CHAPTER 6

Washington, D.C.: In Chocolate City, a Fight to Hold On

Twenty-five years after the first new apartment building reached completion in the wholesale reconstruction of the Southwest sector of Washington, D.C., Joseph Curtis stepped to the microphone to convey his reflections. A longtime resident of Southwest before the city’s ambitious urban renewal program displaced him, he had recently returned to live in the area again. “I tell you,” he recounted, “I might as well have landed on the moon: the whole area had changed so dramatically.” Curtis could not have been entirely surprised. He had stepped forward years earlier, during congressional hearings in 1946 on the proposed redevelopment plan. Representing the all-Black Southwest Civic Association, he had warned about the potential consequences of redevelopment. Sounding very much like critics in New Haven and Pittsburgh in describing the plan as “a shameful un-American displacement program,” Curtis charged that planners had failed to take into account requests of local residents for more public housing, moderate rents, and assurances that they would have priority in buying and renting new properties. A quarter of a century later, in 1988, Curtis remained bitter about the effects of urban renewal, which had been warmly embraced not only by Washington’s civic leaders and the press but upheld by the Supreme Court. Writing in the landmark Berman v. Parker decision in 1954 for a unanimous court, liberal justice William Douglas had proclaimed, “It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.”¹

If Southwest Washington was perceived as a success story by the white establishment, its revitalization did not stem the capital city’s social or economic problems in the second half of the twentieth century. Constrained by often hostile federal supervision and struggling with high levels of poverty as more affluent residents fled to the suburbs, especially after the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, Washington was widely criticized for its soaring crime rate and fiscal instability. Despite achieving a measure of home rule in 1971 and the election of civil rights activist Marion Barry as mayor several years later, Washington struggled to serve the needs of its population, which had reached a Black majority in the mid-1950s. A headline from the Chicago Tribune from 1996 was representative: “Capital City, Capital Crisis: With its crumbling infrastructure, up to $3 billion in debt and a soaring crime rate, here is the Washington, D.C. tourists rarely see.”² Following the Republican congressional sweep of 1994, the resilient Barry, who returned to the position of mayor even after serving time in jail as a result of his arrest while using crack cocaine, found himself in the unenviable position of operating under the oversight of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Congress followed by imposing a federal control board to manage the city’s finances. Even District of Columbia schools fell under federal control. The city appeared to have hit rock bottom.

And yet, only a few years later, as a new century dawned, Washington’s prospects brightened. As the population, which had dropped precipitously since the 1960s, began to grow again and demand for housing increased, so did revenue, enough so that Congress removed federal control in 2001 when the city achieved its fourth consecutive balanced budget. Within a few years, Washington was booming to the point that Richard Florida considered it the top candidate for Amazon’s second North American headquarters. “I’ve predicted that the D.C. area would be the winner,” he told a Northern Virginia news outlet. “The reason is that the metro area has one of the highest concentrations of knowledge workers, educated workers, creative workers on the planet. I don’t know if it’s going to go to Northern Virginia, Maryland or D.C. but I clearly think it’s going to head in your direction.” Proven correct when Amazon designated Arlington, Virginia, as its destination, Florida’s glowing assessment of the District of Columbia remained, even if it escaped the immediate impact of the decision.³ Throughout the riot corridors, where reinvestment had lagged for a generation, money was flush, pricey restaurants and boutiques were opening, and new construction was offering apartment living at rents never imagined in earlier years. Home prices rose precipitously in previously stable, Black middle-class areas; waiting lists for public housing rose as complexes shifted to mixed-income communities; and even parts of Southwest were designated for regeneration.⁴ Like Joseph Curtis before them, long-term Black residents were finding it hard to reconcile their past experiences with what they saw around them. Asked about the changes around 14th and U Streets, where rioting had concentrated in 1968, Marion Barry remarked, “It doesn’t look like a ghetto anymore.” Gloria Robinson, who grew up in nearby Columbia Heights, where a new shopping center and condominium building stood on a street once devastated by riots, told the same reporter, “I feel like I’m in another city.” Such change, she made clear, was not welcome, as she further stated, “I get the feeling I no longer belong.”⁵

Throughout the home rule era in the latter half of the twentieth century, rumors circulated that whites intended to take back control of Washington, now that it had elevated African Americans to positions of leadership.⁶ Although he was working for a Buffalo paper at the time, cartoonist Tom Toles captured perfectly the specter of “The Plan,” as it was often referred to, in his 1998 sketch under that title (fig. 19). As the city boomed in the early twenty-first century, Toles’s scenario appeared to have materialized as the departure of whites for the suburbs reversed and their return to neighborhoods that had been abandoned threatened the displacement of Blacks living there. In 2011 the city’s Black population slipped below 50 percent. More African Americans lived in the city than whites or Latinos, but clearly the luster of the “Chocolate City” local African Americans had embraced for a generation and more had dimmed.⁷ While a number of Black leaders accepted the change philosophically, it was impossible to miss signs of rising anxiety about the future direction of the city. “It’s a question of who has the power to determine what this community is going to look like,” Reverend Cheryl J. Sanders suggested. “I want to have a voice in that. I don’t want to be told to ‘sit down and shut up’ while we cast the vision for the city.”⁸ Sanders’s concerns, reflecting those of Joseph Curtis and so many others before, represented the other side of booster accounts of Washington’s comeback. And, it appears, they proved true both to the District’s history and to its future trajectory.

