Washington real estate developers Jeff Epperson and Rick Powell began snapping up land on Howard Road in Anacostia in 2004. It was an aggressive move in the downtrodden neighborhood.
The potential, after all, was great.
Deparmtent of Homeland Security location in metropolitan Washington
(By Laris Karklis/The Washington Post/Department of Homeland Security) - A map locating the Department of Homeland Security West Campus at Saint Elizabeths
A new headquarters for Homeland Security — the biggest federal construction project in the country since the Pentagon in the 1940s — was on the way. The $3.4 billion project was expected to transform the sweeping grounds of St. Elizabeths Hospital into a national security campus and bring 16,000 jobs to the very poorest of Washington neighborhoods.
Federal and District officials have promoted the project as a savior that would finally bring jobs and prosperity to surrounding Southeast neighborhoods — Anacostia, Buena Vista, Barry Farm, Congress Heights. The work-a-day crowd with cash to spend also has signalled opportunity to commercial real estate developers whose business was kicked sideways in the recession.
Yet after 10 years of planning and two years of construction, progress is dragging to a halt as lawmakers feud over matters big (how to secure the nation) and small (what offices to lease). A tug-of-war over funding has left the project with barely enough money even to finish its first building, the U.S. Coast Guard headquarters.
A larger existential crisis also looms: Some in Washington are asking whether the Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, should be dismantled.
For now, the former mental asylum — whose vacant brick buildings and placid grounds once served as a home to patients including the poet Ezra Pound and John Hinckley, who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 — is still planned as the agency’s home.
So much, it turns out, depends on Congress, where the Republican-controlled House has slimmed or rejected a series of funding requests. The delays have added an estimated $500 million to the cost, which has ballooned to $3.9 billion, $1.3 billion of which was spent as of December. Initially expected to be completed by 2016, the project could now take until 2021 or later, if it is finished at all.
The chairman of a House committee overseeing the project says most of the plan ought to be scrapped. And even the project’s most fierce advocates cannot say for certain when the project might be finished or even if it will be.
Over on Howard Road, Epperson and Powell have watched their prospects fade. The partners tried to lure Wal-Mart, but it went elsewhere. They tried to land a lease for additional Homeland Security offices, but the government cancelled the offering. In recent months, they tried to secure financing to build apartments on their 10 acres but found no takers.
“We’re in a bit of a holding pattern with not much prospects at this point,” Epperson said. “We don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve lost a tremendous amount of value in the past few years.”
Historic hospital
First called the Government Hospital for the Insane, St. Elizabeths was built in the 1850s as a grand demonstration of therapeutic treatment for the mentally ill after furious lobbying of Congress by advocate Dorothea Dix. Bissected by Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, the hospital’s 183-acre east campus is owned by the District, which built a new 450,000-square-foot in-patient mental hospital there in 2010.
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