Can the mayor deliver on her call for equitable distribution of 12,000 new affordable housing units by 2025?

When the District government began planning the construction of a six-story homeless shelter on a publicly owned lot next to a police station in Cleveland Park, some neighbors had concerns. The density of the proposed building, they pointed out, wouldn’t be consistent with the single-family homes on most of the surrounding blocks.

The 50-unit family shelter currently under construction in Ward 3 is one of several facilities envisioned years ago to help replace the DC General family shelter that closed in 2018. The plan utilizes Mayor Muriel Bowser’s “all eight wards” strategy, in which each section of the city plays a role in sheltering people experiencing homelessness. With Ward 3’s median household income well above $100,000, less than 1% of subsidized affordable housing that has been built, preserved or planned in the city since 2015 is located there.

Meanwhile, some Ward 5 residents in Northeast Washington also fought the construction of the DC General replacement shelter in their ward that’s due to open after an Aug. 21 ribbon-cutting. Tom Kirlin, a vocal opponent of the shelter’s location at 1700 Rhode Island Ave. NE, wrote in The Washington Post that he felt the city was concentrating poverty in that part of the Brookland neighborhood, where there is a slew of low-income apartment buildings and social service facilities.

Amid the mayor’s recent push to build more affordable housing, the same debates are expected to recur: Some residents west of Rock Creek Park have similarly objected to large-scale development projects in their neighborhoods, yet many residents in the eastern part of the city don’t want affordable units to be built exclusively in their neighborhoods.

Bowser will have to navigate this dichotomy as her administration hones its plans to facilitate the creation of 36,000 new housing units by 2025 — including 12,000 set aside to be affordable — to accommodate the District’s growing population. In May, Bowser called for an “equitable distribution” of these new affordable units, noting the lack of affordable options west of Rock Creek Park. 

“The mayor took this approach — and I actually give her a lot of credit for it — with the family homeless shelters that were put in all eight wards of the city,” said Patrick Kennedy, a Foggy Bottom advisory neighborhood commissioner who is running for the Ward 2 seat on the DC Council. “It’s a very similar approach that she’s taking now with housing, and I think it’s the right one.”

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Housing and segregation

Economic differences between DC’s wards are clear. In wards 2 and 3 in Northwest Washington — where you’ll find residents who live in mansions, one-bedroom condos, and rent-controlled apartments alike — median household incomes are $104,504 and $122,680, respectively. According to the DC Office of Planning, median incomes in wards 2 and 3 are the two highest in the District. So, there’s little indication that the average resident of these wards needs subsidized affordable housing. Wards 2 and 3 are also majority white: 73% and 80%, respectively.

By comparison, much of the city’s subsidized housing stock is located in wards 7 and 8 on the District’s east end, where the median household incomes are $31,954 and $40,021, respectively — the District’s two lowest. Both wards are more than 90% black.

“If affordable housing is not put into all wards, it just further exacerbates segregation of the city,” said Brittany Ruffin, an affordable housing advocacy attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. “All people should have access to areas that are considered higher opportunity areas.”

For instance, Ruffin said, healthy food is more readily available in Ward 3, where there are seven full-service grocery stores. There is only one in Ward 8, making most of the area a food desert.

DC’s Office of Planning is the agency tasked with guiding the long-term growth of the city. Its director, Andrew Trueblood, said it is important for low-income residents to have access to the District’s most affluent neighborhoods. 

“High-opportunity neighborhoods need affordable housing so that people with various incomes have those opportunities, whether it’s educational, jobs, transit, amenities,” Trueblood said in an interview. “There’s a philosophical view about being able to create opportunities for residents of all incomes in all of our neighborhoods.”

Empower DC, a nonprofit community organizing group, helped organize former residents of Barry Farm, a neighborhood in Ward 8. Barry Farm was originally settled by former slaves in the 19th century and became the site of a public housing complex in 1942. Residents of the historic community helped desegregate DC public schools and produced one of the District’s most influential go-go groups, the Junkyard Band.