The Black population of Washington, D.C., a city that had long been a magnet for African Americans, included significant numbers of middle-class as well as poorer residents. Drawn to the city in the years before and after the Civil War, Black residents of means congregated initially near Howard University, while those recently freed from slavery and arriving with little to their name congregated in back alleys turned into modest locations for residence as builders sought profits by taking advantage of the city’s deep lots. Drawing the attention of social reformers in the early twentieth century, alley dwellings were slated for demolition, but housing shortages during two world wars prevented wide-scale clearance.⁹ Not incidentally, the public housing authority created in the early years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency took the name of the Alley Dwelling Authority under the leadership of John Ihlder, a reform-minded housing specialist who laid out his goals in the Progressive-era publication Neglected Neighbors. Ihlder argued unsuccessfully that redevelopment should fall under the control of the Alley Dwelling Authority. Instead, in a precedent that was as important to the history of urban renewal as Berman v. Parker would become, Congress authorized in the District of Columbia Redevelopment Act of 1945 funds for subsidizing private investors, as long as redevelopment followed an authorized city plan.¹⁰ Aware of how racial covenants had constricted Black residency options, even among the well-to-do, Ihlder shared Joseph Curtis’s concern about displacement. Their fears were confirmed as the redevelopment of the Southwest neared completion. A social survey conducted in 1966 reported that if many Southwest residents lived in better physical conditions after relocation, they nonetheless experienced high levels of alienation and regret over the loss of their old neighborhood. A documentary film, Southwest Remembered, narrated by popular television broadcaster Renee Chenault, circulated in the 1990s to bring that sense of anger over displacement to a wide audience.¹¹ Throughout his long tenure as a District political leader, Marion Barry appeared to offer an alternative by empowering those neglected by both the federal government and the local white establishment.

Figure 19. Published for a Buffalo, New York, paper in 1998, Tom Toles’s “The Plan” captured well the feeling among Black residents in Washington that someday their position of dominance by numbers and culture would be challenged by whites returning from the suburbs to which they had fled in the aftermath of urban decline in the 1960s. TOLES © 1998. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.

Barry was the District of Columbia’s second mayor under the twentieth-century version of home rule, constituting an elected mayor and city council but no representation in Congress, which continued to hold considerable control over Washington’s budget. The city’s first mayor under home rule, Walter Washington, earned his credentials as a federal bureaucrat. Assuming office first in 1967 as an appointed mayor in the prelude to elected self-government, he served one term under the new system as a steady administrator but uninspiring politician. Lacking credentials in the more visible civil rights actions of the 1960s, Washington drew opposition from several Black rivals in 1974, not the least from Barry. A former head of the Southern Non-Violent Student Coordinating Committee, Barry had moved to Washington in 1965, where he continued to press for civil rights and formed a highly visible youth action organization, Pride, Incorporated. A member of the first elected city council, Barry parlayed his considerable organizational skills and charisma to draw enough support from white middle-class and poorer Black voters to win the Democratic primary and eventual election as mayor. In line with the diverse coalition that elected him, he directed his efforts both to the predominantly white business community and to those living in the poorer sections of the city.

Such balancing acts seldom work, and over time Barry tended to govern with white interests in mind—especially those of the city’s major business of real estate—but to campaign Black by stressing his commitment to improving social welfare. Challenged by other African Americans in primaries, Barry managed by employing the rhetoric of Black power and his personal attention to constituents to maintain his office. He continued to direct the city’s fate, embracing his emotional connection to Washington, not as the national capital city but as “Chocolate City,” the name associated—especially in the aftermath of George Clinton’s song released by the band Parliament in 1975—with the capital of Black America, a place that had risen from the ashes of 1968 along with black people’s hopes for self-determination.¹² It was not until 1990, when a government sting using a sometime girlfriend, Rasheeda Moore, as bait that federal agents caught Barry smoking crack cocaine and arrested him.

Barry failed in his effort to maintain power as a candidate at-large for city council while his case awaited trial, but after serving six months in prison, he successfully gained election as the city council’s representative for Ward 8, where his social welfare policies remained popular. In 1994 he improbably gained reelection as mayor, now with the backing of very few whites but with broad support among Blacks drawn by his campaign theme of redemption.¹³ City finances had suffered badly during a recession, and Barry was pressed, as he had been in the last years of his previous term, to cut the number of city employees. He defended his policies, boasting that the city homeless problem would have been much worse had he not made so many appointments to government agencies. When confronted with soaring District costs by the Republican-held Congress in the mid-1990s, he pushed back, arguing that Washington suffered from a structural deficit due to Congress’s inadequate federal payment and an accompanying prohibition against levying a commuter tax on District workers, a majority of whom lived in Maryland or Virginia.¹⁴ Seeking to thwart a move to put the city in receivership, Washington’s nonvoting delegate to Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, stepped in to work out a compromise “grand bargain.” Under the National Capital Revitalization and Self-Government Improvement Act of 1997, Congress absorbed costs normally borne by states, including those associated with the criminal justice system, tax collection, and Medicare, along with an unfunded $5 billion pension obligation passed to the District at the time of home rule’s outset. With these obligations met, the annual federal payment to the District, which had reached the level of more than $600 million that year and dated back to the end of Reconstruction, ceased.¹⁵

Washington’s fiscal struggles so visibly associated with the controversial Barry continued to provoke wide-scale criticism, most notably on the local level from the moderate African American Juan Williams writing in the Washington Post and on the national level from the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel. Barry, Siegel charged, was the unfortunate product of “a mix of Great Society liberalism and the movements for home rule and Black separatism—all of which were leveraged by the threat of renewed rioting.” Barry and his allies, he concluded, “have created in the District a ‘volkish’ democracy, a Dixie-like political culture based on the organized cultivation of racial resentments. If in the segregationist South ‘white made right,’ in the Crow Jimism of the District ‘white must be wrong.’ ”¹⁶ Looking more to Barry’s rhetoric than his actions, Siegel missed the way Barry complied with congressional demands for cuts in service. In only a few years the budget was headed back into balance, and Barry could retire from the position of mayor having helped fashion the course for stability and growth.¹⁷ Still, it became increasingly clear that the control board had set the city in a new direction, Susanna Schaller argues persuasively, that encompassed a regime dedicated to growth and development, even if it came at the expense of the social justice issues Barry had kept alive for a generation.¹⁸ As he stepped back to a relatively minor role as a member of the city council, Barry observed the city’s fortunes soar in the new century. The fate of his most fervid supporters in the poorer sections of the city was not as positive.

