Morgan Baskin

From this link >> https://dcist.com/story/23/10/05/dc-kenilworth-courts-redevelopment-dcha/

On a dreary morning in mid-September, Kenilworth Courts resident Sheila Herring walked us through the complex, taking a brief reprieve from her own apartment. It’s being treated for a mouse infestation so severe that the critters have urinated and defecated on her clothes and bedsheets. 

“Welcome to hell,” she says, shuffling up the narrow cement stairwell of an apartment building on Quarles St. NE. Yards away from a ground floor windowpane where cracked glass radiates from a bullet hole, a cluster of stuffed animals and candles memorialize a resident who recently died. “Some have walked over bodies and some more to get in and out of that building. And the bodies weren’t moving. They were cold.”

When Kenilworth Courts opened in 1959, the 26-building complex was an example of what government-funded housing could be: It was one of the first integrated public housing complexes in D.C. and adjacent to amenities like the city’s iconic aquatic gardens and, later, a bevy of public transit options that includes the Deanwood metro station. 

But its 290 apartments fell into extreme disrepair, and in 2012, the DC Housing Authority received a grant from its federal counterpart to redevelop the property. By 2016, it struck an agreement with residents that outlined and affirmed their rights during the redevelopment process. 

The plan was relatively straightforward. With the help of two private developers, DCHA would raze and rebuild the complex in three phases, either giving existing tenants vouchers to temporarily live elsewhere or transfer them to another part of Kenilworth not undergoing active construction. The first phase would deliver 166 units of subsidized housing, and give priority to tenants who lived in the apartments being redeveloped. Residents would also get job opportunities, DCHA said, and importantly, they’d be able to move back in without having to redetermine their eligibility for public housing.

Kenilworth Courts is now one of only three public housing complexes in D.C. being actively redeveloped, despite pervasive conditions issues across DCHA’s portfolio of buildings, and before the complex’s groundbreaking, Herring became its resident council president to help her neighbors navigate the changes.

In the resident services building on Quarles St. NE, floodwater from recent thunderstorms sat stagnant, a dead cockroach floating on its back in one of the pools that collected in the communal kitchen. And although the building sits directly across the street from new phase one apartments covered in weatherproof wrap, its fate, along with the rest of Kenilworth’s acreage, remains unclear. 

Attorneys at Bread for the City, a legal services and advocacy organization representing the Kenilworth residents, learned this summer that the DC Housing Authority canceled the master development agreement between its two partners, the Warrenton Group and Michaels Organization. It’s unclear when DCHA will begin soliciting proposals from developers for the work. (Spokespeople for the two companies did not respond to DCist/WAMU’s requests for comment.)

Rachel Molly Joseph, the housing authority’s chief operating officer, did not answer DCist/WAMU’s questions about how the contract cancellation will shift the redevelopment timeline, saying only that DCHA “is committed to the Kenilworth community and the completion of its revitalization plan.”

But for the Kenilworth residents who continue to live on the property and have watched the redevelopment with wary eyes, the delay in construction is just one in a series of promises either bent or broken: The jobs residents were promised never really materialized. Several residents who lived in the phase one redevelopment zone pre-construction allegedly haven’t been contacted about moving back in. And dozens of others are now facing a flurry of paperwork as they find out they will ultimately have to reapply for the new units, contrary to what they say they were initially told.

“That’s what’s frustrating to me. We never got all the Arthur Capper units that we were promised, and that demolition started in the early 2000s. Park Morton is stuck. Barry Farm is stuck. All of these projects are stuck,” says Rebecca Lindhurst, an attorney at Bread for the City, referring to a slew of public housing complexes slated for redevelopment that have stalled at varying points in the process. 

The Kenilworth tenants worry that their complex will go the same way, and believe that their experience is part trend and part omen of redevelopments to come. 

Burdened by old buildings in appalling condition, the Housing Authority has faced mounting pressure by the local and federal government to upgrade many of its worst apartment buildings. A 2022 federal audit of the city’s public housing found that DCHA “is not maintaining units in decent, safe, and sanitary condition,” in part because its developments “have aging infrastructure … that are exacerbating the deterioration of physical conditions.”

But if the Kenilworth redevelopment is what future revitalization efforts will look like, residents say, the agency has its work cut out for it, to prove that existing residents will be the ones to benefit from new investment.

“Kenilworth was the best project in D.C. when my mother moved here,” says Sandra Johnson, a member of Kenilworth’s resident council, who has lived at the complex with her mother for 55 years. 

