701 K Street NE: Tenant-Owned Cooperative Renovation(in progress)

In 2022, the tenants of 701 K Street NE — eighteen households, many of whom have lived in the building for more than a decade, organized to purchase their own building under DC's Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), becoming a limited-equity cooperative with $4.4 million in acquisition financing from LISC. Their achievement preserves permanently affordable housing in a rapidly changing neighborhood between the H Street corridor, Union Market, and Gallaudet University.

Hunt Laudi Studio has been engaged as the architects for the building's renovation and modernization, the next chapter of the tenants' ownership story. Our work will upgrade [scope: building systems, envelope, common spaces, the ground-floor commercial space] while respecting the affordability that makes the cooperative possible. We believe design of this kind is civic work: the residents saved their building; our job is to make it worthy of them.