Barry’s successor as mayor was his very antithesis.¹⁹ Schooled at Ivy League institutions (Yale undergraduate, Harvard Law, and the Kennedy School for graduate work), the nattily dressed Anthony Williams had made his mark as chief financial officer for the federally imposed financial control board. Representing a new generation of African American mayors bent more on technocratic solutions than social uplift, Williams readily adopted the development side of Barry’s agenda while jettisoning the patronage-driven politics of previous years. With the control board already achieving a reduction of 20,000 city workers from a high of 70,000, Williams’s intent was to attract new capital investment and expand the number of private-sector jobs in the city. In this he had plenty of support in the form of a strategic plan, “The Economic Resurgence of Washington, D.C.: Citizens Plan for Prosperity in the 21st Century,” put together by a coalition of public and private organizations and issued in 1998, while Williams was still working for the control board. Although Williams initially intended to stake out his own plan for the future, he rather quickly adopted the Citizens Plan himself, as it brought with it both support and direction for what he wanted to do. Rejecting any further embrace of Washington as “Chocolate City,” the plan readily envisioned Washington’s future as a global city, one that would restore the luster sought for it over generations as a gleaming and productive world capital. Disputing the worst descriptions of Washington’s economy, the plan’s coauthor, Marc A. Weiss, argued that now that the city’s structural issues had been resolved through the National Capital Revitalization Act and the bureaucracy trimmed, Washington should work to build on its existing strengths in the private sector, including tourism, financial services, education, biomedical research, and information technology. Not just a bundle of what might now might be labeled neoliberal solutions, the document singled out Washington’s neighborhoods for reinvestment, citing the importance of linking residents in those areas to new opportunities as one of the greatest challenges of the near future.²⁰

Trained as an urban historian and having served as president of the primary citizens organization of the new Southwest, the interracial and mixed-income Southwest Neighborhood Assembly, Weiss’s role in setting a new direction blending both private investment and citizen participation was not incidental. A special assistant to the secretary of HUD from 1992 until 1997, where he had served as a liaison to the District of Columbia government and to the city’s nonprofit community development organizations, Weiss left his position at the request of control board officials to develop the strategic plan as senior adviser to the director of the D.C. Department of Housing and Development. Charged initially with getting some $70 million in HUD funds held up by patronage considerations into deserving Washington neighborhoods, Weiss directed a robust engagement process, with readily tangible results in what could be considered record time.²¹ Still, it would not be long before the balance sought between neighborhood needs and the priorities of investors would unravel as both business and government sought not to revitalize depressed areas so much as to remake them.

Expanding on one of the strategic plan’s key recommendations, Anthony Williams as mayor embraced a bold ambition to attract 100,000 new residents to a city that had been shrinking since the 1950s. To do so, he sought out development possibilities in underserved areas of the city, most notably those areas east of the Anacostia River, where Barry’s populist rhetoric had been so well received, without however raising incomes or property values. Williams imagined that his policy initiatives would attract new families to Washington, but an analysis of the 74,000 households that settled there in the new century showed only 3,000 were adults with children. By contrast, 27,000 households consisted of adults older than fifty-five without children and a whopping 45,000 adults younger than thirty-five without children, in short, the very millennials every city had been seeking.²² Whites constituted the largest proportion of the newcomers, while the number of Black residents dropped precipitously.

Such changes did not simply materialize by chance. Inspired both by Richard Florida’s argument for attracting and expanding the pool of residents that could be described as part of the creative class and his address to business leaders in the city in 2006, Washington’s leadership made that goal a top objective through a series of reports. In 2007 the city promoted a “Creative Action Agenda” aimed to advance Washington as “a ‘top-tier’ creative city where creativity and talent combine to enliven neighborhoods, contribute to economic stability, and create an even more distinctive sense of place.” Far from a passing phenomenon, the agenda remained on the Office of Planning’s website more than a decade later, concluding that the expansive study that accompanied the action agenda “was undertaken in the context of growing realization around the role that the creative economy can play in supporting globally competitive cities and in providing employment opportunities for a diverse workforce.”²³ The impact of a “creative agenda” on property values could not be denied. In a little over a decade, by 2015, the District of Columbia had exceeded Williams’s projections for growth, and reinvestment, once evident primarily in locations near the core city, had spread to every corner. But efforts to match market growth with new opportunities for affordable housing sputtered. While the number of apartments renting for $1,500 a month tripled between 2000 and 2012 and the number of homes valued at $500,000 or more doubled, the number of low-rent units fell from 70,000 to 34,000. When the waiting list for government-assisted housing reached 70,000 in 2013, the city stopped accepting applications.²⁴

A measure of change could be found at the site of the O Street Market on 7th Street, for years a commercial hub for the community. A deadly outburst of gunfire between rival gangs in 1994 left fifteen-year-old Duwan A’Vant dead and eight bystanders injured, including two elderly women and a toddler. The widely publicized violence at the site was enough to ensure the market’s rapid decline and eventual abandonment as a sad reminder of the ill effects of crime and disinvestment in the neighborhood. When three locally based investors took a chance on rebuilding at the site in 2001, success was not guaranteed, but as further investment built in the area, the project finally materialized in 2013 as the new City Market at O, a 645-unit apartment complex (90 of which were reserved at costs considered affordable) with a 182-room hotel and 86,000 square feet of retail. Offering one-bedroom apartments at $2,700 a month, the building’s website proclaimed that “life with soul begins with a stylish address” where “you’ll discover others who share your joie de vivre.” In addition to offering a dog walk on the roof, it promised “plenty to do right at your doorstep,” including boutique shopping, a booming food scene that included multiple Michelin-starred restaurants, and “hotspots popping up on the regular.” The mother of the youngster slain at the site, Karen A’Vant, moved to Maryland after the shooting. It was too painful for her to remain, but she returned to Shaw periodically, where, she told Washington Post reporter Marc Fisher, she was struck by so many white people walking their dogs. “It’s good for the area to have change,” she asserted. “But it just don’t feel comfortable. It just makes me sad that when they have a memorial for all the kids who died, quite a few people have to come over from Maryland or Southeast because they don’t live there anymore.”²⁵

