Dr. Frankenstein begat his Monster.... my* monster child is H Street Main Street

I mentioned in a neighborhood email last week that H Street Main Street and the H Street Community Development Corporation are opposed to the Capitol Hill BID expanding to the H Street corridor. No one seemed to pick up on it.

I mentioned it again yesterday, and later in the day, Joe Fengler, Chair of ANC6A, sent out a long email with copies of email in the chain, covering the "invitation" from the BID and an email notice that H Street Main Street's board voted against this--this from a group that managed a nascent H Street BID last fall, but weren't paying the contractors--even though they were faithfully invoicing the funders!

Someone sent me a question about this, and below is my response.

Question: I don't understand the Cap HIll BID expansion proposal. What is it and why is H Street Main Street against it. Are you for it?

Yes I am for it.

The tension is between an H Street exclusive BID or a bigger one. An advantage of an H St. exclusive one is that it could fund an organization like H St. Main St. (if such an organization is worth funding).

Although this might difficult to acheive. The amount that goes to a BID is 15 cents/$100 of assessed value depending on the assessed value that is likely to develop. So the revenue is $1,500/$1 million of assessed value, or $150,000/$100 million of assessed value--less the administrative and collection fee that is assessed by the city.

It's been some time since I've compiled such figures for H St. I just don't know if enough money can be raised -- nonprofits don't participate, neither does housing.* I would think an independent BID would need revenues upwards of $450,000-$600,000.

[*In addition to BIDs, Baltimore has "Community Benefits Districts" which include and assess residential properties within the geography, in addition to businesses. They do this because the targeted improvement area is mostly residential. But a strong core of anti-tax activists continually fights against the CBD in Charles Village. It makes everything a battle. IMO, the CVCBD is having tremendous positive impact. The other one is in Midtown. Both are linked on my blog. DC hasn't authorized this type of improvement district.]

When we were looking at the numbers in 2001-2002, H Street had about $70 million in assessed value, and to get to that level, we had to include Hechinger Mall, which added a fair amount of operational costs to the proposal.

Furthermore, nonprofits don't have to participate, and we weren't sure if the office buildings on the south side of the 600 block of H Street (owned by the HSCDC at the time) would have agreed to be included--these buildings made up 1/3 of the total assessment, Hechinger mall about 1/6.

Even if the assessed value has doubled (unlikely) the total gross revenue generated would be $210,000.

I don't know why the H Street CDC is also fighting this, other than not wanting others to participate in what it sees as its exclusive bailiwick. Given how much money it just made off selling the office buildings on the south side of the 600 block of H Street, it could pay for the launch of a BID for a couple years without breaking a sweat...

The original idea of some of the leading founders of the original H Street Main Street was always that H St. would become part of the BID at some point. When we went for the Main Street designation, there were three different programs we could try to participate in and we only had enough organizational capacity to go for one.

One was the BID. I talked with George Didden about it in 2001 and he was open to it. (Although he might have just been "being nice," because it was hard for them to create the BID and he wouldn't have done anything to reduce the likelihood of their ultimate success.) We got kind of uppity about it, because the BID boundaries include Station Place, and we thought add'l assessment revenues from that building should support H Street--the Station Place complex alone would likely generate at least $150,000 in assessment revenues.

Another was participating in the Main Street program. And the third was facade improvement. The latter program ended up going to the H St. CDC, although I would argue the impact was marginal (I'll send anyone who wants it my 14 page testimony about the way DC uses Community Development Block Grant monies, which was based in part on an analysis of the outcomes of this program).

We chose Main Street.

In retrospect, I wish we would have worked on being included in the BID first, because as I have written many times, street cleanliness and safety is the number one issue in terms of reaching out to new customer segments. (#2 is the quality of the store offer, selection, and service, #3 is the condition and maintenance of the extant building stock.)

I can't imagine that "being against a BID for H Street" would be to the advantage of organizations that were chartered to spearhead commercial district improvement for the H Street corridor.
*-----
- founding board member of H Street Main Street
- co-author of the Main Street application and presentation to the selection committee
- author of the strategy developed to capture the community amenities monies from the Dreyfus Station Place project for facade improvements on H Street

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