A poster with all the social services in the neighborhood.

After holding off Anacostia residents for five months—and keeping them in the dark for another six months before that—Calvary Women's Services had to know it was in for a drubbing when it finally showed up for a public meeting about the transitional housing facility it's building on Good Hope Road SE. And a drubbing they got, as person after incensed person rose to berate executive director Kris Thompson for not coming to talk to them sooner.

"I don't care what happened, it didn't happen. You didn't reach out," said local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Greta Fuller, in the middle of a long tirade. "Councilmember [Marion] Barry is here today, he says put it behind us, but I don't see how that's gonna happen. I don't think so."

Although some residents don't want the facility at all, it was really Calvary's astonishing lack of transparency that seems to have permanently damaged relations, even among those who might have been sympathetic to the non-profit's good intentions. Because in Anacostia, it's more than discourtesy—it's disrespect for a community that's felt dumped on for too long, and it stings.

"You saw our black faces, and you thought we were all black, we were in this together," accused local blogger Nikki Peele, speaking to Calvary's blithe assumption that Anacostia's middle class would welcome low-income women with open arms. (Peele has posted videos of the meeting). "We're going to send a message to people tiptoeing behind the scenes: You can try and come here, and we're going to rip you apart."

Not coming to talk to the community was Calvary's second mistake. Its first mistake was buying on Anacostia's main street in the first place. Half the people who don't want the facility wouldn't care if it were an apartment building somewhere off in the neighborhoods, but the storefronts on Good Hope Road are seen as public property, with great potential hasn't yet been realized. "It's our gateway," as one resident put it.

Thompson doesn't seem to understand this. When audience members asked what the facility would look like on the outside, she assured them they wouldn't even realize it was there. "You'll see nothing," she said. "It will be like you're standing in front of an apartment building." Not only that, but security guards would be pushing people along; those who've loitered on that street won't be allowed to anymore.

But you don't want blank storefronts in a commercial area. You want something that passersby can interact with.

Calvary doesn't seem to have thought about this. They're leaving their 25-bed space on 6th Street in Chinatown because they've been leasing there since 1983, and it's now an expensive neighborhood. When I asked her after the meeting, Thompson wouldn't say whether their lease was up and their rent was increasing, but obviously buying in a cheap neighborhood gives them some long-term stability.

Why that building on Good Hope Road? Neighborhood folks in the know suspect some connection between Independence Federal Savings Bank's move to foreclose on the property and its relatively quick sale to Calvary, which is well-connected in politics and financial services (for example, immediate past board director Ann M. Hilpert is the chief financial officer of powerhouse local law firm Wiley Rein). I don't have any proof of those connections. But Thompson doesn't seem to have seriously considered any alternatives.

"I guess I don't know," she said, when I asked where else Calvary had looked. "We could have looked at a number of different things."

Calvary had enough media and political savvy to give Mayor Vince Gray an award at its gala last May, to send out press releases about its fundraising campaign, and to ask me personally back in July to write an article about the project (Thompson refused to talk after the neighborhood exploded in anger). How were they so boneheaded as to not contact the neighborhood first?

Local activist Phil Pannell may have hit upon the answer when he asked Thompson—who says she lives in Ward 6–whether any members of her board live in Ward 8. She couldn't answer definitively, but didn't think so. If any had, though, they might have clued her in before the organization made a permanent enemy out of the neighbors.

ARCH Training Center, soon-to-be fashion epicenter.

I've been chattering a lot about incubators lately, and only just now found out about a new one coming to Anacostia: The Greater Washington Fashion Chamber of Commerce will soon start accepting applications from designers for its flagship workspace at 1225-1231 Good Hope Road SE, to open in July 2012.

Sadly, it's replacing ARCH Training Center, which recently hasn't applied for the workforce development grants that kept it going for the last few years and is closing December 31. But this is a pretty exciting development for one of Anacostia's two main streets (where neighbors have been raising hell about a shelter for homeless women going in a few doors down). The incubator will host between 16 and 18 part-time and eight full-time designers with 24-hour access to the facility, paying $275 and $800-850 per month in rent.

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UPDATE, 3:50 p.m.: Just spoke with Duane Gautier, the guy in charge of ARCH Development, who shed some more light on the closure of the training center. It's apparently been in the works since 2004, when the board realized that plenty of job training organizations had started up since ARCH was founded 20 years previously; they decided to double down on their economic development functions instead. But also, Gautier was frustrated by the direction in which the D.C. government started going with job training during the administration of former Mayor Adrian Fenty, and continuing under Vince Gray: Putting less money into each job-seeker, and giving them general job skills, rather than exactly what a given employer wanted.

