“We’ve run half the distance by getting the building out of [their] hands,” Graham said, referring to the previous owner. “The magnitude cannot be overstated.”
A gentrifying community
Just to the north of Adams Morgan and west of Columbia Heights, Mount Pleasant has long been a mix of professionals and blue-collar whites, blacks and Latinos. Along with a number of Washington neighborhoods, Mount Pleasant became increasingly affluent over the past 15 years as developers turned rental apartments into condominiums and waves of professionals bought up elegant rowhouses.
A handful of cafes and restaurants catering to the new crowd cropped up among the carryouts, groceries, and hardware and liquor stores, an evolution that gave neighborhood leaders hope that Mount Pleasant Street was experiencing a renaissance. Whatever momentum had built along the corridor stalled as the economy slowed and commercial development in Columbia Heights exploded with the building of DC USA several blocks away on 14th Street, the mall that includes a number of national chain stores, including Target.
A week after Target opened in March 2008, the fire — the first five-alarm blaze in the District in nearly 30 years — destroyed the Deauville. No residents were killed or seriously injured, even as many had to climb out windows, hang onto ladders raised by firefighters or scramble down stairwells thick with smoke. The flames engulfed the neighboring Meridian Hill Baptist Church, causing the roof to collapse and shattering stained-glass windows.
From one day to the next, an otherwise prominent, bustling spot on Mount Pleasant Street became shrouded in darkness.
The District tried to help the tenants relocate to apartments nearby, but many eventually moved away, some of them to Virginia and Maryland. Others returned to El Salvador, Mexico and Honduras.
In the days after the fire, Romero-Castillo said she felt an overwhelming sense of loss. Her computer was destroyed. She lost her clothing, photographs, passport, birth certificate and other important documents. Every year on March 13, the anniversary of the fire, she attends a vigil in front of the building’s entrance. “They want to come back,” she said of many of the building’s former tenants. “We are like family. We know the place. We know the people.”
Waiting to come home
Every month, the tenants association meets with its attorney to learn the status of the project. The tenants are working with a developer, the National Housing Trust/Enterprise Preservation Corp., a nonprofit organization that has built low-income housing complexes across the country. On Mount Pleasant Street, NHT plans 61 affordable units, with the apartments available to a family of four earning no more than $64,500.
What the tenants association still needs from the District government is $3 million to build the project. Additional funding would come in the form of “Low Income Housing Tax Credits,” which NHT and the tenants association would sell to corporate investors to raise $7 million. The next opportunity for NHT to apply for the tax credits will probably be spring, according to a spokesman for the city’s Department of Housing and Community Development.
A more immediate concern for the Deauville’s former residents is their loss of rental subsidies, which the District provided to many of the households since 2008 because then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) wanted to ensure that the displaced residents could remain in the area.
Fenty pledged $275,000 in city funds to help the tenants pay their first month’s rent and security deposit and to cover, in subsequent months, the difference between what they had been paying at the Deauville and their new apartments. The subsidies, which have totaled almost $1.8 million, were to end when the tenants returned to Mount Pleasant Street.
At least twice, the District has extended the subsidies beyond their expiration date. In July, the city ended the subsidies to 22 of the 36 households still receiving them. Seven of the remaining 14 households will lose their subsidies at the end of this month. The rest are to be cut off June 30.
Romero-Castillo, 46, said she just lost the subsidy — about $500 a month — that she needs to afford the one-bedroom apartment she rents for $1,130 a month a few blocks from her former home.
Now she says she will look for someone to split the rent and move into the living room.
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