Last week’s post A Place to Play: Potomac Gardens, Public Housing and Our Children made clear that the playground at the Potomac Gardens public housing complex had seen better days. The children who live in Potomac Gardens had stopped using it and their parents wanted it replaced. But the owners of the property, the District of Columbia Housing Authority, really couldn’t come up with the money to make that happen.
Despite the obvious need for affordable housing in the District of Columbia and indeed urban centers across the country, only a ridiculously small percentage of our taxes supports public housing. As a result, a new playground for Potomac Gardens wouldn’t be funded by the Public Housing Operating Fund or the Public Housing Capital Fund.
It’s very popular among the political right to rely on Ronald Reagan’s edict that “government is not the solution, government is the problem.” One may consider the former state of Potomac Gardens playground as supporting that statement but the reality is we rely on government for a lot of things—infrastructure, education, security, etc. If basic safety net issues were funded properly, government might do better by us all. Until that day arrives (and it might never happen), communities have to make demands of their elected representatives and government officials and then hold them to their mandate to serve the citizenry.
So here’s how Potomac Gardens got its new playground. Parents brought their concerns to the Potomac Gardens Resident Council. Resident Council President and D.C. Housing Authority Commissioner Aquarius Vann-Ghasri, worked with both Little Lights Urban Ministries and DCHA Director of Asset Management Laurie Putscher to try and solve the problem. Little Lights had a relationship with the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project, and despite the fact that the children who live in Potomac Gardens are not in fact homeless, they were willing to work with Little Lights and the Potomac Gardens community. Unfortunately, after months of negotiations and missed deadlines the new playground didn’t materialize.
Residents vote on playground design.
Residents vote on playground design.
Residents vote on playground design.
At this point, DCHA Director of Asset Management Laurie Putscher stepped up to the plate. Though she was unable to leverage DCHA funds for the playground, she was able to leverage resources from the District’s non-profit and corporate sectors. First of all, Putscher contacted Make Kids Smile, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to providing playground equipment for underserved children in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Make Kids Smile raises money for playground equipment and donates the materials to the recipient. They also pay a certified installer to be present on the day of the build to ensure the project is properly constructed and meets all applicable safety standards.
The president of Make Kids Smile, brought in a troop of volunteers from Foulger-Pratt, who had assembled and installed playground equipment before. They were joined by a slew of Potomac Gardens’ residents who were delighted to finally see their wishes brought to fruition. Little Lights Urban Ministries, happy to finally have a playground they can use during their summer programming, also sent volunteers.
In addition to volunteers, Foulger-Pratt also donated $5000 to fix the basketball rims, add additional landscaping beautification, and some painting. CT Management, the company DCHA has under contract to manage Potomac Gardens, also donated $5,000 and provided lunch for many of the volunteers. Finally, Laurie Putscher also contacted the Earth Conservation Corps who planted 20-30 trees, not just along the side of the playground itself, but throughout the property.
Providing a playground for kids who live in public housing shouldn’t be more complicated than building a dog park but in the District of Columbia, it might be. In 2007, the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) issued regulations which allowed for the creation of official, public dog parks on District-owned parkland. So far there are two dog parks in Ward Six and a third, which will be funded privately, has been approved. DPR has been around in one form or another since 1790 and yet only maintains eight playgrounds for children in Ward Six, the playground in Potomac Gardens is not one of them.
Public-private partnerships make sense for dog parks but do they make sense for playgrounds? Ward 6 Councilman Charles Allen was happy to ask DCHA Director Adrian Todman to get more involved and push for a new playground at Potomac Gardens, but the driving energy definitely came from the community. Without their willingness to hold elected representatives and public officials accountable to their constituents even this small victory could not have been achieved.
Below are images of the playground on the Potomac Gardens public housing complex as it was when Grassroots DC was founded and moved onto the property back in 2013. Broken down and missing safety rails, is the playground at Potomac Gardens Public Housing Complex safe? How do public housing communities fix these issues?
playground
no safety rails
swingset but no swings
no safety rails here either
The state of the playground was a topic of discussion in our basic computer class and a cause for concern in resident council meetings. Little Lights Urban Ministries, another nonprofit located in Potomac Gardens, who offers tutoring and a summer program for kids from pre-k to the 8th grade, also had concerns. The basketball court was another issue. Potomac Gardens’ resident Carlton Moxley sometimes laid out his own cash to replace the backboards.
One might assume that the playground of a public housing complex would be paid for and maintained by the government, but public housing is a complicated business. Most of us don’t even know who owns public housing. Is it the city? Is it the federal government? Below are some answers.
While the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) oversees the public housing program, it is administered locally by about 3,100 public housing agencies across the United States. The local public housing agency that administers Potomac Gardens and indeed all of D.C.’s public housing complexes is the District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA). Most public housing agencies own and manage their public housing developments themselves, but some contract with private management companies. DCHA does not manage Potomac Gardens itself; management of the property has been contracted out to CT Management.
