D.C. Man Selling a Crumbling Brick Wall to Spite His Neighbor

$50,000 for a property in Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood is an unheard-of steal, given that Redfin reports the average home price in the area at $1.6 million. Allan Berger is selling his "piece of Georgetown" for that low price. But it isn't a house; it's a brick wall standing just a few feet tall next to a parking lot. 

According to The Washington Post, Berger's father was able to buy the brick wall for just $2.14 decades ago. "'Ah, great, I could say I own property in Georgetown,'" he explained of his dad's thought process. Whatever the wall had once been attached to was long gone.

It didn't become a problem until recent years. Daniela Walls, Berger's (fittingly named) "neighbor," purchased her home attached to the structure in 2019. She maintains ownership of the interior 12 inches of the wall and Berger owns the exterior 12 inches. In 2020, water started leaking into her house, and she discovered the beams in Berger's part of the wall were wet. As a result, the wall a structural danger to her house. An engineers' report in 2022 confirmed the problem. 

The D.C. Department of Buildings fined Berger twice due to improper upkeep of his property, including chipping paint and rotting materials, for a total of $1,661. He denied the claims and is set to appear before a judge on the matter in September. 

Later, when Walls offered to buy the wall from Berger for a tax-assessed value of $600, he decided to put his property on the market. “That’s when I came up with $50,000, without any research, without any great thought,” Berger said. “For better or for worse.” Robert Morris, a real estate agent whom Berger contacted to help him sell it, wasn't impressed by what he saw. “It’s, like, crumbling," he said.

Last week, the DOB sent Berger an order to submit a structural engineering report on his property within 30 days. Berger saw the fines as a personal attack from Walls, saying she "blindsided" him with them, but Walls called the accusations "childish" and simply fears for her and her baby's life if the wall continues to deteriorate. His legal hearing in September.

"I can’t let the house fall down. I can’t let a dangerous wall go unabated,” the single mother said. “Everybody is working to resolve this, not because they have a vendetta against Allan. It’s because they want to solve a problem."

The ordeal is a good lesson in double checking if someone owns a piece of property adjacent to yours before buying.