The Pursuit: A Home Search Leads to Carver Langston

• February 20th 2015

by Lark Turner

The Pursuit is a series on UrbanTurf where we take a brief look at the home purchase stories of our readers.

An UrbanTurf reader recently wrote in with a question: Why hadn’t we covered the neighborhood of Carver Langston?

The neighborhood is actually two, Carver and Langston, which sit just east of Trinidad. It’s close to H Street, Kingman Park and Hill East, and just south of the National Arboretum (map). Carver Langston is full of the same turn-of-the-century brick rowhouses that line the streets all over DC. It was named after the inventor George Washington Carver and John Mercer Langston, the first black American to serve in Congress.

Our reader, Amy Driscoll, is a longtime DC resident who lived on Capitol Hill for 13 years before looking around to buy. She started with a budget of about $375,000 and began her search in Mt. Rainier and Woodridge. She was prepared to do some work on the house, but preferred something already renovated.

“I was looking for a three-bedroom, two-bath home at the beginning,” the 39-year-old said. “I didn’t want a condo. I didn’t want to pay condo fees, I didn’t want people telling me what I had to do to my property, and I didn’t want to go into the suburbs.”

But competition for fixed-up homes in her two main search neighborhoods was fierce. Driscoll’s first bid, on a home in Mt. Rainier, failed. Homes were “taken in a flash,” she said.

And as she looked, Driscoll realized what she was looking for may have been closer to the city center.

“I still have a very social life in DC,” she said. “And I would go in these homes and they would need a lot of work. I got nervous I was going to take on all of this on my own.”

Her hesitations about Mount Rainier and Woodridge — and an increased buying budget — led her to a two-bedroom, 2.5-bath house not far from H Street’s famous starburst intersection. The remodeled home has a front porch, a parking pad out back and the type of character, including transom windows and moulding, that sets some homes apart from others. Her offer of around $425,000 was accepted, and she closed last September. It’s smaller than she was hoping for, but also much closer-in to the city than she thought she could afford.

“I was really surprised because Trinidad was out of my price range,” she said. “Even Kingman Park was out of my price range.”

Driscoll loves the neighborhood, though she said she’d love it less if she didn’t have a car. When driving, it’s convenient to shopping at Home Depot, Union Market and downtown DC. And since she works in Old Town Alexandria, Driscoll said driving is part of her routine.

Carver, she said, is much more convenient for her commute to Virginia than Mt. Rainier or Woodridge, and there’s “a national park and golf course just around the corner.” Then there’s the neighbors.

“Everybody is down to earth and family-oriented,” she said. “It’s full of people who have been there forever.”

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/a_long_home_search_leads_to_carver-langston/9552.