City Sending in Fix-It Teams

Amazed Residents Wonder Whether Cleanup Effort Will Last

David Hooper couldn't have been more pleased as D.C. workers inspected large rat holes, wrote fines for trash violations and painted over graffiti in run-down alleys near his home.

"It's a new day," said Hooper, a newly elected advisory neighborhood commissioner, who has lived in Ivy City in Northeast since 1972. "It's a dream come true."

Joseph H. Dean wasn't ready to proclaim victory. For years, the 90-year-old resident has been picking up trash and cleaning nearby alleys to wash away the smell of urine. Like many of his neighbors, he's fed up with apartment buildings whose owners are negligent, allowing trash to pile up, buildings to run down and tenants to run amok.

"It ain't going to last long," Dean said of the cleanup effort. He moved to the neighborhood in 1967, after spending 20 years in the Army. "These people who live in these apartments houses throw trash and garbage on the ground. They tear the place up."

As part of an effort to show residents that government is responsive, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's administration is unleashing "operation fix-its" across the city. Various departments come together on a single corner, alley or neighborhood to clear debris, stamp out rats, install jersey barriers to prevent illegal dumping or fine landlords.

The cleanup efforts' goal is to show residents, even skeptical ones such as Dean, that change is possible.

"We do one or two 'fix-its' a week," said Clark Ray, director of community relations and services for Fenty (D). "Sometimes two or three agencies are involved, sometimes more."

It's an extension, in some ways, of the "core teams" established for each ward under Fenty's predecessor, Anthony A. Williams (D). After years in which residents had essentially given up on the idea of a functioning government, the goal was to return to the basics: collecting trash, cutting the grass, responding promptly to residents' calls. After Williams's two terms, that's a well-entrenched goal, and coordinators from each ward serve as citizen advocates to navigate the bureaucracy.

At one cleanup last month on Dunbar Road in Southeast, city agencies carted away three tons of trash, demolished an abandoned trailer and moved two couches that had been sitting on Metro property near Suitland Parkway.

In Ivy City, where rat infestation at apartment buildings is a particular problem, city leaders are leveling fines for open containers of trash and citing owners who have rat burrows near their buildings and leave them untreated.

"Rats like food and water," said health inspector Gerard Brown, as he examined large rat holes behind one building. He said the culprit was the garbage, most of which was piled behind commercial buildings, which provide their own private trash collection but must comply with city rules.

"Lids must be closed at all times," he said, pointing to several that weren't.

The exact amounts of trash collected and tickets written weren't immediately available. Many Ivy City residents were happy to have the attention, acknowledging that cleanup efforts in recent years were starting to pay off. At the latest session, Ward 5 Advisory Neighborhood Commission member Wilhelmina Lawson said she was surprised there were few abandoned cars to tow.

"That's progress," she said. "When I first moved here, I thought I had moved into the devil's bowel. It was trash. It was drugs. It was public urination."

Now, as with other parts of the city, housing prices have risen significantly, bringing renewed vigor to areas where tiny pockets of residents had felt as if they were fighting alone. Lawson, who moved to the District in 1992 from New Jersey, said there's still plenty of work to be done. Lawson said she hopes mass cleanups can become a thing of the past.

"We shouldn't have to do this over and over again," she said. "We can spend less energy cleaning and more energy making it a healthy neighborhood."