At Each Hurdle, Stronger Resolve

In the end, the yes vote was unanimous.

"My mom wants to stay," Mitchell said afterward, by way of explanation. Rodriguez said he was committed to helping fellow tenants pursue their dreams.

"Don't group me with drugs. The faces they see here aren't the faces selling drugs on the street. And we were here first. And I'm not leaving."

MICHELLE CRAIG

Capital Manor tenant

While they waited for the city's decision, the tenants association worked on recruiting more residents to the project. Having more participants would bolster the application to the National Cooperative Bank, which had tentatively promised a $3.5 million acquisition loan and an $8.1 million construction loan. Nerissa Phillips and Solomon Moreno spent three hours one night preaching the gospel of collective home ownership door-to-door, offering tips in English and Spanish on how to save money for the down payments they hoped they would need. Give up chips and soda from the corner store, they suggested. Turn off your cell phone for a couple of months. Ask for cash for Christmas.

"We're all in the same boat. We all lose or we all win," Phillips said. "If someone is embarrassed because they're broke, well, we're all broke."

She and Moreno barely knew each other, although they'd lived three floors apart in the same building for years. Their joint effort was one of many small interactions unfolding across a cultural divide in the complex, which was about two-thirds Latino immigrants and one-third black residents. Until the tenant purchase effort, the two populations rarely mixed.

But the tenant board was chosen to include both. Meetings and documents were always translated. At a fundraising dinner, the $5 buffet featured chimichangas as well as chicken wings. Stereo speakers boomed hip-hop, then salsa, then hip-hop again. As the project moved forward, people who for years had passed each other in the dim hallways or concrete courtyards without speaking began exchanging polite greetings.

Arriving home one day loaded down with grocery bags, Fitzgerald noticed a Latino youth holding the door open for her -- for the first time in her memory.

Little such camaraderie, however, developed with the mostly white residents of the 19 rowhouses across the street. Built early in the 20th century for well-off families, the houses had transformed over the decades along with the fortunes of W Street. When drugs and crime overtook the block in the early 1980s, only the poorest families remained. But with the U Street Metro station set to open in 1991, white-collar professionals started buying and upgrading the rowhouses. By the time Capital Manor went on the market in 2001, all but two had changed hands.

The northsiders said they liked the idea of living on a street that was racially and economically mixed. But some owners worried that Capital Manor's run-down appearance detracted from their property values. They complained about noise -- Capital Manor's intercom system had stopped working years ago, so visitors often announced their arrival by blaring car horns. When Thomas proposed that the city build a playground on an empty lot between two rowhouses, the northsiders objected, saying it would become a magnet for thugs. The lot remains empty and has been put up for sale.