The DC Housing Authority plans to redevelop Barry Farm into a mixed-use community with retail space, market-rate housing and public housing units, though fewer than existed there previously. Tenants and Empower DC have sought historic landmark status for Barry Farm in order to retain part of the neighborhood’s history amid the proposed redevelopment.

Daniel Del Pielago, organizing director at Empower DC, said he agrees District residents should be able to live in any ward, but he said expansion of housing opportunities west of Rock Creek Park shouldn’t come at the expense of other areas of the city, such as Barry Farm. Residents there may not want to leave, he said, and deserve protection from displacement due to gentrification.

“It negates that people have built community, that there is history that needs to be preserved and uplifted. So just this idea that if there is housing created in another ward that that’s good enough,” Del Pielago said. “We need to fix and invest in the neighborhoods that exist and preserve them.”

Trueblood, whose office is exploring ways to create more low-cost housing west of Rock Creek Park, acknowledged the need to strike a balance between housing production and preservation.

“Maybe you produce new housing in high opportunity areas, and you focus on preservation or low-income homeownership opportunities in some of the areas where you have more low-income residents today,” Trueblood said.

The Office of Planning and the Department of Housing and Community Development are surveying DC residents through Friday, Aug. 30, to determine where they think affordable and market-rate housing should be built. The agencies will discuss the findings from the survey and other engagement activities at a “community conversation” for Saturday, Sept. 21, from 1 to 3 p.m. at Ron Brown College Preparatory High School, 4800 Meade St. NE.

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Building up in Ward 3

When tenants of 3218 Wisconsin Ave. NW purchased their 20-unit building across from the Washington National Cathedral in July, they did so through a newly formed limited equity cooperative thanks to a loan from the nonprofit LISC DC. The transaction was the first city-funded affordable housing initiative in Ward 3 in years, according to a press release distributed by LISC DC.

Producing affordable housing in Ward 3 on a larger scale will be no easy feat. Much of the land is already developed with low-density single-family homes, land values are through the roof, and many residents oppose any development they expect to alter the perceived character of their neighborhood.

One resident group, Ward3Vision, was founded to advocate for what steering committee chair Susan Kimmel categorizes as “smart growth.”

To Kimmel, smart growth means more density along transit corridors such as Wisconsin and Connecticut avenues NW and particularly near stops for Metrorail’s Red Line. She said one way to do this would be constructing apartments above existing buildings — as occurred at Cityline at Tenley, where condos rise above the old Sears department store. Kimmel supports adjusting the zoning code and the Comprehensive Plan — the District government’s strategy for growth — to increase the building height limits and allow for more duplexes and taller apartment buildings within walking distance to commercial districts.

Under the current zoning regulations, 72% of land west of Rock Creek Park is zoned for single-family use, whereas just 36% of DC as a whole is zoned single-family, according to a recent report by The New York Times. Exclusionary zoning practices like this often result in segregating residents along racial and class lines.

“There would be areas for what we call ‘the missing middle,’” Kimmel said, referring to smaller multifamily buildings that are not as large as mid- or high-rise complexes and would be closer in scale to the single-family homes that dominate those areas today.

The Comprehensive Plan was last amended in 2011, but the DC Council will vote in September on a new round of suggested changes after giving initial approval in early July to amendments that prioritize affordable housing. In spring 2018, nearly 300 urban planning wonks and residents debated housing policy and land-use reform at a 13-hour council hearing about updating the plan.

Ward3Vision submitted numerous suggestions to the council, most of which involve “upzoning” to authorize taller, denser buildings near Metrorail stops and bus corridors.

In early July, eight land-use experts with the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research organization, spent a week in Washington studying ways to expand affordable housing in Ward 3. The Bowser administration asked ULI to make policy recommendations and identify sites in the area to build homes affordable to families making 30% to 80% of the area median income, which is $121,300 for a family of four.