Nearby, Donald Trump’s first administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, after ending a sweetheart deal of paying $50 a night for time actually spent in a lobbyist’s condominium, moved to an apartment where he was paying rent between $2,500 and $3,000 a month.²⁶ Contemporary accounts confirmed that such prices in Shaw, a prime case of disinvestment and decline in the years following the 1968 riots, were not unusual. As the historic “Black Broadway,” U Street at Shaw’s core had over a decade shifted from the kind of entertainment aimed specifically at African Americans to trendy bars, pubs, specialty stores, and a host of new apartments—often named in accordance with Black cultural heroes associated with the area but occupied increasingly by affluent whites. Where civil rights activist Walter Fauntroy had once organized neighbors to counter the kind of displacement through redevelopment that had devastated the old Southwest, Black guides were directing white students to the African American War Memorial and nearby museum of the same name adjacent to the Shaw subway stop near Howard University.²⁷

Shaw was hardly alone in its revitalization. Following the directive of the 1998 strategic plan, which sought the revitalization of the area, spurred in large part by the introduction of a new subway stop, the portion of the near Northwest, extending north and west from Union Station, witnessed the construction of multiple high-rise office and residential structures in the rebranded NoMa (North Massachusetts Avenue).²⁸ Nearby, an entire commercial corridor along H Street Northeast shifted away from offering services to African Americans who concentrated there after the 1968 riots prompted white flight to what the District of Columbia website described as “a dynamic one-and-a-half mile stretch in Northeast DC, known for its nightlife, restaurants, pop-ups, festivals and communal atmosphere.” As in Shaw, new mixed-use facilities like the Avec opened and promised “unmatched amenities,” including a dog walk and rooftop pool, in service to its commitment that residents would live in style, ease, and excitement in the rebranded Atlas district. The new structure replaced the H Street Connection strip mall opened in 1984 to local acclaim for bringing back a number of services, including a pharmacy, lost in the aftermath of the 1968 riots. Further signaling the transformation of the area, a 2.2-mile trolley capped the city’s planning and cultural tourism organizations’ drive to ensure the area’s ascendant position as a target for investment and a mecca for consumption, while leaving just enough evidence of the once dominant Black presence at the transportation exchange to convey a confined sense of the district’s overall diversity. As sociologist Brandi Thompson Summers puts it in her book on the area’s conversion, a district associated for decades with Blackness “is transformed to become palatable and consumable while some of the edginess remains.”²⁹ Put another way, in the words of Alesia Montgomery, such market-driven place-making efforts have the effect of bringing about integration without human rights and cultural affirmation without Black power.³⁰

Washington’s boom in apartment construction added 37,267 new units from 2013 to 2015. But apartments that lower-income residents could afford were replaced with smaller, luxury units costing well in excess of $2,000 a month.³¹ Caught in the housing pinch, by 2016 some 26,000 low-income households, 91 percent of which were Black, were paying more than half their income on rent.³² Everywhere home sales prices escalated, bringing with them evidence of gentrification and displacement. In 62 lower-income census tracts, more than 20,000 Black residents had been displaced between 2002 and 2013. By 2015, more than half the District’s census tracts had gentrified. A 2019 report confirmed what residents suspected from experience: Washington led the country in “intensity of gentrification.”³³

Figure 20. Ellen Wilson Homes shortly after the public housing complex opened in 1941 to whites only at the edge of Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. District of Columbia Housing Authority.

Compounding the difficulty of access to affordable housing were changes to public housing policy. Used in part to absorb those displaced by renewal in the 1960s, public housing had deteriorated significantly over time as limited appropriations delayed upkeep and repair and as social problems mounted as such sites became entangled both in gang warfare and the vicissitudes of an underground economy. With alterations to federal policy intended to replace such structures with more stable and desirable shelter by converting them to mixed-income communities, Washington used a number of different means to achieve these goals, working within federal guidelines created under HUD’s HOPE VI program, which was adopted in the mid-1990s. At the edge of Capitol Hill, where President Woodrow Wilson’s wife’s name had been applied to the Ellen Wilson Homes in honor of her crusade against the city’s notorious alley dwellings in the early twentieth century, an alliance of local residents, none of them former residents of the housing complex that had been shuttered for a decade, managed reconstruction in ways that mirrored their more prosperous homes nearby. In 1995 the city’s public housing authority, seeking a means of securing greater leverage over the process, created its own, privately managed entity to direct conversion. Other conversions followed, at different paces and with different obstacles to timely completion, but they all shared the effect of pushing large numbers of their former residents into searches for new residences, a process that made competition for limited vouchers or access to market housing all the more competitive. With completion of the project, only 7 of the former 134 households managed to return to their former area of residence.³⁴ As of the summer of 2018, a new home at the rebranded Ellen Wilson Place, a 1,161-square-foot two-bedroom, was listed for sale for $864,356. Other homes in the complex were similarly listed at over $800,000.

Figure 21. Long after its racial composition had changed, the complex was demolished and the new HOPE VI structures rebranded as Ellen Wilson Place. Homes like this along the alley running between 6th and 7th Streets S.E. were selling for close to $900,000 before the pandemic hit the city in 2020. Mara Cherkasky.

Long a source of political support to District politicians, those living in and suffering from the plight of public housing caught the attention of Anthony Williams, despite his focus on attracting new and presumably more affluent residents to the District. With funds for the federal HOPE VI housing program declining in the first years of the new century, Williams sought to extend the process of conversion by drawing on local sources. He did so under a program he called “New Communities,” and to reassure constituents that improvements to the places where they lived would not force their displacement, the new program, as it was announced in 2004, made commitments not included under HOPE VI: one-for-one replacement of each unit destroyed, the right for every tenant to return, and—most singularly—a commitment to build alternative units first before forcing relocation.³⁵

