Income Housing Went Wrong
(The New Communities Initiative) is a tremendous opportunity for our city, one of the most important things we have done in the last 10 years. Mayor Anthony Williams, July 2005
When Williams uttered these words, New Communities seemed a bold leap, setting a new standard for urban renewal, in which long term, low income residents would benefit most from the changes. The pledge was to build new affordable housing with wrap around services adjacent to decaying complexes, so that tenants got new homes in their own community while a larger mixed income redevelopment took place.
The program bpatagonia guide jacket option3egan with a pair of murders, the most obvious being the January 2004 execution of 14 year old Jahkema Princess Hansen in the Sursum Corda complex near First and M streets NW, cut down for having witnessed an earpatagonia sale better sweaterlier killing. community in the first wave of inner city renewal in the 1950s.
That history fed community skepticism of New Communities in Northwest One the North Capitol Street area adjacent to Sursum Corda, where the whole program began as residents questioned whether demolition and displacement would trump the building of new units in the community. But neighborhood advocates like me helped overcome the suspicion, patagonia guide jacket option0arguing that this time would be different, and we would fight to make it so.
Now the New Communities Initiative is in serious trouble, with the biggest news in its 10th year being a city commissioned report detailing its fundamental failings. The recommendations for reviving the program in the report by Quadel Consulting and Training only magnify the danger. Underneath the measured, wonkish tones is an unmistakable message: New Communities can only be saved by breaking its original promises those, that is, that haven t already been broken.
One measure of this betrayal: The New Communities program in Northwest One has resulted in a net loss of more than 100 deeply subsidized read: truly affordable units thus far.
This is not how it was supposed to be and I speak as someone in the room when this all came together, in community meetings at St. Aloysius Catholic Church following the highly publicized murders, failed HUD inspections, and consequent feared loss of hundreds of unitpatagonia down parka reviews of affordable housing.
Over the years, I have been heartbroken as, one by one, those hopes were dashed, those pledges compromised, even discarded. Council.
They called it urban renewal, but it wapatagonia online discounts really black people s removal. Alverta Munlyn, president, Northwest One Council, 2006
For African American residents, rede velopment schemes inevitably evoke the painful and formative experience of Southwest in the 1950s. The sight of hapatagonia women's el cap fleece jacket - specialrdscrabble alley dwellings within sight of the gleaming Capitol dome deemed too raw for tender sensibilities, planners decided to level much of the community destroying it in order to save it. But save it for whom? A new Southwest rose, but in the process, more than 23,000 people mostly low income blacks were displaced, never to return, as detailed in the film Southwest Remembered.
The inevitable community opposition that met any subsequent renewal pushed urban planners to try to do better. In the mid 1990s, the Hope VI programpatagonia outlet better sweater jacket transformed the feared Washington Highlands public housing complex Valley Green into Wheeler Creek. The new development was impressive, resembling a suburban subdivision, with mixed incomes residing side by side but at the cost of a major net loss of affordable housing.
This set the stage for the struggle a few years later over the redevelopment of Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg Manor on the Southeast side of Capitol Hill. Tenants campaigned successfully to ensure one for one replacement of affordable units, along with a right to return to the renewed community.
This hard fought victory left the most disruptive aspect of redevelopment still in place, however: Residents were displaced from their homes for years before being able to return after construction. The reality of Capper/Carrollsburg was not so much different than in Southwest decades before: As of November 2012, only 114 of the 707 families displaced had returned.
New Communities promised to move urban redevelopment to a new, more resident friendly level, taking the lessopatagonia m's better sweater 1ns learned and applying them to area around the impoverished, embattled Sursum Corda complex.
There was considerable irony in the fact that this ambitious affordable housing endeavor came together inpatagonia guide jacket option1 the administratipatagonia guide jacket option2on of Anthomagic of patagoniany Williams. Over the course of his first term, the wonky, bow tied mayor had become widely mistrusted among lower income black residents as too friendly to developers seeking young, white, wealthy faces to populate their luxury condominiums.
But the Williams administration patagonia outlet store camarilloled by new city administrator Robert Bobb won over the feisty and often skeptical Northwest One residents, making them essentially co creators of what became New Communities.
Over the course of 2004 and 2005, the program was hammered out in meetings between city officials and the broad based neighborhood organization the Northwest One Council. On top of the principles of One for One Replacement, Right to Return, and Mixed Income one third deeply subsidized, one third workforce/middle income, and one third market rate New Communities added two critical new elements.
The first, and most essential, was Build First, which committed the city to building new affordable units in the neighborhood before demolishing old ones. This would ensure that residents would remain in the community, no more than a few blocks away, while the redevelopment was underway. The final piece was implementing wrap around programs of social uplift, fostering human capital as well as improving physical capital.
All in all, it was ambitious, even visionary, with the entire program to be financed out of the Housing Production Trust Fund, multiplied in bond market transactions. Councilmembers Jim Graham and Vince Gray scrambled to replicate it at Park Morton, Lincoln Heights/Richardson Dwellings, and Barry Farm.
The Williams administration impressed observers by taking on the Bush Companies, owners of the decaying, troubled Temple Courts, the largest single chunk of the 520 units targeted in Northwest One. Bush was seeking to opt out of Section 8 and thus New Communities itself to go market rate for a big payday.
This threatened to derail New Communities before it even got started. The city moved forcefully and effectively, wielding eminent domain to wrest control of the building from Bush, making sure Temple Courts residents weren t displaced.
It wasn t all smooth. Since the Trust Fund could only pay for housing production, the wrap around services had no obvious funding source. Due to a process underway before New Communities arrived, 40 tenants were displaced early on from Golden Rule Center, owned by nearby Bible Way Temple. And personality conflicts between Alverta Munlyn, the dynamo who headed the Northwest One Council, and Sursum Corda Cooperative president Beverly Estes led to a painful split, which ended with Sursum Corda making its own separate redevelopment deal.
The standoff was enervating and divisive. Still, the project looked to be in decent shape as the 2006 election loomed, with Adrian Fenty a staunch supporter of New Communities and affordable housing on the Council replacing Williams as mayor.
When they tear down this building, we re not coming back It s a lie. Diane Hunter, president, Temple Courts resident association, June 2007
Over the course of 2007 and 2008, however, New Communities absorbed two hammer blows in quick succession. The most obvious was the near meltdown of the American economy, which definitively undid the arguably dubious math underlying the finances of the project.
The source of the second was even morpatagonia guide jacket no tiee shockpatagonia guide jacket optioning, unexpected and devastating, however: the Fenty administration itself.
The economic challenges were real, but the new Fenty team proved to be arrogant and unilateral, making a difficult situation far worse. They talked a good game about community input and collaboration but acted in another fashion entirely. If the Northwest One Council was to remain a partner, it was now a decidedly junior one, expected to acquiesce in whatever the administration wanted. The looming financial gap was used to bludgeon the Council into playing along.
The rapidly escalating tension came to a head after Fenty decided on the basis of a poorly attended community meeting that Temple Courts tenants were to be moved elsewhere, with the complex to be torn down before new housing was built.
If any single moment heralded the death of the original vision of New Communities, this was it. Only about 70 people attended the meeting not even a third of the Temple Courts residents, even if every attendee represented a separate household. Thebuilding had just held a vigorous and closely monitored resident association election that re affirmed Diane Hunter an outspoken opponent of displacing the tenants as president. Nonetheless, Fenty would forever claim to have followed the will of the people in making this rash decision to demolish Temple Courts and scatter its residents.
