East of the River

Lincoln Heights: Future Beacon On A Hill?

City Hopes To Improve On Public Housing Redevelopment Shortcomings

by: Gabriel Pacyniak

Fiftieth Street, SE runs right through the heart of six blocks of the Lincoln Heights public housing project. In fact, the U6 Metro bus line has a stop right at the peak of the hill on 50th Street, just east of the Deanwood neighborhood. But until Resident Council President Patricia Malloy started raising hell about it, the District's Department of Transportation wouldn't maintain the street. "'You have to talk to the Housing Authority,' they would say," remembers Malloy. "It's like this wasn't part of the city." But Malloy, a firecracker who herself works for the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA), was not to be put off so quickly. She soon became elected to the ANC where she learned from other community activists, like John Frye, how to navigate the bureaucracy. Five years later, Lincoln Heights has new street signs, a new sidewalk and a reopened recreation center at Kelly Miller Junior High School.

That is just the beginning. Thanks to a hardworking core of dedicated residents, service providers, and civil servants, the public housing project has experienced a mini-renaissance in the past five years. Rebecca Stamps, another longtime public housing resident, started the Project Blessing Crisis Center for Hurting Parents. It began in 2001 when she was sharing food with residents in need out of her own refrigerator; now, with her own office, she not only gives out food, she helps residents find jobs, counsels young parolees, teaches typing and anything anything else she can to help her neighbors. Resident Elizabeth Whitlow has engaged a local artist to come to the area and work with young people on a mural about the history of Lincoln Heights and its future. Department of Parks and Recreation gang mediator Theophus Brooks has returned to work in the neighborhood he first started out in 1971, making it a point to get to know everyone, no matter how tough or how late the hour, by harassing them with his rough wit and charm. He takes pride in pointing out that violent crime has dwindled in this once-notorious neighborhood. There is also Daybreak, an after-school center started by a group of volunteers from McLean Bible Church, that has now become a full-time organization located right in Lincoln Heights, famous for taking local children to summer camp and on trips.

“In the last several years, Lincoln Heights has come a long way,” says Brooks. “And its because we’ve got people here like me, Ms. Stamps, Ms. Malloy. We all work together. And most public housing communities don’t have that.”

But problems still exist. Drug dealers still sell their wares openly; elderly residents complain about an undercurrent of fear, and mothers worry about the environment their children are being raised in. The physical condition of Lincoln Heights plays up to the stereotype of public housing: hallways are mottled and dirty, there are no doors in the apartment building entrances and the red brick buildings reinforce the institutional character of the neighborhood.

So when Patricia Malloy was watching municipal television last spring and she heard Mayor Anthony Williams speaking about the New Communities program that he was introducing to renovate low-income housing at Sursum Corda in Ward 6, she wondered, “Why can’t Lincoln Heights be a New Community?”

She called Councilmember Vincent Gray, who had already helped her with other issues, and she asked him the same question. Gray was looking for ways to revitalize northern Ward 7, and he jumped on the idea. Last fall, the council unanimously passed legislation introduced by Gray and Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry that named Lincoln Heights and Barry Farms, a Ward 8 public housing project, as the next New Communities.

Squeezing the Housing Boom For All Its Worth

The New Communities initiative grew out of the Hot Spots crime program that combined increased police presence with concentrated city services, such as housing code enforcement and recreation opportunities. But mayoral deputies began to realize that increased enforcement and services wouldn’t reach the root of high-crime areas by themselves. “Where you have high crime, you also have high unemployment, a lack of access to training and jobs and other missing supports,” explains Deputy Mayor of Planning and Economic Development Stanley Jackson. “We quickly realized that we can’t address crime without addressing these other pathologies.”

Recent social science has illustrated that concentrated poverty greatly increases the likelihood of a variety of social ills, from unemployment to crime. Since the 1990s, the government has approached the problem of concentrated poverty with the idea that it could transform impoverished communities into "mixed income communities." A federal grant program called HOPE VI provided millions of dollars for local housing authorities to redevelop public housing stock, in partnership with private developers, into a combination of public housing, moderately-subsidized housing and market-rate housing.