"The way that the economy is going, and the way both the federal government and District considers job training and people in need was really totally opposite of what we thought needed to be done," Gautier says. "Our focus has been trying to convince D.C. government that you need to work with private employers, and private employers then set standards to training, and you train to their standards...That was not their focus. They do not understand the issues that are facing people who have very little education and no job skills."

The good thing, though, is that Gautier is working with D.C. Councilmember Michael Brown on legislation that would help create more incubators in other areas of the city, potentially through finding some seed money for new ones. A food incubator, hallelujah, is in the works.

New Jersey Avenue buildings must stay! (Lydia DePillis)

The Historic Preservation Office has had to deal with some gnarly demolition-by-neglect cases recently. In deciding whether to grant a landlord's request to take down their decrepit building, staff have to weigh how much historical integrity the structure retains, how egregiously the owner has allowed it to deteriorate, and whether it would be possible to rebuild.

For its November meeting, the staff have come out with recommendations on two notable raze applications. On one, the Third Street Church of God has asked to demolish three houses on New Jersey Avenue NW in order to make room for more parking. On a second, the District wants to raze one house on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE that it bought from the negligent Kushners last year and plans to redevelop. Both are second attempts; the Board had denied raze applications for each property in the past.

The preservation office held firm on the New Jersey Avenue buildings, arguing that the facades are intact enough to be worth preserving, and that giving in to the Church's desire would send the wrong message:

The Board has always stood against approving razes of buildings brought to a state of dilapidation by lack of maintenance, as approval would not only result in the loss of historic fabric and character in the particular, but would reward and encourage such neglect in general. Just as reconstruction is an appropriate remedy for unpermitted active demolition, so is rehabilitation the appropriate remedy for passive demolition. Demolition of this structure is contrary to the purposes of the preservation law, and specifically its intent 'to retain and enhance those properties which contribute to the character of the historic district and to encourage their adaptation for current use.'

On the MLK property, however, even though it's a more historically significant structure, staff are recommending that the District's application be granted. The building is mostly gone, but more importantly, the perpetrator is out of the picture. "The requirement of the replacement of a building that has already been essentially demolished by neglect is a remedy only appropriately applied to the owner who allowed it to reach that state, just as the owner of a property actively razed without permit can be required to rebuild it," staff wrote.

In these two recommendations—which the Board may disagree with, but likely won't—the preservation office is taking into account the prospects for redevelopment of the two sites, and the goodwill shown by each applicant, not just historical merit alone. The Third Street Church of God may see it as unfair that one city agency grants another city agency permission to raze a building it bought from someone who had let it deteriorate beyond repair, while punishing a religious institution for doing the same thing. In this case, though, I think that's probably reasonable. And if the Church doesn't want to deal with rehabilitation, it can just sell the properties, like it should have done years ago.

We've been following the Anacostia streetcar’s progress closely for the past year or so. Here are the five things I’m feeling about the recent news.

1. No one party is solely responsible. It appears that everyone involved screwed up. GGW’s post argues that the FTA should chill out, recognize the city’s commitment to building a streetcar system, and not add last-minute obstacles. The FTA told DCist, "DDOT, however, refused to follow FTA's guidance…had they done so, they would have preserved the City's long term options and perhaps saved taxpayer monies in the long run."

2. DDOT doesn’t want Anacostia to fail. Notable Anacostia boosters have accused the agency of giving the neighborhood false hope of revitalization. But this all seems a result of DDOT moving too fast and the FTA's inflexibility, not an intentional sucker punch to the neighborhood. Unless DDOT decides, based on public input, that it's better to not build at all (not terribly likely!), Anacostia is getting a streetcar—and it’s getting the second line in the whole system. (At-Large Councilmember David Catania took credit for this in 2008.)

3. The Anacostia line isn’t happening anytime soon, anyway. The most recent public meeting, held in June, presented four options for alignment, and a final option has not yet been picked. DDOT is still working on an Environmental Impact Study, required by the National Environmental Protection Act and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. The Anacostia line is in its embryonic stages, and likely won’t be a reality for at least another five years or so; the last I heard, there was no chance of cars running on it until 2014 at the very earliest. That the bridge will be streetcar rail-ready and not actually equipped is a setback in time and money, to be sure, but one that might be made up for as other tenants of the project—like the finalization of the alignment—become clear. This thing wasn’t going to be running tomorrow, or next year, or the year after that.

