Photo via office of zoning files
The following was written by PoPville contributor David McAuley, founder of Short Articles about Long Meetings.
A four-unit apartment building at the N Street entrance to Blagden Alley has been operating for about 14 years on the basis of “forged” documents. That’s the story a committee of Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 2F/Logan Circle heard at its regular monthly meeting last night (November 29).
Nneka Shelton, the representative of the owners of 924 N Street NW, told ANC2F’s Community Development Committee that the owners have been operating the building since 2003 without a valid DC Certificate of Occupancy. At various times in the meeting, Shelton characterized the owner’s current Certificate of Occupancy as “faulty” or “forged”.
The certificate of occupancy in the publicly-available electronic files of the DC Office of Zoning for this case is from July 1985 and allows a dry cleaners to operate on the premises. Shelton said at the meeting that this is the latest Certificate of Occupancy for the building.
A Certificate of Occupancy is the DC government’s confirmation that a property is being used in accordance with zoning regulations. In this case, the property is now zoned RF-1, which is “for areas predominantly developed with attached row houses on small lots within which no more than 2 dwelling units are permitted”. Before a 2016 conversion of zoning designations, the building was categorized as “R-4”, but the limitations were the same – no more than two residential units per property.
Now the owners want to get legal. (more…)