At the culminating panel discussion, ULI’s Brad Leibin, a San Francisco-based architect, said Friendship Heights in particular has opportunity for growth. He recommended that the Fox 5 headquarters — which is slated to be relocated — be redeveloped into a 90-foot-high, mixed-use building that would have retail on the ground floor and affordable housing units above. He also recommended upzoning and redeveloping the four-acre site of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority bus garage and the parking lots of the Mazza Gallerie shopping center and Lord & Taylor.

The panel suggested making better use of publicly owned properties, such as public libraries in Tenleytown and Chevy Chase, to save the District from shelling out the money for pricey parcels of land. Trueblood has also discussed this approach. He tweeted in June that the Tenley-Friendship Library on Wisconsin Avenue was built with reinforcements, making it easier to build housing above it.

The cheapest and most effective way to increase Ward 3’s affordable housing stock would be for homeowners to add accessory dwelling units to their homes, according to ULI panelist Philip Payne of Ginkgo Residential in Charlotte, North Carolina. If just 14% of the 17,700 single-family homes in Ward 3 added an accessory dwelling unit, it would create 2,500 new affordable units, which is the ballpark target ULI panelists set for Ward 3. Since 2016, the District zoning code has allowed many single-family homeowners to add accessory dwelling units, such as backyard tiny homes or basement apartments, without having to obtain a zoning exception; groups such as the Coalition for Smarter Growth have sought to encourage such additions, but so far relatively few property owners have availed themselves of the opportunity. 

“Why … auxiliary dwelling units?” Payne asked rhetorically. “Because it is the easiest and fastest way to begin to address this problem.” 

The panel did not recommend declaring a state of emergency to address the affordable housing crisis or abolishing single-family zoning — steps taken by officials in Portland, Oregon, and in Minneapolis, respectively. It will present the final report of the findings it summarized in July at ULI’s conference in Washington in September. 

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Across the income spectrum

In interviews, DC residents and housing activists took issue with the Bowser administration’s interpretation of the meaning of the words “affordable” and “equitable” — and complained that the government’s latest commitments mask years of inadequate initiatives under multiple mayors.

Charmaine Hawkins, a native Washingtonian in her 70s and resident of the Woodridge neighborhood in Ward 5, said many of her friends have been forced out of their neighborhoods despite the availability of so-called affordable options.

“In my opinion, affordable housing begins with those who are working with incomes of $40,000 or more,” Hawkins said in an interview at the DC Department of Housing and Community Development’s 2019 housing expo at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

“My question is, Are you giving public relations statements … or are you really addressing affordable housing?” Hawkins said after Bowser gave a speech during which she boasted of her administration’s investments in the Housing Production Trust Fund, one of the District’s principal tools for combating the affordable housing crisis.

This year, the Bowser administration proposed to allocate more than $130 million to the fund, a $30 million increase over her first-term budget proposals. While many affordable housing advocates applauded this commitment, they bemoaned Bowser’s reluctance to invest in public housing at the same time. Her administration didn’t initially allocate any funds to fix the District’s crumbling public housing stock this year, and at the housing expo, protesters interrupted her speech to display a sign asking her to “fix public housing now.”

In the end, the DC Council amended Bowser’s proposal and dedicated about $24 million to public housing repairs and $116 million to the Housing Production Trust Fund.

Just how those funds should be distributed is a point of contention. Residents and advocates like Yasmina Mrabet, a housing organizer for local activism group LinkUp, say the Area Median Income (AMI) calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development does not fairly account for the income of most residents in areas with extreme inequality, like the DC region. That’s the measurement, however, that local governments use to determine which families are eligible for certain housing programs. 

The Washington region’s AMI is $121,300. Of the 19,506 subsidized affordable units that have been built, preserved or planned through various District housing programs since 2015, 46% of them are affordable to families making less than $60,650, or half of the AMI, according to the District’s affordable housing database. Just 21% of these units are affordable to families making less than $36,400, or 30% of the AMI.

Mrabet said true equity in affordable housing would mean dedicating proportionally more money to those lower on the income spectrum.

