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Spring Valley prospers on
Real estate market unaffected by arsenic cleanup
(Published November 3, 2003)

By MELISSA FERRARA
Staff Writer

The Spring Valley-AU Park area’s real estate market appears to be barely ruffled after four years of testing and removing arsenic and other hazardous materials from the area, left over from World War I munitions tests.

A neighborhood advisory board, formed to deal with community concerns arising from the arsenic cleanup, decided Oct. 14 that it no longer needs to include "protecting property investments" among its primary objectives. The consensus was that successfully working through the completion of the neighborhood cleanup and restoration will indirectly protect property values.

"Considering property values have gone up and continue to go up, it is a point [the Restoration Advisory Board] doesn’t have control over," said Greg Beumel, a community representative on the 14-member board. The board, known as RAB, includes neighborhood residents and representatives from the D.C. Department of Health, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, American University, Horace Mann School, the Miller Co. and the Environmental Protection Agency.

Real estate agents who sell in the area and city officials agree that real estate sales, home values and property taxes in the Spring Valley/AU Park area have not been drastically affected by the discovery and lengthy cleanup of hazardous materials by the Army Corps.

"For the most part, AU Park sales have been really healthy," said Prudential real estate agent Marjorie Dick Stuart said. "There are a lot of people concerned about it [the arsenic], but prices keep going up."

Homes have consistently sold at or above asking price in the area, according to Prudential sales records since October 2002. Sales within the last year, according to Stuart, include a home with an asking price of $499,000 selling for $655,000, an asking price of $599,000 bringing $650,000 at sale, and another home selling at the asking price of $525,000.

"In the four years since this process started, the value of my home has increased by 100 percent," said one RAB member when addressing a potential buyer’s concerns about moving to the Spring Valley neighborhood, expressed during a mid-October meeting.

Another longtime Spring Valley resident advised the buyer to not move to Spring Valley. She said that while she loves Spring Valley, she would not move here in the midst of the arsenic cleanup.

Despite the consistent rise in property values, property taxes in Spring Valley have risen only about 15 percent per year while tax assessments have increased so dramatically in other parts of the District that the city council passed a bill last year capping real estate tax increases at 25 percent per year.

Spring Valley residents experienced a 45 percent change in assessments from January 1999 to January 2002, about a 15 percent change each year, and a 14 percent increase from January 2002 to January 2003, according to statistics from the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue.

AU Park experienced a 43 percent increase in residential property assessments between January 2000 and January 2003, about 14 percent per year.

Spring Valley residents filed 193 tax appeals during the same period, according to the Office of Tax and Revenue. AU Park residents filed 323 appeals.

Response from RAB members to a potential Spring Valley homebuyer’s concerns at the advisory board’s Oct. 14 public meeting showed a marked hesitation by some in the neighborhood to openly discuss the situation.

RAB Chairman Dorothy Zolandz refused to allow the RAB members and others at the meeting to extensively comment on the potential buyer’s concerns. Zolandz said that was not the issue at hand and instructed the man to ask the Department of Health or Army Corps representatives about his concerns after the meeting, even though the man stated he had come to the meeting looking for answers from the community because neither of those agencies had been helpful in his previous attempts to speak with them.

"The RAB should ensure that no more than necessary, the minimum information, about private properties is put into the public domain," said RAB community member Andres Liebenthal.

RAB members also said they intend to protect the community’s right to know, even though that could directly conflict with residents’ rights of privacy.

"There is a fine line between the two," said RAB Chairman Zolandz.

In addition to this conflict for the RAB, home inspectors’ testing guidelines have not been altered since the arsenic findings. Home inspections are another part of the real estate purchasing process. This means that unlike mold, asbestos and lead, arsenic does not have any specific compliance guidelines yet, said home inspector David Kempton. Because there are no regulatory standards for arsenic, it is up to the buyer to further investigate the problem and pay for any additional tests.

The Army Corps provides a letter to potential Spring Valley property buyers on the arsenic findings, providing a timeline of events and testing data showing a successful cleanup, thus far, in the area.

"Inspectors inform buyers of the high arsenic levels and then refer them to an environmental specialist," Kempton said.

RTS is an environmental specialist Kempton typically refers buyers to. Consultants for environmental testing can also be found through the American Industrial Hygiene Association web site, www.aiha.org. The web site provides a list of toxicology consultants according to a specific environmental issue and geographic location. Consultants’ phone numbers and addresses are also provided. The Cooperative Extension Office at the University of the District of Columbia also provides soil testing.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry performed arsenic exposure investigations in February 2001 on the workers and children at the American University Child Development Center and in March 2002 on residents in Spring Valley. Using hair and/or urine samples, the results showed no significant arsenic exposure to the population.

"Follow-up testing would have been a very beneficial thing to do, but there was not one child or adult with an elevated level [of arsenic]," said Lynette Stokes from the D.C. Department of Health’s Bureau of Hazardous Material and Toxic Substances.

The Department of Health’s surveillance of the Spring Valley/AU Park residents’ health may be changed to more hands-on methods from the passive phone surveillance used in the last four years. The Department of Health is scheduled to decide a plan of action early this month.

Lewisite was found during the cleanup at American University and is located along the southern boundary of American University’s main campus, referred to as Lot 18.

"Lewisite and mustard degrade rapidly in the environment. Arsenic is the breakdown of lewisite," said Gary T. Schilling, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers civilian project manager for Spring Valley.

The full extent of the lewisite is unknown, and the Lot 18 area has been temporarily closed. Restoration is scheduled to resume about a year from now, in the winter of 2004. Other future work includes restoring 120 residences, a groundwater investigation, completing sampling of remaining properties within the area, and investigating other potentially affected properties around the Spring Valley/AU Park area.

"I don’t think we’ll ever be 100 percent sure [that the site is clean]. What we are doing is the best we can with the technology we have. As more information becomes available, we look at it," said Schilling.

The Department of Defense and the Army are responsible if anything else happens and remain committed to repairing the area, added Schilling.