The building was completely gutted by the guy who renovated it then. When we bought it in 1996 there was nothing original in the house other than the window trim. There were no mantles, or any other original decorative details. Even the staircase was new. Though the knewell posts and railings were of the period they weren’t original to the house. So the only historic thing about the house is the facade which will not change.

In DC the number of condos a developer can convert a rowhouse into is based on the square footage of the lot. The zoning calculation is 900 sq ft for the area, the lot 5325 sq ft. Cap City by lot size right could do 5 condos. The lot was a mere 75 sq ft shy of being able to do 6 condos which wasn’t a big stretch for the zoning administrator.

We can argue all day whether a 615 sq ft condo is too small. But having just left a house of over 5000 square feet a condo that small is very appealing. The buildable area is over 7000 sq ft with the garage and space above it, so the house is in fact really big.

Not sure why you’re obsessing over the affordable housing angle, since that was a single sentence in the letter and wasn’t the basis of the minor deviation variance. Have you been involved in zoning cases before? Or is snark just your standard default?

Maybe it would help for you to take a quick look through the applicable zoning regulations: http://www.dcregs.org/Notice/DownLoad.aspx?VersionID=518385

I think the (not very well made) point was that having some smaller units would mean that there would be multiple price levels in the building — i.e., that it wouldn’t be composed solely of (say) $500K units, but would also have some $400K and $300K units.

In contrast, if they’d split the building up into 4 units, probably all of them would be $500K.

(Note that I’m just guessing on the prices there, and that presumably the basement unit and maybe the first-floor one would be less expensive than the others.)