She believes that the city’s attitude about the development changed over the decades: Investment in upkeep and maintenance declined, even as property values around Kenilworth – and across D.C. – rose. As the city’s population grew, so too did visitors to the aquatic gardens, turning their neighborhood into a de facto parking lot for out-of-towners. 

Housing conditions at Kenilworth soon began to degrade. Between 2013 and 2018, the property was inspected on at least four occasions by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. In each case, it received a failing score for its property conditions, earning only 38 points on a 100-point scale in 2018. Herring, who has lived on the Kenilworth complex for more than 30 years, had such bad moisture in her phase one apartment that, by the time she moved out of it, mushrooms grew from the walls. 

Herring and Johnson also say they have started to notice more drug- and gun-related crime around the property, particularly along Quarles St. NE. Herring recalls walking down that street recently just as someone drove down it, firing a gun paces away from her.

So when the Housing Authority promised Kenilworth residents the opportunity to apply for jobs related to the redevelopment, and helped host two job fairs in November of 2021, Herring was enthusiastic about trying to reach her neighbors and help them sign up. In Ward 7, where Kenilworth Courts is, the unemployment rate sits at 7.2% – nearly double the national average. “Some of the boys were like, ‘I don’t have to be out here hustling, risking being shot, being killed anymore,’” Herring says, remembering one young man who was recently shot and killed around Kenilworth Park. “It’s life or death for some of these kids.”  

But residents and their attorneys tell DCist/WAMU that the workforce development initiative, overseen in part by the local nonprofit Training Grounds, didn’t deliver jobs in a meaningful way. One resident, Lachelle Hardy, says that she was excited about the prospect of applying for a job that would allow her to work close to home. But many of the jobs on site required skilled labor, and by the time listings went up, it was too late for tenants to receive the certifications they needed to be eligible for the work. 

Some of the people who were recruited were later dismissed for having criminal backgrounds, Herring says, which devastated the applicants, who were allegedly never told that having a record would disqualify them from the jobs.

Training Grounds was contracted by the development team to provide a wide range of services to the Kenilworth residents, from occupational and technical training to life skills workshops. A spokesperson for the organization told DCist/WAMU in an emailed statement that they “consistently encountered a system that provided limited employment opportunities for residents. As time passed, both our frustration and that of the residents grew. Sadly, we’ve been a witness to the decline of resident morale due to these systemic issues [around the redevelopment process].” 

The spokesperson says that the team “brought [their] concerns to the DC Housing Authority and the development team on a number of occasions,” but that “there was little to no action taken to address the escalating issues.” The spokesperson declined to address the specific issues Training Grounds raised with the agency. 

“We hope that in the future, project leaders will demonstrate greater dedication and diligence in creating employment opportunities for residents, in a more equitable manner,” the spokesperson said. DCHA’s Joseph did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment about Training Grounds’ concerns. 

Herring says that the debacle sowed discord among residents. “[They said], ‘you lied to us, you told us we were gonna get jobs … you lied to us like they did,’” Herring says. “You built their hopes up to break them down. Now, if I go to them or anyone else, they won’t move.”

That distrust was amplified when it came time to have discussions about moving back into the property, residents say. 

“From day one, [DCHA employees] could not answer our – well, my – questions,” says Johnson, who has lived at the complex long enough to watch D.C.’s growth come at the expense of communities like hers, and remains skeptical of how Kenilworth’s redevelopment will play out. “So what they did, I think, is they gave us what they thought we wanted to hear. But they didn’t give us, ‘[here’s] what’s going on, what’s actually going to occur after these buildings get up.” 

So she says she felt a little vindicated when, on June 21, Housing Authority employees presented tenants with a slideshow that upended their understanding of the redevelopment. 

Johnson says residents learned that day that Kenilworth Courts is being converted through the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, a controversial and often complex federal pilot that’s supposed to make it easier for cities to finance housing improvement projects. 

More than 1,600 complexes around the country have already been rehabilitated through RAD over the last decade, but Kenilworth Courts will be among the first, and largest, complexes in D.C. to do so – and given the pressure DCHA faces from the federal government to improve public housing conditions, it likely won’t be the last. 

In the case of Kenilworth Courts, RAD gave the DC Housing Authority a way to offset the steep cost of redevelopment by bringing in private companies to construct and manage the building, as well as leveraging tax credits to add more units of varying affordability.

