By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 20, 2005
The bleak public housing that once lined the East Capitol Street entrance to the District is mostly demolished, save a few brick shells awaiting a bulldozer's blows. The prostitutes and the drug dealers have disappeared from the busy main drag and the hilly side streets.
Surrounded by newly empty land, a bright, brick-and-stucco apartment building for the elderly has risen. And men and women who once lived at the now-destroyed East Capitol Dwellings are moving in.
"A lot of people here thought we were never going to make it, but we made it," LeRoy Woodson, 64, said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony yesterday. "Everybody here is glad to be back."
Hundreds of apartments, townhouses and single-family homes are to go up around the building over the next 2 1/2 years -- a mix of sales and rentals, some for public housing residents, some subsidized for rent or purchase by low- and moderate-income households, the rest available at market rates.
There is space for 95,000 square feet of retail stores as well, and city officials say that probably will include a supermarket.
The development, christened Capitol Gateway Estates, was launched in 2000 through a federal program designed to replace distressed public housing with something better. The District's hot real estate market boosted the number of units planned from 555 to at least 761.
"There's going to be a time, very soon from now, that I'm going to be able to drive by this neighborhood and swell up with pride," said Michael P. Kelly, executive director of the D.C. Housing Authority. Motorists, he said, will "look on either side, and say, 'This is magnificent.' "
For most of the 1980s and 1990s, East Capitol Dwellings was notorious for crime, drugs, blight and poverty. The HOPE VI project demolished the complex and two adjacent government-owned apartment buildings -- a total of more than 1,100 units, many of which had been vacant for years.
"People just gave up. Never thought it would be changed," said Lorraine Still, 72, who moved into the new building from an apartment near Catholic University, where she moved when East Capitol Dwellings was shut down.
Yesterday, she sat in the sunny common room with friends from the old neighborhood, enjoying a catered lunch after the ribbon-cutting. Evelyn Brown, another former resident who has helped lead the redevelopment, sat with her. Although she could qualify for the senior building, she said, she is waiting for a townhouse.
Brown, 72, said she is pleased that the rebirth of the neighborhood is finally taking shape after several delays in the financing and design phases.
But she was also nostalgic for those seniors who would not be coming back -- those who didn't qualify because of credit problems, or died before the project was completed, or simply became comfortable in what were supposed to be temporary homes.
For those folks, "my heart is hurting," Brown said.
Although the Housing Authority last year began requiring that HOPE VI projects create a public housing unit for every one that is demolished, that mandate does not apply to Capitol Gateway.
Housing officials said the development will include a large percentage of public housing residents, with the number pending while officials debate how many residences will be built on the 40-acre site.
Capitol Gateway is one of four recent HOPE VI projects in the District. Two others have been completed, and Kelly said the housing authority is finalizing its application for a seventh grant to remake the vacant Sheridan Terrace apartments, just off Suitland Parkway.
The most recent grant was to remake the vacant Eastgate complex, a short distance from Capitol Gateway, across Benning Road. The impact of the two revitalizations so close together, Kelly said, will be powerful. "It's a whole part of the city that will benefit."
