WaPo story on Temple Courts (“affordable housing plan hasn’t delivered”)

You might wish to read this Washington Post article on Temple Courts, which was located due south of the Bates area.  Click on the link to read the entire article; the first few paragraphs are provided below.   And I have included the subsequent post from Washington City Paper Housing Complex reporter Aaron Wiener.

In District, affordable-housing plan hasn’t delivered

By , Published: July 7

By now, Mary Dews-Hall was supposed to be back home. When the city tore down Temple Courts five years ago, staff assured her that she and her neighbors would return. That there was a plan. That this time wouldn’t be like the others, when poor, black neighborhoods were paved over in the name of progress.

The New Communities Initiative was going to infuse prosperity into this troubled area, 10 blocks from the Capitol. It would serve as a template for remaking other violent neighborhoods in the District, a commitment to those who felt a changing city was leaving them behind.

By the end of this year,180 units were to have been built for former Temple Courts tenants. So far, the plan hasn’t delivered one.

The plan for Dews-Hall’s neighborhood was supposed to show that the city had figured out some of the great puzzles of urban renewal, how to revitalize a community without replacing it, how to create a place for prosperous newcomers without pushing out poor old-timers.

Instead, New Communities has shown how hard it is to make affordable housing work in the modern American city and how easy it was to let a program that was the centerpiece of the District’s affordable-housing efforts unravel.

And here is the subsequent WCP Housing Complex post.  Again, click on the link to read   the entire blog post.

Housing Complex

The Lessons of Temple Courts

Posted by Aaron Wiener on Jul. 8, 2013 at 5:23 pm

The Washington Post‘s Robert Samuels has a great in-depth story today on the years-long screw-up that’s turned a low-income housing complex into a semi-permanent parking lot. In 2008, Temple Courts, on North Capitol Street between K and L streets NW, was demolished to make way for a planned mixed-use, mixed-income development on the increasingly valuable site, replacing a squalid hotbed of crime that culminated in the 2004 execution-style murder of a 14-year-old girl. Since then, a whole bunch of things have gone wrong and left the site flattened, raising the questions of 1) what went wrong, 2) what happens now, 3) who exactly is in charge, and 4) how we prevent this from happening again.

Samuels’ Post colleague (and my Housing Complex predecessor) Lydia DePillis blogs that the moral of the story is that “big, complicated public land deals involving private investment, churches and mixed-up property records are really hard to pull off.” That’s certainly true. I’d add one other takeaway: It’s all about the medium term.

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