Deanwood businesses, community groups push back against evictions by developer

The owners of several Deanwood businesses filed a legal complaint this morning against Neighborhood Development Co., the company responsible for abruptly evicting them from their properties and padlocking their storefronts days later.

Nook’s Barber and Beauty Shop, Little Jewels Child Development Center, Sunny Chicken and Fish and Uncle Lee’s Liquors were told to vacate due to “environmental hazards” on Oct. 2 via a letter rather than an formal eviction notice from the property’s new owners, 1100 Eastern LLC. The subsidiary of the Neighborhood Development Co. plans to replace the retail strip at Sheriff Road, Eastern Avenue and Division Avenue NE with affordable housing for seniors.

“It’s unconscionable that an affordable housing project would be used as a tool to wrongfully evict minority-owned Deanwood businesses, including businesses that have been operating in our community for more than a quarter of a century,” Deanwood advisory neighborhood commissioner Anthony Lorenzo Green said in a news release issued today. “This is not how we treat people that have been here during the bad times, and the good.”

The company finalized the sale of the business strip a day before the notices were sent out. According to DCist, Neighborhood Development Co. told at-large DC Council member Robert White that contractual constraints prevented it from notifying tenants about the hazards until the sale was finalized.

On Oct. 4, the storefronts were padlocked, although two of the businesses have reopened in the days since then and another has found a temporary location. Johnny Barnes — attorney for the owners of Nook’s, Sunny and Uncle Lee’s — argued that an informal or “self-help”-style eviction is illegal in the District.

The building’s new owner expects to prevail if the case ends up before a judge. “We believe the claims in the lawsuit are baseless, and are prepared to defend ourselves if necessary,” wrote 1100 Eastern LLC in a statement.

1100 Eastern LLC also said it will provide the business owners temporary access to retrieve any belongings; monetary and technical relocation assistance; and financial compensation for any lost profit during the time it takes for them to relocate. The existing businesses will be welcomed into the new development on “discounted financial terms.”

In response to the eviction, more than three dozen protesters participated in a Saturday afternoon march from Columbia Heights to the Crestwood home of Neighborhood Development Co.’s CEO and co-founder Adrian Washington on Oct. 6.

“It does not matter if [Washington] is there, because you know who is there? His neighbors that he has to see every single day,” said April Goggins, an activist and organizer with Black Lives Matter DC who helped lead the march. Goggins said she hoped the protest would disrupt Washington’s neighborhood just as Deanwood has been disrupted.

“You have little black children who have been going to day care on top of this for months. … Environmental racism is real,” Goggins said during the protest.

After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the company, Barnes recently met with representatives of Neighborhood Development Co., who provided documents that he says “show they were not truthful at all in their assertion that an immediate environmental hazard existed,” according to the press release issued today.

1100 Eastern LLC bought the business strip on Sheriff Road for a new development project that will create 63 affordable housing units for seniors using an $11.4 million loan from the District. The project is part of a $103 million affordable housing effort that Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on June 13, the same day that a controversial and widely reported stop-and-frisk incident occurred outside of Nook’s Barbershop.

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

“These are affordable housing units and senior units which are desperately needed in DC,” Goggins said. “So it’s important to understand we’re not saying, ‘We don’t want affordable housing.’ It’s important to understand that they are pitting black and brown folks, working black and brown folks, against each other for things that they all need — housing, work, all of those things.”

Goggins and other organizers put together the Oct. 6 protest in just three days, with their efforts getting underway as soon as word spread of the abrupt closures. Black Lives Matter DC and the Stop Police Terror Project — an organization committed to “changing the system of racist, militarized policing” in DC — convened a group of approximately 40 people. The protesters marched from Columbia Heights Plaza up 14th Street and along Shepherd Street NW to confront Washington at his home, chanting “Stop gentrification” and “Black businesses matter” along the way.

The group paused several times to explain the protest to onlookers, many of whom used their phones to get photos or video of the event. Once the march entered Washington’s neighborhood, the organizers stopped several of his neighbors and urged them to confront Washington about what was going on in Deanwood. As Goggins expected, many of them appeared to be uncomfortable.

Washington founded Neighborhood Development Co. in 1999 and served as president until 2005, when he took a two-year leave of absence to serve as president and CEO of the Anacostia Waterfront Corp., a government-backed project to revitalize the Anacostia Waterfront. He returned in early 2007 as CEO. The company was part of the development team for CityVista DC and CityCenter DC; it has also built several condo buildings along Georgia Avenue and the Gap Community Child Development Center on Upshur Street NW, among other projects.

Washington did not appear to be home when the protesters arrived, but a woman who identified herself as his sister-in-law and was sitting in her car filmed and spoke to the organizers for a brief time before going inside the house. Multiple police cars showed up throughout the march and demonstration, but officers did not disturb or attempt to break up the protest.

Speaking to the group’s decision to help organize the protest, Natacia Knapper, a member of the Stop Police Terror Project, explained that “violence” extends beyond physical altercations.

“I feel like people have a very narrow idea of what violence means,” Knapper said. “Violence isn’t just shooting or punching or stabbing somebody. Violence is very prevalent in the way that we treat certain communities and the circumstances that we force these communities to live in. … One form of violence, in my mind, is gentrification.”

In its statement issued today, 1100 Eastern LLC refuted accusations of gentrification.

“This is not gentrification — this is the exact opposite,” the company wrote. “We’re not building some swanky condo for yuppies — we are replacing the current one story commercial structure with a brand new, six story building that will provide 63 units of housing that will be home to low and moderate income residents, including grandparents and extended families, provide permanent supportive housing to formerly homeless families, and, on the ground floor, provide neighborhood-serving retail to the Deanwood community — including a right to return for the existing commercial tenants if they wish.”

In the meantime, two of the businesses, Nook’s Barbershop and Uncle Lee’s Liquors, found ways to reopen their Deanwood locations last week notwithstanding the padlocks. Goggans has created a GoFundMe campaign to keep Nook’s in business and prepare for a possible emergency move; the campaign had drawn $640 toward its $5,000 goal as of Monday afternoon. According to Green, the day care has opened an interim site outside of Deanwood on East Capitol Street NE under a temporary license.