As a first test case, Williams singled out a pocket of deteriorated housing in the Near Northwest, the recently rebranded NoMa area, where a renewal plan known as Northwest One had been unsuccessfully attempted in the 1960s. Promising the new program would include new and improved facilities for social services—thereby addressing human needs as well as physical shelter—the plan sought as well to capture interest in what the city identified as an “emerging market” to remake a whole neighborhood. Three other locations were added to the program, but Northwest One led the way, with the results decidedly mixed. Although the District of Columbia still described the program in 2018 as providing “for vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods that address both the physical architecture and human capital needs, where residents have quality affordable housing options, economic opportunities and access to appropriate human services,”³⁶ incidents of displacement continued. A formula had been hammered out through meetings between the city administrator and area residents in 2004 and 2005—one-third deeply subsidized, one-third workforce and middle income, and one-third market rate—but the final results tipped heavily away from the lower scales. When the owner of Temple Courts, in the heart of the area, threatened to drop his commitment to taking Section 8 housing vouchers for its 520 units, the city used eminent domain to gain control of the site. Construction lags for alternative housing, however, forced the relocation of Temple Courts residents. Despite assurances that the city would honor their right to return, it did not turn out that way. For years, parking lots marked the location of the structure after its demolition.³⁷ And while 30 percent of the units of a new luxury building, 2 M Street, were reserved as replacements for those lost at Temple Courts, the units were too small at 500 to 900 square feet to accommodate families, and the ambience definitely was not aimed at those former residents. Described on its website as “an urban oasis where you can live life to the fullest and live life at its finest,” 2M touted a private dog park among its amenities, hardly the social services that were anticipated for former public housing residents.³⁸ As progress also stalled in other areas, the city council commissioned a review of the program that concluded that promises to build first simply were not practical, signaling another round of displacement.³⁹

Far from addressing the affordable housing crisis in the city, the conversion of public housing could spur reinvestment that even further marginalized the original tenants. In an area located between the Capitol and an underdeveloped portion of the Anacostia waterfront, the Capper-Carrollsburg public housing complex’s conversion to mixed-income housing proved one such instance. The lead developer, Torti Gallas and Partners, was certainly guilty of some hyperbole in claiming that the complex’s alterations “turned out to be the catalyst that restored the city’s connection to the Anacostia River, created $1 billion in total public investment and sparked a new era of pride and prosperity for Near Southeast Washington.”⁴⁰ Clearly, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s relocation to a new headquarters near the Navy Yard as well as the opening of the Nationals’ baseball stadium in 2008 were just as important. Still, the change was startling. In the ensuing decade, the number of households in the area nearly quadrupled, from 977 to 3,809. The average income escalated from $34,379 to $78,265, and the value of residential and commercial property rose from $1.15 billion to $2.65 billion. Anchoring a sixty-square-block area, the stadium, and the deep subsidies it entailed, were promoted as a “walkable livable community.” Among those impressed with the results was veteran sportswriter Thomas Boswell, who declared, “The city wanted a building and population boom in what had been a bleak area of town; part of the benefit would be seen in property taxes and sales taxes. But the prime beneficiaries of this were always intended to be Washingtonians themselves, like those seen pouring down from Capitol Hill in a wave of red before Nats games.”⁴¹ Certainly, the area, rebranded as Capitol Waterfront, abounded with amenities popular with just the kind of newcomers Williams was seeking to attract to Washington. If former residents of Capper-Carrollsburg regretted the loss of the community they had once known, they could now be part of a community where well-appointed buildings known as the Bixby and the Harlow would reserve at least some below-market rate units for them.⁴²

The demand for housing aided some District residents, many of them retired and ready to move, who were willing and able to cash in on the rising value of their homes. But many others, owners of modest homes now facing rising taxes or renters, were hard pressed to stay where they were.⁴³ From an early date, Washington’s poorer residents received support from the District government to buffer such market trends. Responding to signs of gentrification in the DuPont Circle and Shaw areas, the District City Council passed the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) in 1980. Designed primarily to protect renters from being pushed out of their apartments by owners seeking to upgrade their buildings to condominiums, the act granted tenants the first right of purchase, provided they were able to secure a vote of a majority of residents and secure the services of a third-party lender. As Carolyn Gallaher’s assessment of the program reveals, the law had only limited effect. Not only did it place a significant burden on tenants to organize their own defense, it was limited in scope to apartment tenants only. Those renting or buying in more individualized circumstances could find no support in the law itself and had to look to other forms of organization, often locally formed community development corporations, for help. Forty years after inception of the project, a longtime consultant to tenants utilizing the law concluded that “when measured against the struggle needed for each small achievement and against the unfettered success of market housing as a vehicle for speculation and profit, we need to do better.”⁴⁴

An early test of this policy came in the Columbia Heights neighborhood where Gloria Robinson was beginning to believe that she no longer belonged. As the opening of a new Metro subway stop neared in 1997, the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, in partnership with the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development and the Washington Architectural Foundation, convened a charrette for local residents in an effort to forge a vision for the future of the neighborhood. Of immediate concern was the anticipated development and associated effect on housing expected to follow from the opening of the new subway stop at 14th and Irving Streets. As planners of the subway system had hoped, such locations spurred development, and the immediate effects were the introduction of big-box retail in place of a number of marginal properties around the subway exit and the restoration and revitalization one block north of the once grand Tivoli Theatre, a long-abandoned property preservationists had managed to protect from demolition but had previously failed to attract sufficient investment for its reopening until 2005. Although the 1997 charrette appears not to have drawn much in the way of involvement from the neighborhood’s poorer minority residents, their interests were sufficiently represented by community organizations to ensure that as real estate prices rose, a significant number of affordable housing units—2,174—were created or preserved. By 2012, Kathryn Howell, a former policy specialist in the city’s housing department, reported 20 percent of the housing units in the neighborhood were income restricted. Overall, however, the number represented a net loss of affordable housing in a neighborhood that had for a generation remained affordable through a combination of subsidies and market affordability.⁴⁵ With increasing demand putting a strain on city resources, TOPA was able to protect only 35 out of more than 5,000 units that went up for sale across the District in 2012.⁴⁶

TOPA helped preserve the affordability of some units in Columbia Heights, but that was not the only tool affordable housing advocates had to work with. In 2009, the city set a minimum inclusionary housing requirement on new development of 8 percent of new units for those making less than 80 percent of median income. The program was slow to take off, however, and assisted only a modest number—some 400 of the 7,700 households registered for it in the first eight years of its existence.⁴⁷ The city’s rent control laws offered security to those nearly 80,000 units covered by the measure, but all housing built after 1975 was exempt, and the very existence of so many other units under rent control helped fuel rising fees elsewhere when demand was high.⁴⁸