4. Nonetheless, it’s really, really dumb not to build streetcar tracks into the 11th Street Bridge. The tracks on H Street NE were installed as part of the repaving and streetscape construction there. It only makes sense. Though DDOT may have brought this upon themselves in their urgency to get the streetcar system’s construction underway and to do so with federal funding, the agency has clearly demonstrated they’re committed to building the infrastructure. Even if the FTA is exacting proper punishment, it seems ridiculously inefficient.

5. In a perverse way, not building the tracks into the bridge might not be so bad, after all. Though there is some support out there for the streetcar line, most of those who have turned out to DDOT’s meetings have been stridently opposed to it. Part of the psychology of this, I suspect, is the fact that the streetcar rails were being baked into the 11th Street Bridge; in a neighborhood that’s prime for gentrification (consider Anacostia’s relatively low-cost-but-good-quality housing stock, ideal “downtown” infrastructure, and transit accessibility), that signifies to a lot of people that the city is making moves without their permission. Whether that is or isn't a valid way to feel is a discussion for another time, but it's certainly a sentiment that's been vocalized, loudly and often. If the 11th Street Bridge is rail-ready, not rail-equipped, the streetcar might seem like less of a monster—and, therefore, slightly more palatable.

I talked with DDOT spokesperson John Lisle shortly after writing this list. He explained that the 11th Street Bridge and the study area for the Anacostia streetcar line are two different beasts: The latter "goes up to the base of the bridge, so the discussion about the bridge and whether we put tracks in the bridge does not slow down what’s going on in Anacostia," he says.

Photo by DDOTDC on Flickr

Best coffeeshop south of Bauhaus. (Lydia DePillis)

After a couple years of watching D.C. change from day to day, it’s always remarkable to go home to Seattle and see a year’s worth of change all at once. Or, in the case of one far-flung neighborhood, about a decade of it.

While I was growing up, Georgetown was the odd place so far south of downtown as to not seem part of Seattle at all, where I’d occasionally go to play a soccer game and then leave. It’s halfway to the airport, sandwiched between Boeing Field and the railroad tracks, garlanded in a highway interchange. The city’s emerging hot spots—Ballard, Belltown, South Lake Union—were anywhere but there.

This past weekend, while gallery hopping with my family in the historic downtown neighborhood of Pioneer Square, we found that many places were closed on Sundays or had shuttered altogether, forced out by high rents. My mom had heard that the new artist haven was Georgetown, so we piled back in the car and headed south.

What we found absolutely blew my mind. The new Georgetown is like a replica of H Street NE, with a tightly-knit cluster of hipster bars with names like Smartypants and Nine Pound Hammer, casual restaurants, and a light-filled, bustling, classic Northwest coffeeshop. Utility poles are plastered with concert posters. Narrow roadways—currently under construction, adding to the H Street feel—are rimmed by magnificent but crumbling old brick buildings, like a former brewery that’s been partially converted into artist studios.

Unlike H Street, though, it’s also figured out retail, boasting vintage furniture boutiques and specialty stores selling graphic novels, records, buttons, blown glass—the list goes on. The set of angled commercial streets is interspersed with more industrial businesses, too, like fish wholesalers and tire stores. And it has even more creative forms of commerce: In the back of some of the lots, there’s a “trailer park” with retro Airstreams selling barbeque and crafts.

Most of this has happened over the last ten years, since the adoption of a neighborhood plan focused on fostering the arts and design economy, acquiring and improving community spaces, deterring crime, bettering code enforcement and permit processing, and preserving affordable housing. Now, it's gained critical mass to the point a person where with a limited housing budget who still wants all the amenities of urban life could easily consider living there (the New York Times even noticed in 2008). A certain kind of person clearly loves it: My barista sported a T-shirt that read "I [heart] Georgetown," with a spurting aorta coming out of the left and right ventricle.

Walking the streets of Georgetown, though, I wasn't reminded so much of H Street's present as I was of Anacostia's potential future. Like Georgetown, it sometimes feels far away and hard to get to (Anacostia's actually closer, with a metro stop). They're both blessed with atmospheric historic building stock, and were bustling town centers before their decline.

