By Mara Lee
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 22, 2008; F01

Ivy City is changing.

The neighborhood of rowhouses and small apartment buildings tucked behind the old Hecht's warehouse off New York Avenue NE has a contractor remodeling or building on nearly every block.

"Slowly things are being built or renovated," said Jeannette Swanson, who has lived in Ivy City for 33 years. The neighborhood "has changed, up and down, up and down" during her years there.

The 1990s was one of the down times, she said, with shootings and drugs -- "Some white folks came up here looking for it," she said of the drug trade.

Now she has white neighbors for the first time. "They just renovated that last year," she said. "So that's nice."

Eight years ago, census researchers found 50 owner-occupied houses, 225 rental houses and apartments, and 163 vacant apartments and houses in Ivy City. In recent years, some of those vacant apartments have become condominiums and some of those vacant houses have become livable again.

Down the block, Edward Johnson isn't as pleased as Swanson about the changes. He grew up in Ivy City, living there since 1979. He rents an efficiency apartment, and his father owns a house in the neighborhood.

"They [are] trying to get rid of the people in the neighborhood," he said, adding that there have been police harassment and "ridiculous fines about their back yards."

Johnson said rent for his efficiency started at $650 in 2003 and reached $850 in January.

He said that's outrageous for an apartment so small that you could "fall in the bathroom, bust your head in the living room."

He said: "When developers start building up, they ain't really looking out for the people who have been here. It just disturbs me to even talk about it."

Matthew Spicer, a real estate agent who has a rowhouse listing in the neighborhood, said most houses are two-bedrooms with no basement, though some that have three bedrooms. The two-bedroom house he is listing was bought last year and renovated by an investor, who dropped the price from close to $270,000 to a little less than $250,000 in the first month on the market.

Even with the price drop, it has not found a buyer after 2 1/2 months on the market.

But it's not just investors and home builders who are changing the neighborhood. The District's Home Again Initiative, which aims to revitalize vacant property, is making a major investment in Ivy City, turning over 38 properties to three charities and one traditional developer to create 60 condos and houses. Of those, 37 units will be sold to low- to moderate-income families -- for instance, a family of four with less than $57,000 in annual income.

There was next to no acquisition cost for the properties -- 80 percent were seized for unpaid taxes -- but the District projects that it will spend $2.5 million to $4 million to make up the difference between what it costs to build the units and what they can be sold for to stay in reach of families with modest incomes.

Some condos could sell for as little as $98,000 -- well below the past year's $175,000 to $230,000 range in sales prices of Ivy City condos. Unsubsidized houses could cost as much as $400,000, about $70,000 higher than the highest sale price in 2007.

Leila Finucane Edmonds, director of the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, which runs the Home Again program, said construction is scheduled to begin this year. "I think it's something the community's very excited about, and we're very excited about it, as well."

Nafi Ayyub, 36, moved to Ivy City about a year and a half ago, attracted by its reasonable rents. He saw efficiencies in Southwest Washington for $850 but found a one-bedroom in Ivy City for $700.

Ayyub, who commutes an hour by bus and Metro to his construction job in Arlington, said the access to public transit is great -- he lives a mile from the Red Line stop on New York Avenue.

But he said public investment in the neighborhood is long overdue. The light poles along his street have warnings that police have designated it a prostitution zone and are patrolling to disrupt the business.

"There's all kinds of craziness. People selling drugs. You have streetwalkers," Ayyub said. "It's more or less like blight with all that going on."

Sadie Ward moved to Ivy City 40 years ago, first renting, and then buying a rowhouse for $43,000 with a city-subsidized loan at 1 percent interest.

She and her sister-in-law, Martha Straughter, chatted on the front stoop on an unseasonably warm day recently. Their street is called Capitol Avenue, and true to its name, that's what you see when you face south. Straughter exclaimed, "I love Ivy City!"

Ward said: "You do? I used to. I'd go somewhere else, but I'm too lazy to move."

She said she's sad about what drugs did to the neighborhood. She mentions a man whose mind is still damaged from the marijuana laced with PCP he smoked decades ago.

Straughter said: "The worst thing that happened was crack cocaine. It changes the attitude of people."

Both women were horrified when prostitution settled in their neighborhood. Straughter said the women were desperate, selling themselves for "$3 and a sandwich." But as they describe it, increased policing in 2006 cleaned things up.

Crystal Mason, 43, has been living in Ivy City eight years, since her mother moved into an apartment in the neighborhood. On a nice day recently, she perched on the wall outside her house and called out to everyone passing by -- unless they spotted her first, as one did. He yelled, "What's up, baby?"

"We got love on our block," Mason said.

The renovations and building have provided some work for her at construction sites. She also said she is pleased about changes at the strip mall bordering the neighborhood. "I'm glad we got a pharmacy over there now. They just opened up a little Caribbean place. I like the soul food."

She recalls how a man thinking about buying in Ivy City asked her about the neighborhood. "I was the first person he met. [I said] it was friendly and everything," she said. "Next thing I know, he's moving in."