On a national scale, however, the program has fallen far short of its goals to uplift the poorest residents. A shortage of truly affordable units in these public housing projects, combined with strict reentry criteria such as credit rating minimums, continuing employment requirements, and police background checks, have resulted in low rates of return for former residents to the new housing projects. Data from 2000 shows that only 12 percent of displaced residents returned to the redeveloped sites nationwide, although more recent projects, including local projects, seem significantly more promising. For many public housing advocates, the program has become just another government urban renewal program that succeeds best at replacing poor, mostly black residents with more affluent homeowners.

In at least one important way the program has unequivocally succeeded --it has shown that in hot urban housing markets, affluent and working class families won't flinch at buying into attractive communities that also house public housing tenants.

The District's New Communities program is an ambitious attempt to fulfill the promise of the HOPE VI program without federal funding. The program aims to use the District's super-heated demand for housing to create mixed-income communities without reducing the number of low-income units, and will add the same number of subsidized moderate income and market rate units. Just as importantly, the program promises a substantive human services component, which would draw on service providers operating in these communities to provide intensive case management for families.

Most cities would not be able to try a program like this, especially in areas like Lincoln Heights and Barry Farm, which are not gentrifying neighborhoods in the typical sense. To succeed it will require massive private investment, only possible because of the District's extraordinary demand for housing; substantial local funding, available because of budget surpluses; and the public will to use eminent domain, which these projects will likely require in order to triple the number of housing units.

It also promises to become an incredible opportunity. In northern Ward 7 there is already a beehive of activity taking place; Nannie Helen Burroughs Ave. has been named as one of seven “Great Street Corridors” designated for infrastructure improvements and retail development. Through Gray's initiative, the methadone clinic on the corner of Division and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenues was closed, to the great relief of residents who said it created a hostile environment of drug use and loitering at the major intersection. H.D. Woodson Senior High School, the infamous concrete tower that looks more like a prison than a school, is finally due for a full rebuild next year. Non-profit Washington Parks and People has been working on the recently renamed Marvin Gaye Park, reclaiming it from drug dealers and years of neglect and pollution. Deanwood residents are engaged in their own master planning process, and construction is preparing to start on the District’s first combination Recreation Center/Library in the community.

According to area residents, in order for this all this activity to successfully revitalize this neglected portion of the city, the poverty and related problems at Lincoln Heights must be addressed as well.

"With all this going on," says Malloy, "We can't just leave Lincoln Heights standing on the hill like it is, can we?"

Which Residents?

There has already been a major outreach effort at Lincoln Heights. Three hundred people attended a meeting at Kelly Miller on February 28, including a good number of Lincoln Heights residents. Regular, biweekly open meetings have been held with residents, government officials, DCHA staff, and community organizations. Flyers have been delivered to each household, and Daybreak workers have gone door to door with information.

"This is a resident-driven process," says Vanessa Akins, the deputy director of communications for the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), who is leading the outreach portion of the project at this stage of the game.

But while there is no question that residents such as Malloy, Stamps, Armstead and Whitlow, have been leaders in this process, the overall understanding of the project among Lincoln Heights residents as a whole is very different.

In several days of talking with residents, only some seemed to know about the New Communities program at all, and those who did had reservations. “They are lying to us,” said Lincoln Heights resident Brianna, 23 (she declined to give her last name) in a representative comment. “The resident council, the government, the housing authority, they are just lying to us. This isn’t going to be for us, this is going to be for other people.”

And most residents had not heard of the New Communities program, but they had heard the rumor that Lincoln Heights was going to be torn down. “Oh yeah, that’s been going around for a minute,” said a young teenager who is now a high school student at H.D. Woodson. “When is that going to happen? And what is going to happen to the people who live here?”

Jackson admits it is a common response. “I went to Barry Farms and had to endure an hour and a half of hatred from the community before I was even able to start talking about the process. Why? Because people had an uncle in Georgetown, and their parents were moved from Southwest during "negro removal," and all they have ever known the government to do is remove poor African Americans and build for somebody else. But this is for them. They don’t know it yet, but this is for them, and we are just going to have to persevere in our preaching.”

