ABCDE REAL ESTATE saturday, august 21, 2010


WHERE WE LIVE History is alive


in this small town Santa’s spirit lives in the How- ard County town of Savage. F1


Green Scene Extreme heat stresses plants and their caretakers as wilting weather challenges growth. E3


Digest If you missed it, catch up with stories about housing-related topics that ran this week in the Metro section. F2


6washingtonpost.com/realestate Searchable listings of home sales and tax assessments, plus a mortgage rate calculator, community profiles and updated real estate news INHABIT E AX DC MG PG VN VS R


MORTGAGE RATES Trend continues


4.42% m30-year


interest rates again dipped to a historic low. F2


A family home, a family legacy


Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson lives in one of his famed houses


by Nancy McKeon Special to The Washington Post


It was just the kind of building site that


Frank Lloyd Wright loved to tackle: The steep piece of land in a heavily treed cor- ner of Bethesda was generally thought to be unbuildable. The driveway, a nearly straight drop from the wooded road above, was daunting. In addition, the only flat area was small, certainly not enough for a big house.


Wright visited the site in the 1950s and


spoke with the lot’s owners. The husband was a lawyer with the Justice Depart- ment; he and his wife had come to Wash- ington during the second Roosevelt ad- ministration. Some time later, Wright sent them a color rendering of a possible house. The message on the drawing: “Dear Llewellyn &Betty et al. How’s this? Dad.” The house Wright suggested for his son


Robert Llewellyn Wright and his wife, Elizabeth, was oval with pointy ends, plopped atop a curved pedestal, some- what like a layer cake sitting on a footed stand — or the mushroom-like columns in Wright’s 1939 building for Johnson Wax in Racine, Wis. The prow-like end of


wright continued on E4 PHOTOS BY KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST on washingtonpost.com


An unusual family home


A Frank Lloyd Wright design with a lived-in


look? See more photos of this Bethesda home at washingtonpost.com/wright.


Tom Wright and Etsuko Saito live in a house designed by his grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright, in Bethesda. The architect created it for Tom’s father, Robert Llewellyn Wright.


THE HOUSE LAWYER


Consider buying a home rather than paying dorm rent


by Harvey S. Jacobs With the cost of an undergraduate


education at some private institutions exceeding $200,000, parents should be looking for any way possible to take the sting out of sending a child to college. In addition to tuition, one significant component of total college cost is the room portion of room and board. This is especially true for colleges and uni- versities with notorious housing short- ages.


At George Washington University in the District, for example, housing costs for the academic year run $840 a month for one-quarter to one-half of a dorm room. If that money were to be


applied to the purchase of a large one- bedroom or small two-bedroom apart- ment within walking distance (liberally defined) of campus, a parent might be able to locate equivalent shelter while getting tax and financial benefits. By buying a place and taking out a mort- gage, non-deductible dorm rents can be converted into tax-deductible mort- gage interest payments. Parents also benefit from tax deduc- tions for real property taxes, deprecia- tion and the costs of repairs and re- placements, as well as travel expenses to locate, acquire and periodically in- spect the investment property. The par- ents’ tax burden might also be lessened


jacobs continued on E2 Proposed ban on private transfer fees could have hidden costs


THE NATION’S HOUSING Kenneth R. Harney


by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But its proposed ban might extend to transfer fees routinely collected by community associations across the country — po- tentially forcing some of them to raise assessments on thousands of unsus- pecting homeowners. The Federal Housing Finance Agency


A


(FHFA), which oversees the two mort- gage giants in conservatorship, issued proposed “guidance” Aug. 12 that would


federal agency is moving to pro- hibit controversial “private trans- fer fees” on all mortgages funded


prohibit Fannie and Freddie plus the federal home loan banks from investing in mortgages carrying private transfer- fee covenants. Private transfer fees are starkly differ- ent from transfer fees imposed by local governments to raise revenue for public services when properties change hands. In a private transfer-fee arrangement, a developer or property owner records a long-term covenant requiring payments to trustees or other private parties every time the property is resold. The best- known and most controversial version of this plan is being promoted by Free- hold Capital Partners of New York. The Freehold program, which the company says has attracted the participation of “thousands” of development projects worth “hundreds of billions of dollars” across the country, imposes a 1 percent fee that must be paid by the home seller out of the settlement proceeds every time the house is resold during the next 99 years. The money flows from the


closing to a trustee, who distributes shares of it to private investors and oth- ers, including the developer in some cases. Freehold’s activities have raised wide- spread opposition — 18 state legisla- tures have either restricted or banned the use of private transfer fees in vary- ing forms. The proposal from the FHFA seeks to cut off federally related funding or guarantees for the underlying con- ventional mortgages that support pri- vate transfer-fee programs such as Free- hold’s.


Although under conservatorship,


Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac still ac- count for a large share of new conven- tional mortgages. Along with the Feder- al Housing Administration, which had earlier indicated opposition to private transfer-fee plans, the three entities are responsible for upwards of 95 percent of mortgage market volume, according to


harneycontinued on E2


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76