Johanna Bockman is a sociologist and curator of the blog Sociology in My Neighborhood: DC Ward Six. She has been working with Grassroots DC and the Potomac Gardens Community on the production of the documentary Potomac Gardens Inside and Out (which you’ll soon hear more about on this site and beyond). Below is a post from her site of particular relevance to DC’s public housing communities and anyone interested in increasing the amount of affordable housing in the District of Columbia.
My Gentrification Talk & Video
By Johanna Bockman
Last week, I gave the annual presidential address to the DC Sociological Society about gentrification in DC. You can view a video of my address below. I start with a bit of history about the DC Sociological Society, which has its own connections to gentrification in DC. I then define gentrification, show some historical trends and maps, and discuss four myths/narratives about gentrification.
The fabulous discussion afterwards covered a wide range of topics, but there were two that I found particularly interesting.
First, we talked about looking beyond the economic motivations behind gentrification to its political motivations. What are the political motivations behind gentrification? How is DC as a whole threatened by gentrification? As discussed in the talk, one former resident of the Arthur Capper public housing project told me: “It [Arthur Capper] was part of the District of Columbia…like a finger or an arm in the body of the District of Columbia…You just cannot destroy a community and expect the city to thrive and survive.” His comment was surprising to me at the time. What is the nature of this District he is talking about? How is it being destroyed?
Second, we talked about renters. Many amazing community organizers in DC are working to increase low-income home ownership, especially through limited-equity cooperatives. I argued that we should also work to support renters, including by maintaining and expanding public housing, because about 41% of DC residents are renters and those in low-income jobs can barely afford to pay rent, let alone to buy a place. What would have to change in DC and nationwide to create a good environment for renters, especially low- and very-low-income renters? How might we create a positive “renter nation“?
Residents at Museum Square‘s sister property, Mount Vernon Plaza, received letters mandating a $500+ a month rent increase.
Azieb Tesfamariam, a recent immigrant from Eritrea and single mother of three, was looking for housing early last year. She couldn’t afford her yearly rent increase of $50 a year so she went out searching for something more affordable. She found Mount Vernon Plaza. Even though she laments that many Americans cannot understand her Eritrean accent, she carefully explained to the leasing consultant in April 2013 that she needed a housing unit that had little to no annual rent increases a year. He assured her that Mount Vernon Plaza had an excellent affordable housing program that would not exceed her budget.
Mount Vernon Plaza–one of only two affordable apartment complexes remaining in DC’s Chinatown.
She moved into the unit on April 1, 2013, paying a little over $1000 a month for her two-bedroom apartment. On December 16, 2013, she received a letter from Mount Vernon Plaza’s Associates telling her that her rent will no longer be affordable. She will have to start paying $1624.50 a month starting March 31st 2014. Confused, she took her letter to all of the government-sponsored housing assistance agencies in the city. She asked them how is this possible. She’s a single mother who works at a nearby hotel cleaning rooms; paid work is never a certainty since she does not have seniority yet. “Why did the management ask me to move into this apartment, if they were going to end the program that year,” she questioned?
Over the Christmas holiday instead of worrying about what gifts to purchase for her children, she was desperately searching for affordable housing. By January 31st, the final date the management demanded a decision about whether she will leave or stay, she signed a new lease with the MVP. Dejected and financially broke, she currently spends all of her money on rent, occasionally asking family members to help when she can’t earn enough money from her part-time job.
Eventually, someone referred her to Organizing Neighborhood Equity, a long-time organizing group that organizes residents around their right to affordable housing and good living-wage jobs. ONE DC and Mount Vernon Plaza residents discovered they are not covered by project-based Section 8 protections, unlike MVP’s sister property, Museum Square. MVP residents are not guaranteed a voucher or even the right to purchase when the building goes on sale or when the project-based section 8 affordability ends. Residents under this program must either pay near or at market-rent or move out. This is the reason the Mount Vernon Plaza’s owner/lawyers gave when residents cried foul.
But MVP residents insisted something sinister and unethical is going on. Not only is the same owner moving to demolish its sister company, Museum Square, the owner refuses to be transparent with the MVP residents about their now-expired LIHTC program. When residents moved in, the management company gave no indication that the program would end in 2013 or that they would have to move or pay exorbitant rents after the program expired. “The management had to know that the program would be ending in 2013; why did they leave us in the dark for all this time?,” Trayawn Brown asked. “And they still haven’t told everyone in the program that the program is over. I think they are just trying to avoid mass vacancies.”
Instead, they were given a two-month notice and expected to pay for units that many residents argue are in various states of disrepair. In state of panic, residents have been moving out left and right; some are moving in with family members, becoming essentially homeless.
