Click on the link  to read the entire Washington Post column by Marc Fisher.  Only the two paragraphs that reference the Bates area are pasted below.

Marion Barry’s Washington: Snapshots of the city the former mayor left behind

By Marc Fisher November 30 at 9:19 PM

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Two miles to the north, on narrow Bates Street NW, what was three blocks of boarded-up houses and open mounds of trash in the 1970s has been transformed into a charming set of pastel-painted rowhouses, home to whites and blacks alike. This was Barry’s first major housing initiative in his early years as mayor, and for nearly a decade, it looked like a swindle, as more than $4 million in federal money went missing and at least three agencies mounted investigations into the project.

The work was eventually finished, and houses that sold for an average of $67,000 each in 1979 have lately been selling for well more than $600,000. “Mayor Barry always looked out for us,” said Lou Holt, 33, who has lived most of his life on Bates. “He made this place better, and he made me better, kept me out of trouble, got me summer jobs in the rec centers, at the zoo.”

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