Butch Hopkins, president of the nonprofit Anacostia Economic Development Corp., said he is hopeful that the renovation of St. Elizabeths Hospital — slated to become headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security — will bring even more new faces to Anacostia.
More than 14,000 federal workers are expected to come to the new complex, and a 281,000-square-foot office and retail development is planned for across the street.
Reshaping Anacostia
Examples of the changes and new businesses in Ward 8.
View how demographics in your neighborhood have changed over time.
“We hope that, over time, a lot of the folks who commute here will begin to see how lovely the neighborhood is, get sick of that long commute and realize that Anacostia is actually a nice place to live,” Hopkins said.
Coming back home
At 7 o’clock on a recent morning, Rebecca Renard watched as construction workers razed the termite-infested 19th-century Victorian house where she and her brother grew up.
A woman on her way to work pulled her car to the side of road and watched. She saw Rebecca and called out, “Hey, I know you? Did you go to Banneker? Are you gonna live here?”
“I am!” Renard said.
“Oh, thank God. I’m sick of seeing condos go up,” she said.
For Renard, 35, returning to this plot of land was far more than a real estate deal. She grew up as a “Ward 8 girl.”
Her parents were civil rights activists. Her father was white, a teacher and former Catholic priest. Her mother was a black nurse, and they made their home in the affordable and historic Anacostia of the 1980s.
Soon after, crack ravaged the neighborhood. Her older brother was mugged at the bus stop. Drugged-out people slumped outside the corner store.
“It was the heyday of crack, and my parents wouldn’t let us do anything,” she said. “We had to take the bus across the river to go to the library.”
Her father felt worse and worse about having moved his family into the middle of an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. Renard went on to attend Oberlin College and NYU for her graduate degree. Her parents left the property about 1996 and went to live in Southwest, near Arena Stage; they kept the Anacostia house, but it sat empty and decaying.
Renard moved back to the District in 2004 to work for the D.C. library system.
“I was tired of seeing all these signs for condos with granite countertops,” she said of her changing neighborhood. “I knew I wanted to do something with this land.”
Developers made several offers for her property, on a leafy stretch of Historic Anacostia on Talbert Road and Mount View Place SE. But she refused to sell. Instead she got estimates from a structural engineer, who told her the damage was so bad it would be cheaper to tear the house down and start fresh. She found a design she liked online, and she’s rebuilding from scratch.
“It was so important to me that I make it right with this house,” she said. “I want to make sure that there’s legacy for the family. I know my dad felt he couldn’t give us this Cosby-Huxtable family experience we all watched on TV because we had this dingy house in a crack-y neighborhood. I wanted to say now, ‘Look, Dad, you didn’t make a bad decision. This is a nice place.’ ”
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