Through organizing, residents realized that there’s a bigger –citywide—problem. The city has almost universally relied on LIHTC to produce “affordable” housing in the city. Yet this type of affordable housing goes by income that’s based on the Area Median Income (DC’s AMI currently stands at $108,000 for a household of four). LIHTC is generally priced at 60% AMI or 80% AMI. As the general income of DC and the surrounding areas rises, so does the LIHTC rents—which now hover around over 1000 for a one bedroom, when priced at 60% AMI. Without a voucher and supplemental income, residents like MVP renters cannot find comparable housing in the quickly gentrifying areas of NW, where many of them have lived for close to two decades.
But more than that, LIHTC has no provision mandating affordability after the tax credits expire. In 1990, the city mandated additional 15 years on all LIHTC properties after the initial 15 year affordable period ends, but that law does not apply to MVP residents because the law was not retroactive.
All of DC’s primary affordable housing programs are under attack—Public Housing, LIHTC, and Project-Based Section 8! “We are a sign of things to come for LIHTC properties in the city,” Quitel Andrews, MVP resident says. “If we don’t change this policy now, thousands and thousands of LIHTC renters will be homeless by 2020.”
Mount Vernon Place residents recommend the city enforce two immediate legislative actions now. We stand with MVP residents. We urge the mayor & city council to enact these demands today!
The city should immediately subsidize the tenants who were on the LIHTC program, including those who were forced to signed new leases with MVP management under duress like Ms. Tesfamariam.
Expand Rent Control to all “set aside” affordable housing/LIHTC units already in place and to a portion of newly built apartment units
MVP residents and ONE DC have been moving swiftly to compel the city council and Mayor Gray to act now. The time is of the essence. Click the link below to:
Something is missing from Washington DC’s Chinatown. Of course we can all notice the elaborate friendship arch topped with characteristic pagoda style roofing, and the yearly Chinese New Year festival. There’s a handful of bustling restaurants and decorations throughout its streets, and Chinese characters adorn each of the storefronts and street signs throughout the few blocks that constitute this cultural icon in our nation’s capital. But despite the Chinese decor, Chinese shop displays, and Chinese food, what’s becoming increasingly hard to find in Chinatown are Chinese people. The very human beings responsible for the existence of this much loved and increasingly desirable destination for so many. And with recent news of plans to demolish Museum Square, one of the two remaining buildings still home to low-income residents in Chinatown as well as the majority of the district’s Chinese population, it seems that those left are being perpetually pushed towards displacement.
Museum Square sits at 401 K Street NW, today surrounded by many new buildings of luxury apartments and condos, grocery stores, restaurants from Subway to Sweetgreen to wine bars and gourmet eateries, all interspersed throughout a plethora of new development. The building holds a Section 8 subsidy contract, and families living in its 302 units pay rent that is adjusted to be no more than 30% of their average monthly income. This contract has preserved most of the only remaining rental housing in the neighborhood still available to low income residents in the face of a wave of development and soaring housing prices that leave no corner of Chinatown unturned.
In October of 2013 tenants received a notice explaining that the owner of the building intended to terminate their contract with HUD, thus ending all meaningful affordability requirements. More recently tenants were issued another notice which revealed plans to demolish the building. The notice also offered tenants of Museum Square the opportunity to purchase the property, and was posted throughout the building’s hallways per the provisions of DC’s Rental Housing Act. This act has made the district notorious for its “tenant-friendly” laws, which require that before any rental property in the district can be sold or demolished, it must first be offered to the tenants who call it home. Theoretically, this creates opportunities for tenant ownership and long term affordability of rental property in DC, and could be instrumental for tenants like those of Museum Square who wish to preserve their building as affordable. But it only seems that way before taking into account the $250 million that it would cost to acquire the building, which works out to just over $827,800 per unit. In reality, the astronomically inflated price tags that developers are able to attach to these properties in up-and-coming areas of the city often render tenant purchase rights virtually useless for tenant ownership, or to aid tenants in avoiding displacement by maintaining affordable rents throughout the city.
In addition to the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, owners of buildings where at least 25% of apartments have rents considered to be affordable are also required to issue DOPA notices. Per the District Opportunity to Purchase Act, properties that are home to low-income tenants are offered to the city before they can be sold or demolished (in addition to being offered to tenants) as another opportunity to preserve affordable rents in DC. But out of the vast majority of rental properties sold in the district each year which qualify as affordable based on rent levels, only a tiny fraction comply with this part of the law requiring that they be offered to the district. And of the few that have complied over the years and issued the appropriate notices to the district, the city has not sent a single response to a DOPA notice, rendering DOPA another of the district’s efforts to preserve affordable housing that doesn’t extend beyond paper. If it were actually utilized, DOPA could be a beneficial tool to protect its residents’ housing in the face of economic interests in development that cause hundreds upon hundreds of people to be displaced each year. But again, to date this tool goes completely unused.