“The mayor is saying that she is going to equitably distribute affordable housing, but the mayor also doesn’t define what affordable housing is because in DC that’s generally considered to be 0-80% of the area median income,” Mrabet said. “Now show me a retail worker or a food worker that makes $80,000 a year to be able to afford ‘low-income housing.’ That’s why the demographics have changed so much — because people are getting pushed out.”

A recent study designated Washington as the city with the highest intensity of gentrification in the country. The report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition said that more than 20,000 black residents were displaced between 2000 and 2013. That’s a major reason Chocolate City is no longer majority black.

Residents in the 0-30% of AMI range — especially residents of color — are the ones leaving the city, Ruffin of Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless said. 

“The most equitable result would be to target the group of 0-30 AMI [for assistance],” she said.

Trueblood said generating housing for the most vulnerable residents — those in the 0-30% of AMI range — is a challenge because more funding is available for projects targeted at higher incomes. 

“We need to identify the needs and then we need to identify how to get the money into those needs,” Trueblood said about funding affordable housing projects across the income spectrum. 

This week, the Bowser administration broke ground on two affordable housing developments in the Deanwood neighborhood of Ward 7. Sixty-three of the 179 units in the buildings on 50th Street NE and Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE will be reserved for families at less than 30% of the AMI, while the remaining units will be set aside for families earning up to 60% of the AMI. 

“Through projects like Providence Place and the Strand Residences, we are getting Washingtonians into safe and dignified housing in the neighborhoods they know and love,” Bowser said in a news release Wednesday.

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‘The discomfort of people can’t dictate how positive change should come.’

If low-cost housing were to be built west of Rock Creek Park and an influx of lower-income families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds were to move into the area, by all accounts, there would likely be growing pains.

After a number of formerly homeless people began redeeming their housing choice vouchers at Ward 3’s Sedgwick Gardens, an upscale apartment building in the Cleveland Park-Forest Hills area, The Washington Post reported that calls to police rose from 34 in 2016 to 121 in 2018. Despite the uptick in calls, police reported that only five crimes took place at Sedgwick Gardens that year, according to the article.

Nonetheless, tenant advocates fault the D.C. government for a lack of oversight that allowed conditions to reach objectionable levels without caps in any single building — and that left residents uncertain of how to address inappropriate behavior other than calling the police.

“Affordable housing will not be accepted in Ward 3 as long as the city does not get its act together in the way it is trying to increase affordable housing,” Sedgwick Gardens Tenant Association president Carren Kaston said at the Urban Land Institute panel discussion. 

Kaston said some residents living in subsidized units in her building ought to be evicted based on having caused disturbances such as screaming. ULI panelist Philip Payne said that improved access to social services is the appropriate solution to the problem.

In spite of some opposition to affordable housing, Ruffin said it is important that the District pursue these policies anyway.

“The discomfort of people can’t dictate how positive change should come,” Ruffin said about the prospect of affordable housing west of Rock Creek Park bringing people from diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds to the area. “While there can be discomfort, there also is great value in making sure people have access to not only spaces but … to other cultures.”

Hawkins agreed it is important to foster racial and socio-economic inclusivity by building affordable housing in wealthy areas of the city. But she predicted that lower-income families moving into majority-white neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park would face struggles reminiscent of the resistance to school desegregation she saw during the civil rights movement.

“It would be as integration was when I was coming up — for a black person to go to a white school, this is the [level of] resistance we will have,” Hawkins said.

This post has been updated to clarify wording about the mayor’s plans to facilitate the creation of 36,000 new housing units by 2025.

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This article is being co-published with Street Sense Media, and a version of it appeared in the July 24 print edition. It is also part of The DC Line’s 2019 contribution to the DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project organized by Street Sense Media in collaboration with other local newsrooms. You can see the collective work published throughout the day at DCHomelessCrisis.press and join a public Facebook group to discuss how to act on this information or to add context to areas we may have overlooked.