As the pace of reinvestment accelerated in the early twenty-first century, the multiple tools for protecting residents against displacement proved limited to the task. In response, Muriel Bowser, in her successful challenge to sitting mayor Vincent Gray in 2014, promised to act on a proposal she had introduced to the city council when she was representing Ward 4—to dedicate $100 million in city revenues each year to an existing but underfunded Housing Production Trust Fund. Devoted to subsidizing rents to keep them affordable, the fund’s contributions had failed to keep up with rising prices across so many formerly affordable neighborhoods. Asserting in her inaugural address to make “Black Lives Matter” more than a hashtag, Bowser promised she would make sure that every city resident could live in a safe and affordable home. Her bold commitment drew broad praise, including from Shelterforce contributor Daniel Kravetz, who pronounced the new investment the largest fund of its kind in any major American city. The product of a five-year “Housing for All” campaign conducted by the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development, the newly potent Trust Fund, he asserted, “will help many families escape the waves of skyrocketing housing prices in DC—the cost burdens and the displacement.” Still, steep challenges remained for a city that had lost almost 50 percent of its low-cost housing since 2002 and witnessed a rise in those paying above $1,500 a month in rent from 13 percent of all units in 2005 to over 40 percent in 2013.⁴⁹

With the Trust Fund stretched by needs in every city sector, Bowser announced in 2017 an additional fund intended to attract private investment. Modeled after similar public-private partnerships formed in Boston and San Francisco, where housing demand had been especially high, the city committed an initial $10 million to the fund with the hope it could attract an equal amount of private contributions.⁵⁰ Even with such an array of government programs, however, protecting those vulnerable to displacement remained difficult. Limited funds could explain part of the problem, but that was not all that was at fault. Inevitably, power and its exercise played a role as well, as was demonstrated in the battle that emerged around yet another development opportunity at a new subway stop, this one in Southeast Washington, often referred to in Washington as “the other side of the Anacostia River.”

The underdevelopment and proximity to waterfront property in Southeast Washington, long an area of modest households and apartments where the city’s highest level of poverty was concentrated, made it an early target for Anthony Williams’s goal of attracting new population and business. A prime target became the St. Elizabeth’s mental health facility, which after lying fallow thirty years after its closing in the 1980s, benefited from the consolidation of the Department of Homeland Security on its West Campus, while plans for a mixed-income community emerged for the East Campus nearest the Congress Heights Metro stop. Anchored by yet another sports facility, to accommodate the NBA Wizards’ training facility and the WNBA Mystics’ games, the development included plans for upscale shopping and apartment complexes nearby. Described as a part of a larger effort to drive economic development for the city under the direction of Events DC Economic Development Corporation, Washington’s sports and convention authority, the project brought with it a community benefits agreement that was not so much negotiated as made a part of the planning. It included commitments to award a minimum of $5 million of the $55 million in construction costs to businesses located in Wards 7 and 8 and $60,000 in cash awards in 2018 to a variety of organizations, including the United Black Fund and the annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade, with promises to direct funds in future years to a variety of organizations, events, and causes. Although the actual payouts were relatively modest and temporary in effect, they generated favorable comment and coverage in local news outlets.⁵¹ Proposed development at the other side of the Congress Heights Metro stop was more complicated and less heartening to residents.

Two months before he died, Marion Barry sent a letter to the zoning commission urging approval of a project planned for the Congress Heights Metro station in his Ward 8 district. Describing the investment—which called for more than 200 apartments, 230,000 square feet of office space, and 26,000 square feet of retail—as transformative, Barry expressed his confidence that “this project can serve as a catalyst for future development in one of D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods.” Renderings showed gleaming buildings that would fit right into the city’s most thriving corridors, with fashion boutiques, a cafe, and a bookstore surrounding the Metro station. The multitiered offices featured multiple roof decks, while balconies at the residences overlooked a revitalized Congress Heights. Conceived by the politically connected developer Geoffrey Griffis of CityPartners, the site was ready for development after the Sanford Capital company bought up four apartment buildings clustered in the area. Plans calling for demolition of those buildings stalled, however, awaiting the disposition of a long-abandoned fifth building and because of the continued presence of residents in apartment buildings slated for demolition. Although plans called for some inclusionary housing in new facilities, residents aware of the tide of development remained fearful. “We know what’s coming to Southeast,” resident Tujuanda Blalock asserted, as she joined neighbors who believed the apartment owners, who were jockeying for control of the remaining property at the site, were letting their buildings deteriorate in an effort to force those who refused buyouts to move. As the Washington City Paper reported, one of those in the 19 of 47 total units still occupied had not had heat in five years. Another resident claimed it took five days for the landlord to repair her toilet, and the smell of garbage and sewage leaked continuously from a ground-floor apartment that was abandoned more than a year earlier. To protect their position, residents formed a coalition of tenants’ associations in 2013 with the intent of using TOPA to buy out the apartments and rehabilitate them with the nonprofit National Housing Trust acting as developer. To advance their cause, they counted on the city to deny Sanford’s effort to buy the remaining fifth property at a discounted price and to use its ownership to reshape development, possibly strengthening affordability requirements.⁵²

While Mayor Bowser maintained her vocal support for affordable housing options, she indicated she could do little to help out the residents in Congress Heights because the properties were privately owned. The City Paper pointed out, however, that the mayor’s interests may have been compromised by contributions to her campaign: $3,753 from principals associated with Sanford Development and $3,200 from Griffis, a former chair of the board of zoning adjustment whom she had appointed to the National Capital Planning Commission. Two key Ward 8 contributors to the campaign, who worked with the developers to garner neighborhood support, secured what they called a community benefits agreement. Under the proposal submitted to the zoning commission in December 2014, $75,000 was to go to the Congress Heights Community Training and Development Center, founded by one of them, Phinis Jones. Another $75,000 was designated for the Ward 8 Council Against Domestic Violence, founded by Sandra Seegars, a candidate for the Ward 8 council seat vacated when Barry died. The deal, which upset residents seeking control over their buildings, contrasted poorly with even the modest arrangement at St. Elizabeth’s, which was described both by the city and the Congress of New Urbanism’s Robert Stuteville as a model of equitable development.⁵³

