The two-bedroom Blackstone Flats condos are outfitted with hardwood floors and Italian marble tiling, done up with custom paint, granite countertops and walk-in closets — and start at $179,000. It’s just that they’re situated east of the Anacostia River, the perpetually neglected Southeast area that Blackstone Flats developer DBT, with a host of others, is seeing as the city’s newest condo gold mine.
“For the most part, it’s professionals — young, black females, college-educated — who are purchasing these properties,” said Lisa Williams, principal broker for Senate Realty, which has found a niche in the Southeast real estate market. “A lot of teachers, a lot of nurses, a lot of individuals working for the government.”
In other words, the type of middle-class workers who have been priced out of the traditional D.C. real estate market over the past five years.
Senate has more than half of the 30 condos under contract at Keystone on Penn, a Nicol Development project at 3956 Pennsylvania Ave. SE that is similar to Blackstone Flats.
Developers have been slow to see D.C. neighborhoods like Anacostia and Deanwood as viable places for condos and retail, underestimating the buying power of the areas’ residents, said Steve Moore, chief executive of the Washington, DC Economic Partnership. But as they begin to see the potential of this untapped market, where land is still relatively cheap, a vision of a dramatically different Southeast is beginning to emerge.
Developers have planned or proposed building more than 2,800 new condos or houses and 1.2 million square feet of office space in Anacostia alone by 2011, according to Economic Partnership numbers — 20 times as much development as the area has seen over the past six years. Deanwood-based Blackstone Flats has 30 of its 36 condos under contract, according to Chase Moore, a principal with Square Root Sales, which is doing the marketing for the development.
“You have some garbage out here and you’re just now getting developers in who are realizing you have to build here like you do in Logan, like you do in Columbia Heights,” Moore said.
Along with police officers and teachers from outside the area, a good portion of the Blackstone Flats buyers are originally from Southeast but chose to rent on Capitol Hill or in Northwest when they finished college, according to Moore.
