D.C. Deal Could Get Schools, Libraries
City Would Let Developers Build Housing, Shops

By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 7, 2006

The District of Columbia is studded with worn-out municipal buildings, many surrounded by the gleaming office and apartment towers of today's construction boom.

The old schools and libraries need to be replaced. Developers are hungry for space for even more condominiums. So D.C. officials want to make a deal: The developers would build new libraries, schools and maybe even police stations, and get the privilege of putting condominiums or shops on top of or alongside them.

Proponents say developers could pay now for amenities the city wouldn't fund for years, if ever, and developers would get scarce city space for housing -- mostly high-end, but some affordable.

With the costs of fixing schools and libraries estimated at close to $2 billion, said D.C. Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp, "I don't believe we can tax our way out."

Even as the District and federal governments are considering proposals to increase funding to rebuild libraries and schools, Cropp (D) has introduced a bill to launch private redevelopment of some of those facilities as a way to bring in corporate dollars and move projects more quickly through the pipeline. The approach is being used increasingly to renovate libraries in other cities but remains rare on public school campuses.

Aides to D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) say more than a dozen sites are ripe for public-private development and could make way for hundreds of new apartments or offices, along with new facilities, boosting the city's tax base and population. City planners cite such complexes as the Marie H. Reed Community Learning Center in Adams Morgan -- a four-acre compound smack in the center of one the District's liveliest neighborhoods.

A cement plaza is framed by large, mostly windowless buildings, which house a poorly maintained school, a cramped recreation center and a health clinic whose directors say they desperately need more space. For more than a year, a few community activists have been urging the city to look for developers interested in building housing on part of the site, then putting new public facilities on the rest.

"There's a good dream here, a good concept," said James Coleman, 52, president of the booster group Friends of Marie Reed. "But the [existing] building doesn't serve that dream."

Coleman said developers could be asked to build a mix of market-rate and affordable housing, since low-cost apartments are disappearing rapidly from Adams Morgan. He would expect them to provide a new rec center, with a recording studio for a recently donated electronic keyboard. The clinic would have enough space for its dentists and substance abuse counselors. The school's noisy, open layout would be replaced by traditional classrooms, fully wired for the Internet.

Some of Coleman's neighbors, however, say his approach could turn out to be a nightmare. The skeptics include old-timers who believe public-private development is simply code for gentrification, drawing more rich, white people to what used to be a working-class black and Latino neighborhood. Some cling to the Reed complex -- built in 1977 to replace a crumbling, formerly segregated school -- as an important piece of history. And there are such residents as Simi Batra, newly elected president of the Reed-Cooke Neighborhood Association, who philosophically oppose giving up part of a public asset to improve the rest.

"You don't sell your public spaces to finance school construction; that's not how it's done," Batra said. "Because what happens the next time a renovation needs to be done? In a hundred years, there will be nothing left to sell."

On Wednesday, the area's Advisory Neighborhood Commission voted 5 to 3 to ask the District to gauge interest in Marie Reed from developers. But the commissioners said their resolution "should in no way be perceived as" a commitment to the public-private arrangement.

Opposition from neighborhood groups has scuttled or complicated past efforts to launch such deals. Talk of adding condominiums to the sites of the Tenleytown and Anacostia libraries, for example, was denounced by activists and went nowhere in 2004. Even projects that did move forward -- the renovation of the historic Sumner School in the 1980s and construction of a new Oyster Bilingual Elementary in the 1990s -- took years to accomplish, as city officials and developers navigated planning, financing and zoning hurdles.

In the meantime, D.C. officials watched enviously as Portland, Ore., and other cities invited private developers to help remake libraries, transit stations and other government-owned sites, adding housing, offices and shops in the process.

"It makes excellent use of an existing resource," said architect Howard Decker of the Washington office of Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects, which has done several such projects. "It puts development where you want it."

District officials say they hope to mitigate resistance by soliciting community input on which sites to develop. At the same time, some proponents of the idea believe its time may have come. They note that Cropp's bill proposing a citywide push for private-public development drew eight of 12 possible co-sponsors. A Board of Education committee made a similar proposal last year.

"It's kind of nice to see people catching on," said Robert A. Peck, a former appointee to the Board of Education and former president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade. For the city, Peck said, "This is the way to get someone else to borrow the big money and get a return on your valuable property."

Christina K. Wilson, an architectural historian and general contractor, has tried for years to interest city officials in private redevelopment of school campuses. She and a colleague sketched site plans for replacing several sprawling Capitol Hill schools with more compact facilities to make room for housing, offices and shops. "Almost every piece of D.C. public school property is worth a fortune," Wilson said.

Smaller properties, such as the West End library at 24th and L streets NW, offer the opportunity for "air rights" development -- the right to construct high-rise apartment or office towers above a public facility or highway. In the case of the West End, the library sits next to a small police building, which city officials say could be relocated. More than 400 luxury condominium units are under construction nearby.

"That's one of the premier sites in the city right there" said Jim Abdo, a developer who renovated buildings just across L street from the library. "For years I've been looking at that corner and imagining what could be. You just almost start salivating when you look at that site."

But residents of the Tiverton, a modest apartment building just up 24th Street, say they would resist any effort to redevelop the city-owned parcels. A few years ago, they successfully fought an attempt to change the zoning on a nearby parking lot to allow high-rises. Tiverton tenants say they are tired of seeing luxury buildings sprout around them -- blocking sunlight from their windows and priced higher than they could ever afford.

"It's underdeveloped, from a developer's standpoint. But it's livable in my opinion," Tiverton resident Deborah Akel said of the corner of 24th and L streets, where the four-story Tiverton, the library and the police station stand out because of their modest size. "We want to preserve affordable housing in our neighborhood, and that's just not the trend right now."

The West End site is so valuable, Abdo said, that developers might well be willing to build some affordable housing as well as a library. In exchange, he said, they would want zoning approval to build six, eight or even 10 stories so that there could be lots of profitable, market-rate apartments as well.

"Any developer that wants to work over there has to be very much aware of the community's concerns," Abdo said, especially because of the plethora of savvy and vocal citizen groups. "It's a give-and-take approach."

City officials say they're aware of how complicated public-private projects can be. They caution that what would work for some sites would make no sense for others.

Planning Director Ellen McCarthy said the District would not allow apartments atop a busy police or fire station, for example, because wailing sirens would be too disruptive. And although a draft report on building libraries endorses the public-private concept, library board president John W. Hill emphasized that the approach would work only at certain locations.

"You have to make sure that there's enough room for you to expand your services, if you need to. You want to make sure that you're not boxed in," Hill said. "One of the recommendations is that the library be prominent . . . that you not have a library on the 10th floor and nobody knows that it is there."

School Superintendent Clifford B. Janey also struck a note of caution. "We want good public-private partnerships," Janey said, not "one-dimensional or self-serving [partnerships] that come at the expense of the schools' needs."

Cropp's bill, which she said will be discussed at public hearings this year, would require city planners to seek input from citizen groups before drawing up lists of properties and offering them to the private sector. That type of public involvement would be crucial, school board member William Lockridge said, to appease wary neighbors.

"Who are we building these apartments for? Are they going to be two bedrooms, or three bedrooms, for families? Or are they going to be just for single people?" asked Lockridge, who with Peck led the effort last year to win support on the school board for such partnerships. "The community will buy into the project as long as they can see something that benefits the existing community."

Staff writer V. Dion Haynes contributed to this report.

For more information on which city properties could be ripe for public-private partnerships, visithttp://www.washingtonpost.com.