“So many of the properties [around the country] are converting to this mixed finance model, and it’s a hodgepodge of regulations that are incredibly difficult for lawyers, let alone residents, to understand,” says Lauren Song, an attorney with the National Housing Law Project and expert on public housing conversions through RAD. “You can have a resident living right next door who could have totally different regulatory rules than the one that you’re in.”

The financing decisions and structure of a RAD conversion deal ultimately have significant implications for residents: At Kenilworth, for example, residents will have a new property manager, likely new residential rules, and will have to redetermine their eligibility to move back into redeveloped units.

But Johnson says she didn’t know any of these particulars until residents received the slide deck from the agency in June that articulated why DCHA pursued a RAD conversion, when tenants might be able to start moving into new units, and how to reapply for them. 

At the time, according to the slides, the first of the new units were scheduled to open in August and come online throughout the remainder of the year; tenants would have until July 15 – just three weeks – to notify the agency whether they were interested in applying for one. Per the 2016 relocation agreement, residents were supposed to receive three months’ notice. The application process would also look different depending on the kind of subsidy underwriting the unit, according to DCHA’s presentation.

“It’s real messy,” Herring says. “Real messy.”

At 15 pages long, one of the applications asks residents to share monthly expense information for things like gasoline, cigarettes, clothing, and cleaning supplies. “You’ve gotta give ‘em six pay stubs–” Johnson begins, before Herring jumps in to add, fervent with sarcasm, “–and your birth certificate, your death certificate, your burial plot,” the two women breaking into peals of laughter.

Residents are still grappling with confusion over when and how to apply for a new unit – to say nothing of when the new buildings will actually open, since the August deadline came and passed.

Joseph from DCHA says that the agency has “never withheld details about the project from our residents,” and that third party management has been a factor in the redevelopment plans since 2012. She tells DCist/WAMU that the agency anticipates opening the first 23 townhouse units to residents in early December, with the rest of phase one’s 143 units to come “by early 2024.”

“We want to give residents onsite and former residents that have relocated every opportunity to move into new units prior to making offers to waitlist [members],” Joseph says, denying that DCHA has publicized a deadline for residents to express interest. “Until units are fully leased Kenilworth residents will have an opportunity to express their interest to get a new unit.”

Joseph adds that DCHA has contacted 47 families who previously lived in phase one about their right to return.

But Herring and her neighbors believe there are even more eligible households who haven’t been contacted. They tell DCist/WAMU that they know multiple families, including family members of their own, who have never received a letter from DCHA about moving back in – despite previously living in phase one and being relocated during construction. 

Per the Dec. 2016 resident relocation agreement, 61 families lived in the phase one redevelopment zone as of December 2016. (An earlier draft, from March, shows that 72 families lived there.) And the relocation agreement specifies that any tenants living on the property as of Jan. 2012 should receive the right to return to the property. But Joseph says that DCHA is using data from April of 2018 – when HUD approved Kenilworth’s phase one demolition – to track families. 

“It’s just a lot of wondering, OK, once they [finish construction], where do we go?” Johnson says. “What is our chance of actually living there?”

And while the first phase of redevelopment continues, the chaos surrounding who gets to move back in along with it, dozens of residents continue to live in squalor on other parts of the campus. 

Herring relocated to another part of the Kenilworth campus in 2017, out of her apartment in the zone scheduled for the first phase of construction. But in some ways, she isn’t faring much better with conditions in her temporary replacement unit: with the mouse infestation, the 62-year-old has been sleeping upright in a chair for weeks, nervous to sleep in her bed after finding mice feces in it. 

But because DCHA must now secure another development contract, as well as apply for approval with the D.C. zoning commission to build out the rest of the site, it will likely take many months, if not years, before redevelopment begins on other parts of the campus.

While phase one will tackle many of the deeply affordable units that were slated to replace Kenilworth’s public housing – 166 new units in total, including 42 for seniors and 44 townhome units – phases two and three were supposed to deliver some 360 more units of housing. Those phases would focus on parcels of land west of the phase one cluster, and include some market-rate apartments available for rent and sale. 

“I’m 62, and I’ve never hit the Powerball or the lottery,” Herring says with a pointed look, “so I figured this would be it for me.”

Despite the conditions she’s living in, Herring isn’t inclined to move back into the redeveloped phase one apartments. She’s nervous about the dynamic that a private management company adds to the mix, and doesn’t trust the housing authority to walk tenants through the changes. 

Either outcome, she muses, could end poorly for her. She wonders how long she’ll have to live in the disarray of her current apartment. And she worries about where she’ll go when they finally tear it down.