As gentrification sweeps through many U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., more residents have trouble finding affordable housing. Each community is...
Jennifer Sumler has lived in her apartment building on Cedar Street in the Takoma section of Washington, D.C., for her entire life, but the sound she heard one late November evening a few years ago was like nothing she’d ever experienced.
Nearly three years later, they’re not done. The financing to repair and renovate the 30-unit building has only now been agreed to and will take another year to finalize. By the time that happens, dozens of parties will have had a hand in the project: developers, community organizers, government workers, bankers, regulators, lawyers, property managers, a historical consultant, lobbyists, investors and more.
Its mayor, Muriel Bowser, is “doing more for affordable housing than any other mayor in the country,” said Kathryn Howell, an assistant professor of urban planning at Virginia Commonwealth University. Bowser committed $100 million a year to affordable housing in her first term, which began in 2015, and has increased the budgeted amount every year since.
TOPA is “one of the really unique things about D.C.’s housing landscape. It’s centered on the residents, whom they see as the city’s assets. Most affordable-housing policy looks at rentals as temporary, like [renters are] not really citizens of the city,” Howell said. In contrast, she said, TOPA “gives a lot of agency and control and power to residents.”
Even with TOPA in place, when a D.C. landlord gets ready to sell, tenants aren’t always interested in making a bid for the property. Many would rather take a buyout and vacate. Likewise, the struggle to preserve and create affordable housing has many local characteristics but a broad outline that looks pretty similar across the country. Developers cobble together funding packages from all levels of government and attract money from private sources whenever and however possible.
With the Cedar Street tenants’ blessing, Joseph and his partners used a loan from LISC to acquire the property. Joseph then applied to the city for permanent financing to pay back the acquisition loan and prep for reconstruction. Between finalizing construction plans, ensuring renovations conform to historic-preservation standards for the 1920s building, putting the rest of the financing into place and pulling construction permits, work won’t begin until early 2020, and is forecast to wrap up roughly a year later.
Paying it forward Jennifer Sumler was born in Washington, D.C., in 1968. Her father spent many years as the chauffeur and bodyguard for the president of Howard University, and her mother sandwiched her years at home taking care of the children between stints at the Federal Reserve. Sumler attended Howard University, majoring in broadcast journalism. She’s worked in television and radio news, and briefly toyed with trying to become on-air talent. But when she learned that would mean leaving Washington to work her way up in smaller news markets, she reconsidered.
Sumler’s professional background likely gave her an advantage compared with the typical TOPA organizer. But in other ways, the Cedar Street tenant association faced a mightier challenge than most groups vying for TOPA funds: The building’s post-storm disrepair had discouraged many of the tenants from the get-go. Sumler found herself in a position that’s familiar to the LISC staffers but jarring to a lifelong renter with no professional experience in real estate.
In fact, 12 current tenants did decide to accept the buyout offer of $15,000, including of all those whom the storm had displaced. The Cedar Street project is only his second solo turn as a developer, and the first time he’d ever applied for tax credits for a project, a reality that the Cedar Street tenants had to take into account when weighing whether to hire him. And Joseph is also, despite his background in social justice, a for-profit developer, a consideration that gave LISC pause in deciding whether to fund him.
The building will see a significant transformation: Its plumbing, heating and electrical systems will be modernized; the portions destroyed during the storm repaired; and it will be made accessible to people with disabilities. Each individual unit, even those not damaged by the storm, will be upgraded. And perhaps most significantly, its mix of apartment configurations will change to make the building more family-friendly, as noted below.
Even though the TOPA pursuit has been a lot more work than she bargained for, Hanger is proud of the line the tenants drew. “It’s sad that the city is being given away to the highest bidder,” she said. “We can at least say we stood up. We want to keep this place low-to-moderate affordable for years to come so people can come and live in this neighborhood. It was nice to grow up here.”
“Everyone I know knows it: Owning a home is the way to go,” he said. “But there’s almost nowhere left in D.C. where owning a home is reasonable. I don’t want to live in a neighborhood that’s incredibly far away, or be dependent on a car, or get a home that’s in disrepair that I’m going to have to put a lot of money into.”
“White incomes have always been significantly higher, but it’s definitely been the case that white income has bumped up as the city has changed, whereas black income has remained stagnant,” the VCU professor Howell said. “In part that’s because blacks who have the means to buy a home are going out to the counties. They move for the same reason we all do — schools, services, access to home ownership. They’re voting with their feet.
One of the curiosities about 410 Cedar St., though, is how diverse the building and the neighborhood around it are. Because of its age and its location within the Takoma Historic District, an official designation from the National Parks Service, the property is eligible to apply for Federal Rehabilitation Tax Credits.
And the clock is ticking. The types of financing incentives that the developer Joseph is using to fund his project, and which developers use to build new affordable homes, have expiration dates. A 2015 mayoral task force determined that nearly 14,000 units of affordable housing with such subsidies are “at risk of loss” by 2020 in Washington.
In 1986, when a housing tax credit was being considered as part of the massive tax-reform effort then underway, “there were a lot of skeptics that anyone could manage affordable rental housing effectively,” Roberts said. “There had been all these previous government projects that were poorly managed, poorly located, beset with crime and other social problems.”
Onward In April, after the city approved the funding that enabled the Cedar Street project to move forward, everyone involved breathed a sigh of relief.
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