Sanford Capital’s plan cleared the zoning commission, but the company found itself tied up in court for two years, battling charges it was violating TOPA’s strictures by failing to keep its buildings in repair. In November 2017, D.C. Superior Court judge John M. Mott put the properties in receivership and ordered Sanford to negotiate exclusively with the tenants, or the tenants’ representatives, about a potential sale for a period that was to end by mid-January 2018. With that deadline bearing down on the developers and facing up to $2 million in repairs required under the receivership, in December, Sanford suddenly transferred the ailing properties to Griffis’s CityPartners. The transaction took place on December 27, the same day Sanford’s legal counsel appeared in court with a check to pay the balance it owed to receiver David Gilmore for initial maintenance and repair costs. “Such a deed resembles a friendly takeover of a property by a lender when a borrower defaults on a loan,” the City Paper charged. All documents authorizing the transfer and assumption of debt were notarized by Ben Soto, a developer and former campaign treasurer for Mayor Bowser. He also served on the board of EagleBank, which issued Griffis a consolidated loan. Soto’s Paramount development firm partnered with Griffis on a number of Washington properties, including the luxury Wharf mixed-use development on the Southwest waterfront opened in 2017. Claiming CityPartners was no longer under court order, Griffis said he intended to begin demolition of the properties “fairly soon,” despite the continued uncertainty about the remaining property slated for redevelopment and still in government hands.⁵⁴

The Congress Heights contest for control over redevelopment may have been especially protracted, but it was not unique. The pace of court challenges quickened after the District’s court of appeals overturned the zoning commission’s approval of a project to redevelop McMillan Park in the city’s Northwest sector as a mix of residential units, offices, a supermarket, and a new park. Twenty-five further appeals followed over the next year, three times the rate of the previous two years. Introducing a number of principles in support of addressing implications “for the District to become a more inclusive, and resilient city,” Mayor Bowser recommended changes to the city’s comprehensive plan intended to clarify ambiguous language that led courts to block projects and to affirm the zoning commission’s authority to add density in exchange for public benefits.⁵⁵

Introduced in January 2018, the proposed changes intended to break the logjam in new, planned unit developments drew the support of Cheryl Court, speaking for the Coalition for Smarter Growth, who complained that thousands of new homes, including hundreds of affordable homes, had been tied up in courts, which she avowed “seem much more willing to second-guess the process,” thus throwing it into uncertainty. Activists countered that the city was making it more difficult to thwart gentrification and that the Office of Planning had failed to honor a commitment to include equitable development among its five core principles. At a city council hearing on the proposed amendments in March, Empower DC executive director Parisa Norouzi claimed that taking developers to court was the most effective way to put power back in the public’s hands. “The reason why people are appealing is because nobody’s looking out for the residents,” she said. Responding in subsequent testimony before the city council to an administration claim that the precipitous drop in Black population—140,000 in the previous fifteen years—represented a natural move to opportunity outside the District, a slate of university-based and public scholars countered by pointing to the loss of thousands of Black residents through displacement. “Ignoring the role of development in pushing Black residents out of the city … serves a policy goal that history and research show will lead to additional displacement,” they claimed.⁵⁶

Groups like the Coalition for Smarter Growth, the Congress for a New Urbanism, and city planners could applaud Washington’s new development pattern as transit and environment friendly as well as revenue producing. While there were always possibilities of shady deals taking place, much of the redevelopment was tasteful and responsible. Several of those involved in the process earnestly described their commitment not just to construction but to “placemaking.” JBG Smith, a company with investments in a number of gentrifying neighborhoods, including Shaw, asserted on its website, for instance, “Placemaking is a core part of our DNA—a philosophy that is focused on creating compelling experiences—within our buildings and in the neighborhoods we touch. By strategically mixing high-quality multifamily and commercial buildings with selective retail and thoughtfully planned public areas, we create appealing walkable places that define neighborhoods and create value.”⁵⁷ In seeking to design visually appealing buildings for the Wharf on the Southwest waterfront, PN Hoffman CEO Monty Hoffman said he was just as focused on the public spaces. “The challenge with object architecture is we’re fawning over the bricks and mortar, but you see object architecture from a distance. That’s not what we’re about. We’re about people and we’re about the pedestrian experience and urban theater. So co-existing the architecture with the pedestrian and retail experience and the environment is something we’re going to be focused on quite heavily.”⁵⁸

Such formulations, Alesia Montgomery contends, serve as a way of reconnecting central cities to regional and global markets by making themselves appear appealing places for white gentrifiers.⁵⁹ While they might offer new opportunities to less affluent minorities through inclusionary provisions, such placemaking gambits also have the effect of putting them in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable positions in places designed and marketed to attract more affluent clients. A survey of Columbia Heights residents, for instance, turned up a number of clashes between new and old residents. While old-timers utilized parks and front stoops to “hang out” and converse with neighbors, newcomers strove, in ways that echoed an earlier process of gentrification in the nearby Mount Pleasant neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, for greater privatization of personal places and more coherent use of public spaces.⁶⁰ A triumph of new “placemaking” was the reconstruction of what came to be called Trolley Turnaround Park, long a gathering place for local residents, but one newcomers did not think was safe for children. Despite resistance from longer-term residents, the park was redeveloped with a streetcar theme, new play equipment, and, most strikingly, a fence around the park that closed at 9:00 P.M. daily. No doubt, the physical space was an improvement over an area that had a history of collecting trash and broken equipment. Still, the dramatic change in its function from mixed use to one that excluded all but adults with children was dramatic. A feature posting on the park’s opening showed just such families—all white. Not surprisingly, one former park user remarked, “You can’t do anything in that park now—it’s not for adults anymore.”⁶¹

Figure 22. Opened in 2012, the renovated Trolley Turnaround Park, at 11th and Monroe Streets, became a point of pride for its advocates but drew mixed responses from some longtime residents who felt a loss of access to community space in the gentrifying neighborhood of Columbia Heights. Courtesy Kent Boese.

