Field Experiences

For those living and working in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, daily life, economic development, urban planning, and real estate are both local and national news. As the nation’s capital and a federal district (not a state), D.C.’s evolving local development issues are being carefully followed by national leaders.

In 2025, NAR hosted a tour with up-to-date information and expert speakers on timely Smart Growth issues in D.C. With the new federal administration, the situation will be quickly evolving and will receive ongoing national attention. Given the quickly moving situation, agenda details will be finalized closer to the tour.

The tour was in collaboration with the DC REALTOR® Association.

Throughout D.C’.s history, alleyways have been a critical feature of neighborhood life. In the early twentieth century, D.C.’s hidden alleyways housed the majority of the city’s Black and immigrant populations, creating unique patterns of segregation. The grand residential blocks housed two distinct communities: White households lived in the street-facing homes and Black households occupied the same lots in interior alley houses, hidden from the street. While city officials condemned life in the alleyways as dangerous, dirty, and diseased, they were in fact a place where communities sustained each other and provided security.

This walking tour, easily accessible from the Washington Convention Center, took participants through the Blagden Alley/Naylor Court Historic District and revealed their secrets.

Once a dividing line between downtown’s federal offices and the historically Black Shaw neighborhood, the Mount Vernon Square Historic District has long been a hub of culture and change. This walking tour, easily accessible from the Washington Convention Center, gave participants an exclusive look inside the beautifully restored Carnegie Library, once one of the few integrated public spaces in a then-segregated city and now home to the DC History Center.

Along the way, attendees explored the sites and stories of faith communities, urban renewal, racial justice, and 19th-century architecture repurposed for the modern era.