Built Environment

It’s no secret that it’s expensive to rent in DC, especially for people who make below the city’s median income of $152,000 for a family of four. Despite DC investing hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in building and preserving…

Southwest residents are pushing for soon-to-be-available land to become a new community-controlled, permanently affordable housing and retail space. At a community meeting Thursday, lead organizers Coy McKinney of grassroots…

There’s not much left of Deatrice Belt’s old neighborhood, the public housing community on Eaton Road SE known as Barry Farm. There’s the old basketball court, a surface now cracked and covered over with weeds, where people used to gather…

Renovations to the boarded-up Chesapeake House — a historic but empty building in the southwest corner of Tenleytown’s Fort Reno Park — should be completed by 2020, National Park Service officials told community members at a recent meeting…

Seven years after a derecho downed trees and power lines in DC and the region, Pepco started work this month to bury high-voltage utility lines in the outer neighborhoods of the city — a project envisioned in the aftermath of the powerful…

Under a Monday afternoon drizzle in Congress Heights, community advocates and politicians teamed up with a local nonprofit and a developer to break ground last week on Iona East, a new adult day center to serve District residents east of…

A proposal to issue nearly $70 million in DC revenue bonds for the renovation of historic Howard University dormitories won approval from the DC Council this week. The measure will also provide a boost to long-awaited restorations of two…

A Congress Heights landlord sparred with attorneys for the District of Columbia in Superior Court this month over whether a judge should drop a requirement that the landlord pay for renovation of a dilapidated apartment complex in…

A D.C. Superior Court judge will hear arguments today regarding the selection of a new receiver for a dilapidated apartment complex in Ward 8. The contested buildings are at the heart of a civil case brought in 2016 by the Office of the…

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration will host community meetings throughout the city this summer to establish neighborhood targets laying out how to distribute a total of 12,000 new affordable housing units over the next six years. …

A new effort seeks to secure official recognition for the historic significance of Barry Farm, a public housing complex in Southeast DC. The neighborhood's origins date to 1867, when the Freedman's Bureau established it as a place…

In a verdant Northwest neighborhood named after its woods, residents are vowing to resist the city’s efforts to add more greenage with over two dozen rain gardens on local streets. As part of the District’s plan to clean waterways of…

Critics of the District’s building code enforcement pointed earlier this month to unauthorized demolition at a museum project downtown as evidence of a need for change. Last Tuesday, in an effort to improve the performance of the…

Through the collaboration of a tree-planting nonprofit and an engineering firm, a stretch of sidewalk near Dupont Circle’s namesake park could be transformed into a community plaza dotted with new trees and other environmentally friendly…

The District’s new top planning official on Saturday met some of the biggest critics of the Bowser administration’s land-use policies, promising to listen to activists’ concerns about the pace of development. Earlier this month, Mayor…

Ward 3 residents and the District government struck a deal Wednesday to alter final details for the area’s family homeless shelter, one of six such facilities now open or under construction as replacements for the now-closed DC General…

The DC government is planning to replace the bulbs in more than 75,000 of the city’s streetlights with cheaper and more energy-efficient LED technology within the next two to three years. The change is expected to cut the city’s annual…

Just weeks before Monday’s shake-up atop the city’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, DC Council members joined tenants and affordable housing advocates in criticizing the agency for years of overlooked housing violations and…

In a darkened section of Busboys and Poets on Monroe Street NE, people sit and watch a documentary about DC residents fighting for affordable housing options just a few blocks away at the World War II-era Brookland Manor Apartments, the…