Such incidents were neither random nor isolated. As the District began recovery in the early years of the new century, Susannah Schaller argues persuasively, a circle of real estate investors and business interests with the support of city government turned to the vehicle of business improvement districts (BIDs) for remaking not just the downtown but select neighborhoods. Presented as democratically constructed vehicles for improving the prospects of established neighborhood businesses, these organizations actually opened the way for new investors to remake whole areas with the intent of attracting new customers at the expense of existing residents. The effort proved difficult to effect in Mount Pleasant, the neighborhood just east of Rock Creek Park, the line separating the rest of the city from its most affluent area. But it was more successful in adjacent Adams Morgan. Seeking to satisfy growth-oriented city officials and their allies, the Adams Morgan BID privileged the area as a citywide magnet for nighttime entertainment at the expense of indigenous businesses that served residents by day. Successful in creating placemaking images free of danger and deterioration, Schaller asserts, such BID efforts have been “decisive in oiling the gentrification machine.”⁶²

Already threatened by the rising cost of housing, residents of modest means and different racial and class backgrounds were further threatened by being culturally marginalized in once-familiar places in the process of transformation. That pattern was well illustrated in Derek Hyra’s 2017 assessment of Shaw. Naming his book Cappuccino City in recognition both of the onset of gentrification and the mixing of races that was ensured in Shaw by a historically significant number of subsidized apartments now closely proximate to luxury apartments, Hyra argued that while not all longtime residents had been physically displaced, many had been politically and culturally marginalized. As the balance of race and wealth shifted, Black residents lost positions on local governance boards and witnessed their cultural organizations overshadowed by new amenities like dog parks and bike lanes. The Louis at 1920 14th Street might advertise itself as “more than an apartment building,” as a community honoring Shaw’s history and “bringing you and your neighbors together,” but that was easier said than done. Although whites and Blacks lived in close proximity, they rarely mixed, a situation Hyra labeled microsegregation.⁶³ As sociologist Sharon Zutkin contends in another context, the overall effect of the transformation of urban spaces, in Shaw as in Brooklyn, is to “move longtime residents outside their comfort zone, gradually shifting the places that support their way of life to life support for a different cultural community. Bistros replace bodegas, cocktail bars morph out of old-style saloons, and the neighborhood as a whole creates a different kind of sociability. Against longtimers’ sense of origins newcomers pose their own new beginnings.”⁶⁴

Inevitably, different cultures clashed, as they did in Shaw in the spring of 2019 when one of the last commercial outlets of Black Washington’s signature Go-go music, Central Communications at 7th and Florida Avenue, suddenly ceased a long tradition of broadcasting the distinctive sound from speakers outside the store. The action followed complaints about the noise from residents at the nearby Shay Apartment complex, owned by the same JB Smith Company so proud of its own form of placemaking.⁶⁵ Indeed, the Shay incorporated within it its own form of upscale shopping destinations, aimed more at newcomers flooding the area than at longtime residents.⁶⁶ The action created a furor among defenders of Black space, including those who believed that the decline of Go-go’s preeminence in the city was a product of gentrification. “The consequences of silencing this music is profound,” resident Julie Guyot said. “I don’t want my children to live in a D.C. that has lost its culture. And if we lose this, we don’t live in D.C. anymore. We live in that federal city named Washington.”⁶⁷ As longtime residents, including Mayor Bowser, came to the defense of the public broadcasts on 7th Street, Shay management issued an apology, the music resumed, and residents new and old resumed their wary view of one another. As a further sign that Shaw had not been fully transformed, a good number of the businesses originally located at the Shay closed.⁶⁸

More pointedly, activists pushed back against the changes that threatened to uproot poorer neighborhoods. In May 2018 Anacostia-based lawyer Aristotle Theresa filed suit in U.S. District Court, identifying District of Columbia officials’ efforts to attract younger, more affluent professionals to Washington as a direct threat to poor and working-class African Americans who had lived in the city for decades. Citing Richard Florida and the city creative class initiatives inspired by his work, Theresa sought $1 billion in damages, charging that “every city planning agency … conspired to make D.C. very welcoming for preferred residents and sought to displace residents inimical to the creative economy.”⁶⁹ Arguing on behalf of a group of Anacostia residents who, Theresa argued, “are highly offended by current plans under way to actively integrate their neighborhoods as if there is something wrong with African Americans living together in tight knit communities,” he pointed especially to turning public housing into mixed-income communities, with the associated effect of dispersing existing concentrations of African Americans. “Really,” his brief insists, “these are just ways for private speculators to buy or lease low and to sell or lease high with government assistance, i.e. tax incremental financing, government grants, and undervalued land sales, while further weakening a discreet, easily identified oppressed racial group. The resulting diminution of community cohesion primes vulnerable groups of African Americans for even more economic exploitation to be repeated generationally.”⁷⁰ Yet one more in the series of lawsuits the city was trying to avoid, Theresa’s document had the advantage of going beyond specifics to name and to criticize the constellation of forces that were conspiring to overturn “Chocolate City” as it had been identified in the second half of the twentieth century. The city responded, as could be expected, by denying culpability, a position supported by longtime Washington Post urban commentator Roger K. Lewis, who argued that the decline in available subsidies over the years was to blame.⁷¹ Although the city council ultimately embraced alterations to the comprehensive plan that were more attentive to the acute housing needs of the city’s poorer residents, final decisions on land use remained in the hands of a zoning commission sympathetic to development.⁷²

No doubt development patterns would continue to shift, but changes to these patterns appeared less likely in light of how far the physical reconstruction of so much of the city had advanced to entice and accommodate new residents. Many of these changes had proceeded over less than a twenty-year period, and it seemed unlikely the nature of city living and the challenges to achieving equitable development would be greatly altered. Black mayors might continue to be elected, and they might give greater priority to social welfare than to economic development, but as former Virginia congressman Jim Moran commented, “As we’ve grown, we’ve been the beneficiary of what Richard Florida calls the ‘rise of the creative class.’ The lifestyle built around Metro stations, the ability to work and play without the automobile, the tremendous collaboration taking place among young technology professionals. That may have a life of its own.” For the moment, Moran remained cautious enough to conclude, “It remains to be seen how self-sufficient we can be without the continuing growth of the federal government.”⁷³ But a good deal of money was betting that real estate investment and the revenues it generated could maintain Washington’s course well into the new century. Just as certain, there was bound to be resistance to the further dilution of Chocolate City and the aspirations to equity it inspired.