However, this statement glosses over a fundamental premise of public housing redevelopments -- not to recreate the same social environment. In past practice, this has meant barring residents who are perceived as detrimental to the community from returning. And depending on what the criteria are, that could include large portions of the community.

For residents who aren't involved in the leadership positions, there are a lot of concerns as to who exactly will decide who comes back and by what criteria. "People who live in low-income communities like this, they don't have the right mentality to get a job, or they maybe they can't get a job," says a young man who identifies himself only as Screw, and says he is concerned about employment criteria. "If this is all you know, how are you going to get a job?"

It's a problem that even many of the supportive Lincoln Heights community leaders admit they have some concerns about. "I get sad thinking about people who won't come back," says resident Geneva Armstead. "but if they are not doing good, they are hurting us."

When administrators speak about the program, they make a point of saying that residents will be designing the re-entry criteria. However, only the residents who are judged to be in good standing by the housing authority will be considered to return. Missed rent payments, police convictions, even apartment inspections can be used to decide status. The residents on the reentry committee do have power to come up with additional criteria, but they cannot, for example, decide that two missed rent payments is acceptable if DCHA decides otherwise.

Though he sometimes seems to gloss over the issue, Jackson says that the government will strive to be honest about the challenge: "We know the program isn't right for everyone. But we want to give everyone the opportunity to get right for the program."

Planning For Opportunity

It is still not clear exactly how those "opportunities to get right" will play out.

"One of the most exciting aspects of the New Communities is that we are going to try to draw on the people who are already doing work in the community, the Daybreaks and Project Blessings," explains Brenda Donald Walker, deputy mayor for children, youth, families and elders. "We are always fighting against a lack of trust, and these are organizations that are already trusted by the community."

Brooks says it even more plainly. "If you just come in here runnin' your mouth, they aren't going to trust you. Take Daybreak. Those are white folks who work there-- but nobody here would even think about messin' with them. Because they take kids out to camp in the summer, they take kids out on trips, they are helping folks. And people trust them."

This is one of the goals of the program -- that by recruiting the existing organizations the program will be more successful in getting households to buy into the human services components earlier, giving them more time to achieve their goals. A needs assessment will be provided to each individual household, followed by ongoing case-management services.

At this point both the Lincoln Heights and Barry Farms programs are still early in the process and many of the fundamental questions are in planning stages. The current emphasis is on education, outreach, and gathering input. At a recent meeting, for example, residents went through an exercise where they were asked to match nine concepts like “one-to-one replacement” with their definitions, such as “for each public housing unit that exists now, a new one will be built.” The point, says Patricia Gawyn, who led the event, “is that we need to know how to inform our neighbors, and to stay on message ... Because we don’t want any of those ugly rumors going around.”

The hope is that committees will be finalized by the summer, a consultant will take over the community outreach and planning component, and a culminating multi-day charette will be held over a weekend that will result in the first detailed sketches of what the physical components of the project will look like.

At the same time, many technical feasibility questions have to be researched and resolved by the District. How large of a site will be needed in both Lincoln Heights and Barry Farms to effectively triple the density of the current projects while retaining a low-density to moderate-density residential atmosphere? What properties, if any, will the District have to acquire from private hands? How much in local funding will be required and where will it come from (one current plan would be to issue bonds against future revenue in the Housing Production Trust Fund)?

Planners expect the project to take four to seven years before construction begins. For the outreach and human services angle of the project, that is a good thing, because outreach work takes time. Yet the project is also running against the clock; a new mayoral administration will be in place next January, and as Jackson admits, "we want to be far enough along that the new mayor can see the scope of the project."

For at least one person on the ground, the view is hopeful because of what has already happened in the past five years. "Don't think that just because there is a core group of only a couple of us that we can't reach all of these people out here," warns Brooks. "Because we can. If you can get people to trust you, that will do more than a whole army of social workers."