Anacostia will need to be rebuilt much more substantially, since few of those warehouses are intact. The economic base, too, will have to come back, hopefully in the form of tech businesses attracted by the new Department of Homeland Security. And of course, thus far Anacostia's seen its share of failures—Big Chair Coffee was supposed to anchor a new commercial cluster, before it closed. (Uniontown Bar has a chance to do so again.)

But with both of these town centers, revitalization isn't a matter of creating something new, so much as it's a matter of bringing something back. As long as you have the bones of a great place, there's still a chance for people to follow.

The "trailer park" where food and goods are sold.

The newly taxed properties. (Office of Planning)

It's been in the works for years, and now the Anacostia Business Improvement District—a formal structure that will levy taxes on property owners to make the neighborhood more attractive—is just waiting on its final approval from the city to get started.

The effort got rolling in earnest in 2008, when Councilmember Marion Barry introduced legislation that would enable the BID's establishment, setting the tax at $0.21 per $100 of assessed value for properties along Good Hope Road, Howard Road, Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, and Shannon Place SE. It passed, but the group of landowners and non-profits—including Four Points Development's Stan Voudrie, Doug Jemal, Don Peebles, ARCH Development Corporation, the Anacostia Economic Development Corporation—then had to get signoff from the Internal Revenue Service and submit their application to the Department of Small and Local Business Development, which is the last remaining hurdle.

It's a significant step, because BIDs have been transformative in emerging commercial areas around the city: Downtown, NoMa, and the Capitol Riverfront especially played key roles in making things happen for their little areas. In large part, it comes down to making the neighborhoods feel clean and safe, but BIDs can also band together to help create services. The Circulator bus, for example, was largely a BID-driven effort. It's especially important for Anacostia, where a Main Streets program died a few years ago, but which has perhaps the best chance to capture growth over the next few years.

For a large version of the full map, click here.

But the bigger problem with that area isn't sidewalks or street trees. Rather, it's the absence of any significant commercial, office, or residential development within a quarter-mile radius, which is the magic number for destinations to fall within walking distance. The primary uses in direct proximity to the Metro station are schools and churches, which are only in use for limited periods. Most of the land is just empty, including a grassy field across Howard Road that's owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and four acres kitty corner from the station bought by Bethlehem Baptist Church in 2002 and never developed. The latter was even identified in a 2004 Office of Planning study, approved by the Council, as "the most promising site for early development," able to handle 230-250 residential units and 11,000-15,000 square feet of retail.

According to local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner William Ellis, WMATA contemplated buying the church site in 2009 for a new headquarters building, but never followed through. He hasn't heard any rumblings from the church about developing its vacant land (which is, at least, current on its property taxes).

Now, I realize the difficulty of luring developers East of the River. But if the feds and the District are serious about improving the environmental qualities of that area, they should buy it and build housing there themselves. Even if the funds don't exist to do that, it's bizarre to not even mention the nonexistent density around that site in a whole media event around greening the station.

1217-1219 Good Hope Road, future women's shelter.

It's as predictable as the sunrise, from Petworth to Congress Heights to Truxton Circle to Hill East: A social services organization tries to locate a facility in a neighborhood, the neighbors feel blindsided, and the battle is joined. This time, the drama is about to play out again in the heart of Anacostia's business district, where Calvary Women's Services is redeveloping a 14,000-square-foot building as a women's shelter.

The 28-year-old organization bought the property, in a former Elks Lodge right across from the Department of Housing and Community Development on Good Hope Road SE, for $950,000 in December. It's a $3 million project, and after landing a $175,000 gift from the Cafritz Foundation, organizers are hoping to raise another $750,000 by the end of the year to make the numbers work. When it's operational, the facility will house 50 women at night and serve meals to 100 per day, along with providing other supportive services.

Despite the fact that it's been in the works for seven months now, lots of people in the area found out about it just last week, in an email blast from Council Chairman Kwame Brown. Today, Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Greta Fuller fired off a letter to the relevant agency directors complaining that the area was already overburdened with homeless services and drug treatment programs; there are four others within a few blocks of Calvary's site.

"It's a very frustrating process, because the community wants so desperately to move forward, and when services like this are on every block in our neighborhood, it makes it difficult to promote the neighborhood," says Charles Wilson, president of the Historic Anacostia Block Association. "You can tell that some people have been maneuvering behind the scenes to move this process forward...you just get a sense that politicians have made it possible for them to make the transition to Good Hope Road."