Washington DC’s Chinatown hasn’t always been such an expensive hot spot in the city. Even before the recent wave of gentrification that has resulted in a rapid drop in the number of Chinese businesses and residents, Chinatown has had a turbulent history of displacement and endurance. During the development of the Federal Triangle, DC’s original Chinatown was uprooted completely. Once established in the blocks surrounding H and 7th Streets NW, the riots in 68 also took their toll on the neighborhood, causing many residents to permanently relocate to suburban areas of Virginia or Maryland. But even so, in 1990 Chinatown was still predominantly made up of low-income Asian residents and Asian owned businesses. As of 2010 the neighborhood was home to less than 20% Asian residents, the majority of which lived in Museum Square or Wah Luck. As one resident of Museum Square describes it, “we have endured so much. We lived in this neighborhood when it was not safe for us, when things were hard. We should now be able to see some of the fruits of our endurance. It is not fair for them to displace us like this. We must fight to stay here now.” Surely the long term residents of Museum Square are willing to fight in any way they can to preserve what for many of them has been their home for decades. Unfortunately, the infamous Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act may not be much help in their struggle to stand up to the determination and economic interests of developers, despite the justification of the act’s existence as a means available to tenants to try and protect their housing.
Ironically, all the authentically ‘Chinese’ elements that defined Chinatown and were indicative of its attractive urban cultural diversity are the same ones now being priced out of the area by its high desirability. An especially visual illustration of this can be found in the signage throughout the neighborhood. In accordance with a city mandate for cultural preservation of Chinatown, all stores and businesses must bear signs that display Chinese characters. In the face of such rampant gentrification, these Chinese characters become adornments for huge chain corporations like Starbucks and Urban Outfitters, and no longer signal locally owned businesses intended to serve the local community of primarily Asian low-income residents. Chinatown has become an Asian-themed amusement park for young professionals that continue to price long-term residents out of the neighborhood.
While the situation in Chinatown is certainly a chillingly illustrative depiction of the harsh effects of gentrification, we need only to zoom out slightly to see that Chinatown is not unique; in fact this is a city and country-wide phenomenon. As with Mount Pleasant, Petworth, and countless other neighborhoods, Chinatown has become a hot new urban commodity for those able to afford the luxury of living there, while long term residents, who along with their families and histories were part of the formation of this “cultural enclave”, continue to be incessantly pushed out. It is a process by which neighborhoods become empty, expensive shells of their former selves, and new residents get to wear the badge of “U Street” or “H Street” or “Chinatown” for free, no matter how high they pay in market rent.
Tensions ran high between developers and community members last Wednesday night, June 25, during a meeting regarding the proposed redesign of the Southwest neighborhood held at the Capitol Skyline Hotel.
The Southwest Small Area Plan, still in its feedback and revision phases, plans for a “newly envisioned” Southwest neighborhood, including the M Street corridor, which is expected to see the most changes, according to Associate Director for Neighborhood Planning Tracy Gabriel.
The border boundaries of the area proposed are Maine Ave. SW, P St. SW, South Capitol and the Interstate 695, and the project has been in development for the last year.
The meeting, led by Gabriel as well as Ward 6 Community Planner Melissa Bird, noted the significant change already happening in and around Southwest, and depicted the proposed plans as the next step of an expansionary growth process.
“Southwest is incredibly unique, and we want to move forward in the best way and best tools to preserve that,” Ward 6 Community Planner Melissa Bird said. “People want to make sure there is a place for everybody to stay in Southwest.”
However, the plan’s potential changing of traditionally low-density areas of Southwest to areas of high-density is a cause of concern and conflict for many community members.
“I count 17 different building properties on this list, and unless I’m wrong, all but for two, the density goes up. Twenty years from now, SW will have double the population if all of these things happen,” 15-year Southwest resident and activist Rick Bardash said. “We want a neighborhood, and we can’t have a neighborhood when density is twice as much.”
Even more of a concern for community activists was whether or not the plans and expansion will displace residents of Greenleaf Gardens Apartments, a public housing complex just south of M Street.
Community activist and 38-year District resident Thelma D. Jones noted that there is deep distrust held by lower income residents for developers, lingering from a long citywide history of redevelopment and gentrification.
“What they do know and remember is that when urban renewal occurred before, more than 23,000 people were displaced,” Jones said. “That fuels even greater fear and anxiety. The people have lost faith.”
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The DC Office of Planning is accepting feedback regarding the plan until July 9 . The proposed plans are available here.