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Lincoln Heights: Future Beacon On A Hill?
City Hopes To Improve On Public Housing Redevelopment Shortcomings
by: Gabriel Pacyniak
Fiftieth Street, SE runs right through the heart of six blocks of the Lincoln Heights public housing project. In fact, the U6 Metro bus line has a stop right at the peak of the hill on 50th Street, just east of the Deanwood neighborhood. But until Resident Council President Patricia Malloy started raising hell about it, the District's Department of Transportation wouldn't maintain the street. "'You have to talk to the Housing Authority,' they would say," remembers Malloy. "It's like this wasn't part of the city." But Malloy, a firecracker who herself works for the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA), was not to be put off so quickly. She soon became elected to the ANC where she learned from other community activists, like John Frye, how to navigate the bureaucracy. Five years later, Lincoln Heights has new street signs, a new sidewalk and a reopened recreation center at Kelly Miller Junior High School. That is just the beginning. Thanks to a hardworking core of dedicated residents, service providers, and civil servants, the public housing project has experienced a mini-renaissance in the past five years. Rebecca Stamps, another longtime public housing resident, started the Project Blessing Crisis Center for Hurting Parents. It began in 2001 when she was sharing food with residents in need out of her own refrigerator; now, with her own office, she not only gives out food, she helps residents find jobs, counsels young parolees, teaches typing and anything anything else she can to help her neighbors. Resident Elizabeth Whitlow has engaged a local artist to come to the area and work with young people on a mural about the history of Lincoln Heights and its future. Department of Parks and Recreation gang mediator Theophus Brooks has returned to work in the neighborhood he first started out in 1971, making it a point to get to know everyone, no matter how tough or how late the hour, by harassing them with his rough wit and charm. He takes pride in pointing out that violent crime has dwindled in this once-notorious neighborhood. There is also Daybreak, an after-school center started by a group of volunteers from McLean Bible Church, that has now become a full-time organization located right in Lincoln Heights, famous for taking local children to summer camp and on trips. “In the last several years, Lincoln Heights has come a long way,” says Brooks. “And its because we’ve got people here like me, Ms. Stamps, Ms. Malloy. We all work together. And most public housing communities don’t have that.” But problems still exist. Drug dealers still sell their wares openly; elderly residents complain about an undercurrent of fear, and mothers worry about the environment their children are being raised in. The physical condition of Lincoln Heights plays up to the stereotype of public housing: hallways are mottled and dirty, there are no doors in the apartment building entrances and the red brick buildings reinforce the institutional character of the neighborhood. So when Patricia Malloy was watching municipal television last spring and she heard Mayor Anthony Williams speaking about the New Communities program that he was introducing to renovate low-income housing at Sursum Corda in Ward 6, she wondered, “Why can’t Lincoln Heights be a New Community?” She called Councilmember Vincent Gray, who had already helped her with other issues, and she asked him the same question. Gray was looking for ways to revitalize northern Ward 7, and he jumped on the idea. Last fall, the council unanimously passed legislation introduced by Gray and Ward 8 Councilmember Marion Barry that named Lincoln Heights and Barry Farms, a Ward 8 public housing project, as the next New Communities. Squeezing the Housing Boom For All Its Worth The New Communities initiative grew out of the Hot Spots crime program that combined increased police presence with concentrated city services, such as housing code enforcement and recreation opportunities. But mayoral deputies began to realize that increased enforcement and services wouldn’t reach the root of high-crime areas by themselves. “Where you have high crime, you also have high unemployment, a lack of access to training and jobs and other missing supports,” explains Deputy Mayor of Planning and Economic Development Stanley Jackson. “We quickly realized that we can’t address crime without addressing these other pathologies.” Recent social science has illustrated that concentrated poverty greatly increases the likelihood of a variety of social ills, from unemployment to crime. Since the 1990s, the government has approached the problem of concentrated poverty with the idea that it could transform impoverished communities into "mixed income communities." A federal grant program called HOPE VI provided millions of dollars for local housing authorities to redevelop public housing stock, in partnership with private developers, into a combination of public housing, moderately-subsidized housing and market-rate housing. On a national scale, however, the program has fallen far short of its goals to uplift the poorest residents. A shortage of truly affordable units in these public housing projects, combined with strict reentry criteria such as credit rating minimums, continuing