Housing Surge and Resurgence

Smith now plans to turn the former Camp Simms into a multimillion-dollar project of 75 single-family houses that are expected to start in the mid-$300,000 range. A new Giant grocery store on the site is expected to open in 2007. Residents are pushing, in addition, to attract sit-down restaurants like Applebee's or Outback Steakhouse -- a part of the mix that will be needed to attract and keep residents moving from areas with better amenities.

He cautioned that the going has been slow and probably will not get any easier. "Logan Circle took 25 years to take off," Smith said.

For the past year, Darrin Davis, a real estate agent for Prudential Carruthers Realtors, has led occasional weekend tours of homes for sale in Anacostia. Davis said one of his real estate colleagues jokingly asked him if he was going to have a police escort for a recent Sunday afternoon tour. "I said, 'You haven't been here in a long time,'" Davis said.

Overall crime in the area covered by the 7th police district is down 57 percent since 1993. Homicides have dropped by a similar amount, to 54 last year from 133 in 1993.

On a recent Sunday, Davis had 18 pages of homes for sale east of the river and four African American women showed up for his two-hour walking tour. Two women were college graduates in their 20s, each looking to buy her first home; another potential buyer was a fortysomething lawyer for NASA who had just moved to the area from Atlanta; the fourth was a computer consultant who was looking for an investment property for her and her lawyer husband.

The first stop on the house tour: a shotgun rowhouse, built in 1905, in historic Anacostia at 13th and W streets SE. Price: $274,900. A few years ago the same houses would have been roughly $125,000.

Tiffany Armstrong, 28, who rents an apartment in Laurel, got the message.

When the tour got to Hunter Place Condominiums, a few blocks off Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, she didn't hesitate to sign a $250,000 contract for a three-bedroom unit. Armstrong got one of the last remaining luxury condos. The renovated units, in what was an abandoned apartment building eight months earlier, sold out in two weeks.

James Bunn, who owns a strip of buildings on the avenue about a mile from the Hunter Place complex, sees opportunities in the newcomers. His tenants include a hodgepodge of shopkeepers, including a sprinkler company upstairs and a barber shop and hip-hop clothing store on the first floor.

"I've seen this neighborhood go from good to bad to terrible, and now it's rebounding," Bunn said. "You're not going to have to worry about kids writing on walls and people throwing trash anymore. It's going to get more like Georgetown over here."

Still, there are no shortage of examples of how far Ward 8 has to go.

Take Bryan Place in historic Anacostia, where Mauricio Ticas, a 36-year-old pharmacist technician and his partner, Tommy Beckner, spent much of the summer cleaning up beer bottles, candy bar wrappers, trash and rusted car parts that littered the alley next to their $175,000 rowhouse. Behind their house sits a boarded-up apartment complex.

Ticas, a native of El Salvador, kept his Dupont Circle place but moved in this summer with Beckner, a 24-year-old mortgage loan officer from Northern Virginia, to Southeast Washington. The couple is adjusting to their new community. "Being a snob from Northwest, I'm not used to being pulled over for roadblocks," said Ticas, who said he has had to stop on his way home at checkpoints set up by police.

But, he added, he has rebuffed efforts by neighbors to get him to report people acting suspiciously in alleys. "We didn't move to this area to call the cops on people," he said.

Hannah Hawkins, a community activist who has lived on Howard Road for more than two decades, is concerned about whether her new neighbors will become involved. "You can't come into our community and be silent," Hawkins said. "You have to make a difference."

Maliik Turner, the high-tech specialist, has his own concerns. About five months after he had moved with his family into their new house, gunshots were fired through the front door and windows. No one was home and no one got hurt, but he admitted, "I was wondering, 'Did I make a mistake?'"

Still, he is bullish on the neighborhood. "You can tell it's changing and getting safer," Turner said. "The bad element is moving out. They can't sustain a lifestyle over here."