tens of thousands of residents, in part because black middle-class families, tired of poor schools and poor services, fled to the suburbs.
The Northeast quadrant, the second smallest quadrant after tiny Southwest, provides a variety of housing options. In Brookland, Victorians, colonials and Craftsman-style houses, both newer and older, sit on tree-lined suburban-style streets. Most of the houses there were built in the first part of the 1900s, but as in many single-family neighborhoods, more were added over the decades.
In contrast to the visual variety of Brookland, other parts of Northeast have neighborhoods of look-alike houses -- the rows of little brick duplexes in Lamond-Riggs or the all-brick colonials of Michigan Park. Parts of Capitol Hill, with its long stretches of historic row houses, are also in Northeast. The quadrant, which includes almost all of Ward 5, plus parts of wards 4, 6 and 7, extends beyond the Anacostia River into lower-income neighborhoods such as Kenilworth and Deanwood.