employment requirements, and police background checks, have resulted in low rates of return for former residents to the new housing projects. Data from 2000 shows that only 12 percent of displaced residents returned to the redeveloped sites nationwide, although more recent projects, including local projects, seem significantly more promising. For many public housing advocates, the program has become just another government urban renewal program that succeeds best at replacing poor, mostly black residents with more affluent homeowners. In at least one important way the program has unequivocally succeeded --it has shown that in hot urban housing markets, affluent and working class families won't flinch at buying into attractive communities that also house public housing tenants. The District's New Communities program is an ambitious attempt to fulfill the promise of the HOPE VI program without federal funding. The program aims to use the District's super-heated demand for housing to create mixed-income communities without reducing the number of low-income units, and will add the same number of subsidized moderate income and market rate units. Just as importantly, the program promises a substantive human services component, which would draw on service providers operating in these communities to provide intensive case management for families. Most cities would not be able to try a program like this, especially in areas like Lincoln Heights and Barry Farm, which are not gentrifying neighborhoods in the typical sense. To succeed it will require massive private investment, only possible because of the District's extraordinary demand for housing; substantial local funding, available because of budget surpluses; and the public will to use eminent domain, which these projects will likely require in order to triple the number of housing units. It also promises to become an incredible opportunity. In northern Ward 7 there is already a beehive of activity taking place; Nannie Helen Burroughs Ave. has been named as one of seven “Great Street Corridors” designated for infrastructure improvements and retail development. Through Gray's initiative, the methadone clinic on the corner of Division and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenues was closed, to the great relief of residents who said it created a hostile environment of drug use and loitering at the major intersection. H.D. Woodson Senior High School, the infamous concrete tower that looks more like a prison than a school, is finally due for a full rebuild next year. Non-profit Washington Parks and People has been working on the recently renamed Marvin Gaye Park, reclaiming it from drug dealers and years of neglect and pollution. Deanwood residents are engaged in their own master planning process, and construction is preparing to start on the District’s first combination Recreation Center/Library in the community. According to area residents, in order for this all this activity to successfully revitalize this neglected portion of the city, the poverty and related problems at Lincoln Heights must be addressed as well. "With all this going on," says Malloy, "We can't just leave Lincoln Heights standing on the hill like it is, can we?" Which Residents? There has already been a major outreach effort at Lincoln Heights. Three hundred people attended a meeting at Kelly Miller on February 28, including a good number of Lincoln Heights residents. Regular, biweekly open meetings have been held with residents, government officials, DCHA staff, and community organizations. Flyers have been delivered to each household, and Daybreak workers have gone door to door with information. "This is a resident-driven process," says Vanessa Akins, the deputy director of communications for the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), who is leading the outreach portion of the project at this stage of the game. But while there is no question that residents such as Malloy, Stamps, Armstead and Whitlow, have been leaders in this process, the overall understanding of the project among Lincoln Heights residents as a whole is very different. In several days of talking with residents, only some seemed to know about the New Communities program at all, and those who did had reservations. “They are lying to us,” said Lincoln Heights resident Brianna, 23 (she declined to give her last name) in a representative comment. “The resident council, the government, the housing authority, they are just lying to us. This isn’t going to be for us, this is going to be for other people.” And most residents had not heard of the New Communities program, but they had heard the rumor that Lincoln Heights was going to be torn down. “Oh yeah, that’s been going around for a minute,” said a young teenager who is now a high school student at H.D. Woodson. “When is that going to happen? And what is going to happen to the people who live here?” Jackson admits it is a common response. “I went to Barry Farms and had to endure an hour and a half of hatred from the community before I was even able to start talking about the process. Why? Because people had an uncle in Georgetown, and their parents were moved from Southwest during "negro removal," and all they have ever known the government to do is remove poor African Americans and build for somebody else. But this is for them. They don’t know it yet, but this is for them, and we are just going to