Signs of Change Line the Shelves
Grocery Arrives In Reviving Ward 8

By Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 1, 2007

For nearly a decade, residents of Washington's poorest ward have yearned for that most basic of community institutions, a place to buy vegetables and milk and bread and gossip with friends and neighbors over shopping carts.

Their wait is over.

When a Giant opens on Alabama Avenue in Congress Heights on Friday, it will be the only full-service supermarket in Ward 8 in Southeast and the first since a Safeway closed in 1998.

The absence of a full-service supermarket in the ward, which encompasses the sloping neighborhoods east of the Anacostia river, has forced residents such as Carol Johnson, a retiree who walks with a cane and does not own a car, to lug groceries on the bus to replenish her fridge.

Depending on the weather and the vagaries of public transportation, the trip can consume several hours. Even for those who drive, the travel crystallizes a sense of deprivation and alienation.

But with thousands of housing units built in recent years, Ward 8 is no longer a place developers avoid.

Although most neighborhoods still have far more shopping options, Ward 8's new Giant is the chain's largest in the city. Spanning the length of a football field, the Giant offers the usual supermarket fare and then some, including 200 types of cheese, more than two dozen brands of ice cream, 14 kinds of honey, fresh sushi, books, toys and DVDs.

"We've been waiting for this for a long time," said Johnson, 57, holding three bags of groceries and her metal cane as she limped to a bus stop across from a Safeway where she shops in Ward 7. Her friend carried another of her purchases, a 10-pound bag of potatoes.

Atop a 25-acre parcel that once housed a National Guard base and across from where two housing projects once stood, the Giant is further evidence of the investment pouring into a ward long suffering from poverty and crime.

Yet even as they pine for the supermarket's opening, residents worry that the Giant and the townhouses and suburban-style homes sprouting up in the area will make their neighborhood too pricey.

Sandra Seegars, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, said she cannot think about the Giant without reflecting on the families who once lived in the public housing complexes, Frederick Douglass and Stanton Dwellings, that were razed across the street.

The supermarket, she said, "represents service to people, and it represents removal of people. If the public housing were still there, we wouldn't be getting the Giant."

The supermarket is the anchor of a shopping center that will include Ward 8's first full-service restaurant, an IHOP part-owned by a District police officer, and an ice cream parlor. A bank and a hardware store have opened.

To Gloria Whitfield, 72, a retired cashier who lives a block from the Giant, the new retail signifies that she will no longer have to drive her '78 Buick to Ward 7 or to the suburbs to buy groceries or eat brunch. Instead, she'll be able to walk to get much of what she needs.

Although the Safeway where she shops is less than two miles away, just across the Ward 7 boundary, "it was insulting to not have anything here," she said. "It seemed like everyone else had it in their neighborhood. We couldn't get a pizza delivered. We couldn't get a newspaper. Now we're getting it all."

Or beginning to.

Even with its first supermarket, Ward 8, with a population of about 70,000, lags far behind more affluent areas of the city. In Northwest, wards 2 and 3 each have six supermarkets serving roughly the same number of residents, according to a study last year by the D.C.-based Food Research and Action Center. The report concluded that Ward 8 offered the city's least nutritious food options.

The ward's main commercial arteries are lined with fast-food joints and convenience stores, places such as the Congress Heights Discount Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, where patrons order from the sidewalk, talking to a cashier through a small square window protected by steel bars. Signs advertise 50-cent sodas and a sale on cheese doodles.

"If you walk to the end of my block, I can buy drugs, I can go to the liquor store, I can get sugar, fried food -- everything that's detrimental to me," said Malcolm Woodland, a research fellow who lives with his mother in Congress Heights. "However, I couldn't find a piece of fruit. I couldn't get fresh meat or produce."

The new Giant, Woodland said, will "boost the local food selection. You will see different health outcomes. But it's only one neighborhood. Ward 8 is large."

The Giant's opening at Camp Simms, as the former National Guard base is known, comes 24 years after the administration of then-Mayor Marion Barry (D) purchased the parcel from the federal government for $1.8 million.

For years plans to develop the site were bandied about without a shovel ever breaking ground. Then, in 2005, then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) sold the property for $500,000 to a development team that included William C. Smith & Co. As part of the deal, the developer agreed to build the supermarket, as well as affordable housing within Asheford Court, an adjoining complex of brick-faced, single-family homes, some of which are selling for as much as $600,000.

Asheford Court and the Shops at Park Village, as the shopping center where the Giant is located is called, are a part of a wave of development in Ward 8, where more than 6,000 housing units have been built since 2001.

A mainstay of the development is across Alabama Avenue from the Giant. Replacing Frederick Douglass and Stanton Dwellings is Henson Ridge, a mix of market-rate and subsidized homes. A few blocks away, the District has opened THEARC, a $27 million arts and recreation center.

Matthew Ritz, project manager for William C. Smith & Co., said the developer's longtime quest to lure a grocer to Southeast was hobbled by the sight of vacant housing and "misperceptions" that there "wasn't sustainable income to support a supermarket."

"We had to overcome it by showing the economic growth in the area," he said.

Taken altogether, community leaders tout the development as a signal to the broader business community that Ward 8 is becoming more economically diverse.

James Bunn, executive director of the Ward 8 Business Council, said he plans to lobby the District to enact controls on the kinds of stores he believes the area has too many of. "We don't want fast food. We don't want liquor stores. We want first-class retail," he said, citing shoe and clothing stores and quality hotels as examples.

Although residents applaud the changes, they can be derisive about the prices of new homes in their neighborhood. Sarcastic laughter rippled from the audience at one community meeting when representatives of William C. Smith & Co. said the price of an "affordable" unit at Asheford Court is in the low $400,000s.

Clarence Jackson, a D.C. police officer who patrols Ward 8, said the neighborhood's transformation gave his family confidence to invest in the IHOP, which will open next spring. Streets once defined by loitering and drug dealing are quieter. "What changed things was the wrecking ball," he said of the demolition of public housing. "It's like a whole new neighborhood."

The added stability also made the neighborhood attractive to Giant, said Barry F. Scher, a vice president of public affairs for the supermarket. "When we build a new store, we need to make sure there's a strong neighborhood base," he said. "And that was shorn up by the development of new homes."

Most of the new housing in the area wasn't around in 1998, when Ward 8's last supermarket closed. Nathaniel Howard, president of the Congress Heights Community Association, was at the Safeway on its last day of business, a depressing experience because the place where he bumped into so many friends was slipping away.

He plans on being at the Giant when it opens. "The moment of truth will be when you see the inside for the first time," he said. "I want to be dazzled."