Current Projects
The L’Enfant Trust’s Historic Properties Redevelopment Program is D.C.’s first nonprofit real estate developer with a primary mission of historic preservation. By focusing on very distressed properties, the Trust brings vacant buildings back to productive use, generates high-quality housing stock for the community, and takes on historic rehabilitation that would not be economically feasible for a homeowner or a for-profit developer because the rehabilitation costs exceed fair market value.
Our current rehabilitation projects will be sold to moderate-income families such as teachers, health care workers, and government employees that serve the community but are often priced out of the District’s expensive housing market. Our work supports the efforts of neighborhood residents, community organizations, and the District to provide a wide variety of much-needed housing and to ensure that the irreplaceable fabric of historic neighborhoods in all eight wards of our nation’s capital are not lost.
1220 Maple View Place, SE
1220 Maple View Place, SE, affectionately known as "Big Green," was built in 1902 as a two-family dwelling by developer H.A. Griswold. Griswold was President of the Anacostia and Potomac River Railway and had a significant impact on the development of Historic Anacostia, then known as Uniontown. He was also a friend and colleague of Frederick Douglass.
The Queen-Anne style house has sat vacant for over 30 years and leans significantly to the east due to the partial collapse of the east foundation wall. Prior to the city’s ownership, a previous owner gutted the interior of the house down to the studs which further contributed to the home's structural instability. In 2014, the city shored up the interior of the house, partially rebuilt the west foundation wall, but failed to make any repairs or reinforcements to the east foundation wall.
The Trust’s rehabilitation of the property will create two family-size affordable units of three bedrooms each. As part of the rehabilitation, the Trust will restore the original, character-defining wraparound front porch. While the front porch was removed prior to the Trust’s ownership, the Trust remarkably discovered the original porch columns in safekeeping inside of Big Green and plans to reuse and restore the columns. The Trust’s project team in place for the rehabilitation of Big Green includes Cunningham & Quill Architects, Silman Engineering, Huska and Horgan Engineering, LLC, Grintel Engineering, and AllenBuilt, Inc. Costs for construction are estimated to be more than $2.6 million.
Scroll below to see more photographs of the property.
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