have to persevere in our preaching.” However, this statement glosses over a fundamental premise of public housing redevelopments -- not to recreate the same social environment. In past practice, this has meant barring residents who are perceived as detrimental to the community from returning. And depending on what the criteria are, that could include large portions of the community. For residents who aren't involved in the leadership positions, there are a lot of concerns as to who exactly will decide who comes back and by what criteria. "People who live in low-income communities like this, they don't have the right mentality to get a job, or they maybe they can't get a job," says a young man who identifies himself only as Screw, and says he is concerned about employment criteria. "If this is all you know, how are you going to get a job?" It's a problem that even many of the supportive Lincoln Heights community leaders admit they have some concerns about. "I get sad thinking about people who won't come back," says resident Geneva Armstead. "but if they are not doing good, they are hurting us." When administrators speak about the program, they make a point of saying that residents will be designing the re-entry criteria. However, only the residents who are judged to be in good standing by the housing authority will be considered to return. Missed rent payments, police convictions, even apartment inspections can be used to decide status. The residents on the reentry committee do have power to come up with additional criteria, but they cannot, for example, decide that two missed rent payments is acceptable if DCHA decides otherwise. Though he sometimes seems to gloss over the issue, Jackson says that the government will strive to be honest about the challenge: "We know the program isn't right for everyone. But we want to give everyone the opportunity to get right for the program." Planning For Opportunity It is still not clear exactly how those "opportunities to get right" will play out. "One of the most exciting aspects of the New Communities is that we are going to try to draw on the people who are already doing work in the community, the Daybreaks and Project Blessings," explains Brenda Donald Walker, deputy mayor for children, youth, families and elders. "We are always fighting against a lack of trust, and these are organizations that are already trusted by the community." Brooks says it even more plainly. "If you just come in here runnin' your mouth, they aren't going to trust you. Take Daybreak. Those are white folks who work there-- but nobody here would even think about messin' with them. Because they take kids out to camp in the summer, they take kids out on trips, they are helping folks. And people trust them." This is one of the goals of the program -- that by recruiting the existing organizations the program will be more successful in getting households to buy into the human services components earlier, giving them more time to achieve their goals. A needs assessment will be provided to each individual household, followed by ongoing case-management services. At this point both the Lincoln Heights and Barry Farms programs are still early in the process and many of the fundamental questions are in planning stages. The current emphasis is on education, outreach, and gathering input. At a recent meeting, for example, residents went through an exercise where they were asked to match nine concepts like “one-to-one replacement” with their definitions, such as “for each public housing unit that exists now, a new one will be built.” The point, says Patricia Gawyn, who led the event, “is that we need to know how to inform our neighbors, and to stay on message ... Because we don’t want any of those ugly rumors going around.” The hope is that committees will be finalized by the summer, a consultant will take over the community outreach and planning component, and a culminating multi-day charette will be held over a weekend that will result in the first detailed sketches of what the physical components of the project will look like. At the same time, many technical feasibility questions have to be researched and resolved by the District. How large of a site will be needed in both Lincoln Heights and Barry Farms to effectively triple the density of the current projects while retaining a low-density to moderate-density residential atmosphere? What properties, if any, will the District have to acquire from private hands? How much in local funding will be required and where will it come from (one current plan would be to issue bonds against future revenue in the Housing Production Trust Fund)? Planners expect the project to take four to seven years before construction begins. For the outreach and human services angle of the project, that is a good thing, because outreach work takes time. Yet the project is also running against the clock; a new mayoral administration will be in place next January, and as Jackson admits, "we want to be far enough along that the new mayor can see the scope of the project." For at least one person on the ground, the view is hopeful because of what has already happened in the past five years. "Don't think that just because there is a core group of only a couple of us that we can't reach all of these people out here," warns Brooks. "Because we can. If you can get people to trust you, that will do more than a whole army of social workers."