A Welcome Development

Some Residents of Old SE Public Housing Are Back, This Time as Homeowners

Harold and Linda Thomas, with their son, Godtheson, now own a home at Henson Ridge in Southeast Washington. (Lois Raimondo - The Washington Post)

Harold Thomas lived through the good years, the bad ones and, eventually, the ignominious death of the dilapidated and crime-ridden Frederick Douglass Dwellings in Southeast Washington.

Today, he is a part of the housing development's rebirth.

It was 1958 when the then-17-year-old Cardozo High School football player moved into the public housing complex with his grandmother and siblings. It was "the best house we had ever lived in," he says. Families left their front doors unlocked. On sultry nights, Thomas and his buddies slept on the grass to cool off. The women sat on their porches in their slips, trying to catch a breeze.

Forty-one years later, Thomas was among the last of the Frederick Douglass residents to vacate a complex that had been deemed uninhabitable, where the few remaining occupants lived behind triple locks, conditioned to duck inside at the sound of gunshots and intimidated from moving about outside by feuding drug gangs. "Chaotic" is what his beloved home had become, Thomas recalls.

This month, the 66-year-old Thomas moved anew into Frederick Douglass, now renamed Henson Ridge and redeveloped by the D.C. Housing Authority into a handsome collection of three-story townhouses built along landscaped cul-de-sacs. The 600-unit, $122.4 million development in Ward 8's Congress Heights neighborhood was funded with public and private money and launched by a $29.9 million grant from Hope VI, the federal program designed to replace distressed projects such as the Frederick Douglass and Stanton Dwellings with mixed-income communities.

Thomas returns as a first-time homeowner, fulfilling a longtime dream by applying his federally funded voucher -- which previously subsidized his rent at Frederick Douglass -- to a mortgage at Henson Ridge. He will still pay only 30 percent of his yearly income for housing. The development is the first of the Housing Authority's half-dozen Hope VI projects that uses homeownership vouchers.

Today, housing authority and city officials are scheduled to announce the kickoff of the sale of the remainder of the homeownership units in Henson Ridge, where prices run from $298,000 for a two-bedroom, 1 1/2 -bath townhouse to $332,500 for a four-bedroom, 2 1/2 -bath home.

Of the 600 units at Henson Ridge, 280 are rental units (three per townhouse). They already are occupied. Former Frederick Douglass or Stanton residents are in 213 of them.

The other 320 units are designated for homeownership, with 100 reserved for returning residents such as Thomas; 110 for families whose income is less than 80 percent of the Washington area's median income, which is $94,500 for a family of four; and 110 for market-rate buyers.

Henson Ridge, across Alabama Avenue SE from a shopping center that includes a new Giant that is Ward 8's only full-service supermarket, a bank and a hardware store, has 90 homes left for sale, spokeswoman Dena Michaelson said.

Michael Kelly, executive director of the D.C. Housing Authority, said 22 former residents have bought homes at Henson Ridge. Under rules created by former residents engaged in the transformation of the complex, returning renters must have a clean police record and a history of timely rent payments.

Home buyers such as Thomas had to attend a yearlong class on homeownership. There were sessions on creating monthly budgets and maintaining a property, plus job training and job counseling services.