All of this information, still leaves unanswered the question, where do the funds for the replacement of playgrounds in public housing developments like Potomac Gardens come from? The federal government funds public housing through two main streams: (1) the Public Housing Operating Fund, which is intended to cover the gap between the rents that public housing tenants pay and the developments’ operating costs (such as maintenance and security); and (2) the Public Housing Capital Fund, which funds renovation of developments and replacement of items such as appliances and heating and cooling equipment.
The purchase and installation of a new playground can easily cost more than $100,000. According to the US Department of Housing Operating Fund Budget for 2016 the D.C. Housing Authority will receive about $6,164 per unit to cover the gap between the rents that public housing tenants pay and the development’s actual operating cost. HUD’s Annual Budget does not explicitly state that District gets $6,164 per unit from the Operating Fund. The total budget for the Public Housing Operating Fund in 2015 was $4.44 billion. The share that goes to the District of Columbia Housing Authority is 1.1 percent or $48.84 million. The District of Columbia Housing Authority manages 7,924 units. Divide the $48.84 million by 7,924 units and you get $6,164 per unit. Of course, DCHA doesn’t spend $6,164 on each unit. Most of the money goes to salaries and other overhead costs. But this figure gives us an idea what kind of money DCHA has to work with to meet the maintenance and operating needs of the District’s public housing. In any case, we can’t expect DCHA to allocate $100,000 from the Operating Fund to pay for a single playground in one housing complex.
It might be more logical for the money to come from the Public Housing Capital Fund. In fact, DCHA received $27 million from the Capital Fund in 2014 and an additional $34.4 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. However, the Captial Fund grants were probably used for renovations and replacements needed in a single, housing complex or for specific projects like lead abatement, renovations needed to bring DCHA properties up to accessibility standards or environmental sustainability initiatives. Most of the Recovery Act funding will go to enhance housing projects that have or will become mixed-income developments like the townhouses at Cappers Carrollsburg. Getting money from the Capital Fund or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to replace a single playground in a 100 percent low-income housing development is highly unlikely.
So, what then? Clearly, the playground in the images above needs to be replaced or torn down all together. If the community within the Potomac Gardens Public Housing Complex can’t expect help for a project like this from the District of Columbia Housing Authority, what do they do? That question will be answered in the next post…
As many of you know, there is much discussion about the future of the DC General homeless shelter. This morning, the Post’s Petula Dvorakstated, “Developers are salivating over D.C. General. It’s a huge property with plenty of potential. So there’s no question that it will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about.” Mayor Gray is rightly calling to rehouse those at the DC General shelter before closing it, but his plan is based on an unfounded belief that private apartment owners will now come forward and house the hundreds of families at DC General at rents far below market rates. Thus, in the interests of “salivating” developers, hundreds of homeless people are going to be displaced again? DC General is District property and could be renovated, maybe even employing homeless or near-homeless workers, if the District wanted to do so. However, developers and homeowners in the area are working hard for the “revitalization” of the DC General area, which they see as requiring the removal of their homeless neighbors. The deterioration of DC General is required as proof of the need for “revitalization.”
A few weeks ago, I went to a great panel discussion, “Racism in the New DC,” organized by Empower DC, which spoke to these issues from a very refreshing perspective. The speakers were three public housing residents working to maintain public housing and public schools in DC (Marlece Turner, D. Bell, and Shannon Smith), as well as Dr. Sabiyha Prince (the author of African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, DC), Ron Hampton (a former police officer and activist against police abuse), and Post columnist Courtland Milloy.
The main takeaway from the panel discussion was that institutional racism (not individual racist people but a racist system) works based on the idea that brown and black people do not deserve as good things as white people do. Improvements in the city are made for white people both because they often have more money and also because they are seen as deserving better things, like better schools and better services.
I asked the panel about a recent Post article that had said that, “Almost 10 years after the District vowed to assure low-income residents in four areas that they wouldn’t be displaced if their neighborhoods were revitalized,” the District decided that this was “overly optimistic.” The District was considering a policy change to “no longer guarantee that residents have a right to stay in their neighborhoods, and the promise that existing public housing won’t be demolished until a new building is constructed to replace it would be abandoned.” Empower DC and others have been warning people about these false promises for some time.
So, I asked the panel, is this a new policy? or is this a statement of what the District was already doing? Courtland Milloy immediately said, “They do what they can get away with.” He explained that, when District officials made these promises, they had to to make their redevelopment plans and the destruction of public housing palatable. Earlier, Milloy had stated that we need to acknowledge institutional racism and that these “revitalization” policies are in the interest of property owners and not in the interests of the homeless and other poor DC residents.
How can we change the situation in which “They do what they can get away with”? As a start, we might recognize that the journalist’s statement “So there’s no question that it [DC General] will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about” is not a statement of fact but rather a statement supported by those who are interested in this outcome and “can get away with” it. It is a political statement in the battle over space in the District. The next step would be to support a range of policies, including permanent public housing and permanent affordable housing in the District.
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“?
Last week’s post A Place to Play: Potomac Gardens, Public Housing and Our Children made clear that the playground at the Potomac Gardens public housing complex had seen better days. The children who live in Potomac Gardens had stopped using it and their parents wanted it replaced. But the owners of the property, the District of Columbia Housing Authority, really couldn’t come up with the money to make that happen.
Residents vote on playground design.
