More Doors Closing on Working Poor

Bodaken said such housing is often the only option for more than half of the nation's renters -- those earning less than $30,000 a year. In this region, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment stands at $999. Housing advocates say thousands of service workers make less than half the salary needed to afford that.

Meanwhile, places like the Arna Valley apartments in South Arlington, once home to 3,000 tenants, have been torn down to make way for high-priced luxury townhouses and apartments.

The loss of garden apartments compounds the shortage of affordable housing that has overtaken the region as public housing complexes close and the number of publicly subsidized units dwindles -- a drop of about 6,000 in the past decade, according to data compiled by the National Housing Trust.

In a few cases, garden apartments have been preserved and kept in the affordable housing pool. Those include the 147-unit Georgian Court in Silver Spring and the 465-unit Gates of Arlington in Arlington.

Many others, though, are dying their long deaths, and tenants with few choices -- Cheadle, or his neighbor at Hunter's Ridge, Lisa Parnell, a food service worker with an injured hand, poor credit and four children -- are hanging on until the end.

A Welcome Change

Theresa Dudley's back door opens onto Landover Road. Every day, she sees further signs of decay at Hunter's Ridge and the Glenmore. A teacher and community activist, Dudley is eager to see the apartments torn down. And she doesn't want new rentals built in their place, even the mix of condominiums and apartments now proposed. She wants single-family homes.

"We're sitting here looking at this abandoned, vacant property," Dudley said. "Now they want to do the same thing again. I say, hell, no. We've got enough affordable housing in Prince George's County. Go over to Bethesda, where those builders live."

Such opposition dates to the 1960s, when residents railed about the influx of people and the growing demand for services that came with them.

In that decade alone, 70,000 apartments and 350,000 residents came to Prince George's. Many of the new units were in the two- to three-story garden complexes, often cheaply built.

As neighboring Montgomery County pulled back on such development, Prince George's officials rezoned farm fields and woodlands in what amounted to the highest concentration of apartment construction in the nation. A federal grand jury spent two years investigating real estate dealings in the county, uncovering bribes between a leading developer and a county commissioner. Convictions followed, and the head of the planning commission was found guilty of tax evasion.

Neighbors, meanwhile, already were complaining about the strain on schools, roads and police. Today, many see the glut of garden apartments as the root of the most intractable problems in Prince George's: crowded schools, blight and crime in communities inside the Capital Beltway.

Spiraling Into Decline

The story of Hunter's Ridge and the Glenmore, which knew several names throughout the years, underscores the evolution of garden apartments.

The first tenants at the complexes that opened in the mid-1960s were white families escaping school integration. They were soon replaced by black families fleeing crime, many of whom then left for new houses beyond the Beltway. Those who remained tended to have lower incomes.

At the same time, the buildings were aging badly, as maintenance by out-of-state landlords lapsed. In the early 1980s, the two complexes became part of the vast and chaotic real estate empire of landlord Loren Simkowitz, who was frequently at odds with the county over maintenance.