Vacant Crummell School at center of latest development battle in Ward 5

Luxury units and craft distilleries have marked Ivy City’s resurgence, but the Crummell School site, vacant since the early 1980s, remains a vestige of a forlorn period in the Northeast neighborhood’s history.

The District plans to sell the land surrounding the Crummell School building, a total of 101,000 square feet, for a mixed-use project with plans for developers to renovate the Ward 5 school building as a community center. Residents told the DC Council this week that they want to go further and preserve the campus surrounding the school, named after Alexander Crummell, a 19th-century abolitionist and priest.

Anxiety over gentrification brought dozens of activists and neighbors to a DC Council hearing Wednesday. Some denounced the deal as a “giveaway” of public land to build 320 units of housing in the form of town houses and apartments, alongside new retail.

For opponents, the redevelopment is especially contentious because they had drawn up their own proposal in 2013 for the site with a developer. Instead of new market-rate housing units (30 percent would be affordable), organizer group Empower DC and others envisioned a 2-acre community campus with a gymnasium, basketball courts, job-training centers and a daycare.

“There’s a lot of kids in Ivy City,” said Parisa Norouzi of Empower DC. “And they’re playing on sidewalks and in streets.”

The development team will spend $16 million to renovate the Crummell School, which the District would lease to the developers for 99 years, said Douglas Firstenberg of StonebridgeCarras. Half of the affordable units would be for residents earning no more than 80 percent of area median income, and the other half would be for earners less than 30 percent. Less than half an acre of space immediately surrounding the school building would be reserved for a public use, to be determined by the community and the District, developers said.

“I don’t think they want more buildings,” Ward 5 Council member Kenyan McDuffie said of the community’s response. “I think they want more public use.”

The high upfront cost of renovating the Crummell School drove up the scale of the development in order to ensure the project’s financially viability, developers said. Ward 3 Council member Mary Cheh said the District may need to consider covering the school’s renovation costs, if it would mean less private development on the site. The annual ground lease for the Crummell School would be $1 under the proposal approved by the mayor.

“If you said the city’s gonna pay the $16 million to renovate the Crummell School, then the developer has an attitude to do other things,” replied Bill Jarvis, whose Jarvis Company is part of the proposed three-team project with StonebridgeCarras and Ocean Pro Properties. “We put a package together that we thought was the best one that we could do.”

The Committee on Transportation and the Environment, chaired by Cheh, and the Committee on Business and Economic Development, chaired by McDuffie, will take action on the pending legislation to declare the entire site, excluding the Crummell School, as surplus property that the District government doesn’t need.

Activists called for more affordable housing and at least an acre of green or recreation space, which Ivy City lacks, they said. They blasted the Bowser administration’s engagement on the future of the site, which was offered to developers in 2016. Three development teams vying for the site followed up with presentations to the community, but critics say their input was ignored.

Former Ward 5 Council member Harry Thomas Jr., who served three years in prison after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from city programs for children, testified with activists in support of recreation space.

Back at the Wilson Building after a political career that ended in disgrace, Thomas struck a more conciliatory tone than activists with sharper anti-development rhetoric. His mother spoke right before him, raising applause from the full committee room as she finished and Thomas began testifying.

McDuffie, his successor, gaveled for quiet, saying everyone’s testimony was equally important.

“During many community discussions, there has been a sense that larger economic forces are at play, and that we have little power to change their course,” Thomas said. “I thoroughly reject this idea that there is nothing we can do.”