Wilson's got a point, of course. While not much has been willing to rent space there yet, that's theoretically a prime retail or restaurant location, and it's hard to convince a sit-down restaurant to put their sidewalk cafe right next to a homeless shelter (whether or not the aversion is well-founded). And of course, Calvary did itself no favors by getting this far along in the process without starting a discussion with community groups; that's only asking for hostility.

Still, there's also no reason why a well-managed shelter has to be a blight on the community. Many are fairly innocuous. And there's clearly a need for these kinds of services, somewhere. Calvary's executive director Kris Thompson was on vacation and unable to comment, but staff are apparently supposed to defend their program at ANC 8A's meeting tomorrow.

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UPDATE, August 2: Here's a response to complaints about the use of the term "NIMBY" on this post.

The building on the left has room to grow. (UrbanAdvantage)

Via David Garber, here's a rendering done by UrbanAdvantage for the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road SE in Anacostia, where a mural is being dismantled after the building behind it became dangerously unstable. The Department of Housing and Community Development, headquartered across the street, bought the corner lot early last year, and has been slow in figuring out what to do with it.

This mockup, I've got to say, isn't encouraging: The corner should have something bigger than two stories to anchor that struggling commercial strip, preferably with as much housing as possible. It's zoned C-3-A, which allows for building up to 65 feet. The analogous development is the Grays at Pennsylvania, which has a Yes! Organic Market on the ground floor, and leased up in a jiffy. On such a prominent site, why wouldn't you fill your entire envelope?

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UPDATE, 5:00 p.m. - Looks like not much will be happening with that property in the near term anyway. From a DHCD spokeswoman: "At this time, the Department does not have immediate plans for the property. We will be exploring temporary and permanent redevelopment options in the near future. DHCD works to evaluate plans to beautify the gateway entry."

I must say, if the presence of a large city agency in a depressed area neither results in commercial spaces across the street being leased nor a well-positioned property having any plans for development a year and a half after the agency bought it, what good is it?

Gone is the option of a double-track on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, which DDOT officials said they preferred in March. The remaining route alternatives are parallel but separated routes on MLK/13th Street SE, MLK/Shannon Place, and MLK/Railroad Avenue. The fourth option is a parallel double-track on Railroad Avenue.

The first three alignments all run one way on MLK. That street, Anacostia's main commercial corridor, stands to benefit most from having potential customers roll by on the regular. Entrepreneurs are already plunking down projects there, and the infrastructure—buildings zoned for commercial use, some of which exist in a historic district—is in place. MLK also sees heavy car and bus traffic throughout the day; there's a chance that, with the streetcar running, buses might be diverted onto other roads. This could ease traffic on MLK and allow for bus service in different parts of the neighborhood.

The 13th Street SE route is beneficial in that it reduces the distance those in Anacostia's densest parts would have to walk to board the streetcar. But that's also a downside: It runs through a highly residential area in Anacostia's historic district. Shannon Place SE is residential, too, but has more empty lots and warehouses that could be redeveloped for commercial use.

Anything along Railroad Avenue will be particularly complicated, because CSX currently holds the right-of-way for that area—which could result in negotiations between the District and CSX not unlike the talks with Amtrak that have delayed the H Street NE line. The MLK/Railroad Avenue alignment puts a greater distance between the parallel tracks than any other, while the double-track option along Railroad Avenue requires an odd turn, to route around a historically significant building and create a specialized right-of-way that avoids conflict with CSX. And while Railroad Avenue has plenty of warehouses that could be redeveloped, the double-track option doesn't touch MLK—which puts it further from the burgeoning investment in Anacostia's main street, and further still from residents who live on MLK's eastern side.

There are still a lot of questions about the streetcar, but many—such as how much fares will cost, how late it will run, how many parking spaces will be removed to accommodate it, how much room it needs to make a turn, how it will affect bus routes, and where it will stop—require DDOT to figure out where the line will run before they can be answered.

The meeting was less of a circus than DDOT's previous forays into the neighborhood, which may mean the agency has gotten past a rough patch in its public engagement process (they've got a long way to go; this section isn't supposed to have streetcars on it until at least 2014). It also wrapped up Phase 2 of DDOT's planning timeline for the Anacostia line. The agency expects to release a draft of a final alignment in September.