Low-Cost Housing Eliminated, But Nothing Built in Its Place

Lara West used to rent at Parkland Gardens in Arlington County. Developers bought the complex, but the 149 apartments have sat empty for about a year. (By Katherine Frey -- The Washington Post)

One night in February 2005, a letter was slipped under the door of the studio apartment in Arlington County where 81-year-old Margot Gelhard had lived for 25 years.

It was written in Spanish, so at first she didn't realize it was an eviction notice. The apartment building had been sold and was going to be torn down and replaced with luxury condominiums. Gelhard said she was so distressed the day she moved that she was taken out in an ambulance and hospitalized. The building was demolished.

But construction never went forward. The former Marlaine apartment building on North Pierce Street in North Arlington is an unsightly dirt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. It's one of at least six Washington area buildings seemingly marooned by housing economics and changing times, representing more than 700 low-cost apartment units that have gone missing from the market during the recent real estate slump.

Former tenants, neighbors and housing activists say it is a shame that these places were destroyed or left vacant when the need for affordable housing is so acute.

"It's sad that the people who lived there were scattered and had to move elsewhere, when nothing has happened for two years," said Stanley G. Karson, president of the Radnor/Fort Myers Heights Civic Association.

Hilltop House, adjacent to the Marlaine at 1200 N. Queen St., was also demolished. Together the buildings contained 142 apartments, housing about 300 people. Parkland Gardens, on North Glebe Road near Lee Highway, which is now vacant, contained another 149 units. Another cluster of buildings, on 14th Street near the Arlington courthouse, sits boarded up and overgrown.

In Gaithersburg, West Deer Park apartments, which once housed 191 families, has been vacant since July 2006. Residents were forced to move to make way for a 130-town house development, but the plans have been canceled, and the building eventually will be reoccupied as a rental property.

"The owners got caught up in the tanking market," said Louise Kauffmann, Gaithersburg's director of community development.

In Alexandria, Hunting Terrace, which is being proposed for redevelopment, had 116 units, all now empty. A low-income housing complex on West Glebe Road called Glebe Park, which is owned by the Alexandria Redevelopment and Housing Authority, has 152 units, but 102 are vacant. It has structural problems and needs a major renovation, city officials said.

Moorosi Mokuena, a housing activist in Montgomery County, said: "They are displacing tenants, telling them to live elsewhere, disrupting their economic health and their families. The bottom line is that it is immoral what these people are doing."

Real estate industry executives say the market slowdown, coming after several years of an intense boom, is to blame for properties left dangling in limbo. More than two dozen proposed condominium projects have been canceled in the past year, according to Alexandria-based real estate information firm Delta Associates, because the market for high-end units has fizzled and investor-purchasers have vanished.

"The market conditions are putting a pause in many projects," said economist Gregory Leisch, president of Delta Associates. "Construction costs continue to rise, borrowing costs have spiked up. . . . That's the urban renewal process. It's the human downside to the phase we are in now."