Langston Hughes was working as a busboy at Washington’s storied Wardman Park hotel in 1925 when he slipped three of his poems to a literary critic dining in the hotel’s restaurant — a move that helped launch him into America’s literary pantheon.
That sprawling resort — demolished, with parts rebuilt or historically preserved over the years — was once the official home of some of America’s vice presidents, and an epicenter of Washington’s conferences, parties, galas, luncheons and weddings. It was largely staffed by Black workers, like Hughes, who were also being pushed out of their established communities in the neighborhoods surrounding it.
The landmark closed during the pandemic, went bankrupt and was snatched by a California developer at auction for $152 million.
And now, hundreds of high-end units are planned in an area where affordable housing is scarce, in a city dotted with homeless encampments. It kicked off an unexpected, long-shot social justice campaign.
“This isn’t what we need here,” said Carren Kaston, a longtime resident of one of D.C.’s most desirable Zip codes and one of the people forcing her neighbors to reckon with the truth of their wealthy enclave’s past.
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It’s a challenge D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser has repeatedly issued to this moneyed sector of a plurality of color city, where 4 in 5 residents are White, Kaston noted, “essentially saying ‘You bad people, you redlined African Americans.’”
Back at the turn of the century, Ward 3 was home to some of the city’s most vibrant, majority-Black neighborhoods. There was an all-Black baseball team, the Fort Renos. The Palisades Black community formed around a well-regarded school for African American students.
Then came the deed restrictions, the redlining and the demands — from White people — that the federal government take over the land in those neighborhoods and demolish homes to make way for Fort Reno Park and all-White schools.
The government did in the 1930s and 1940s, my colleague Courtland Milloy wrote.
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It was during that time that Hughes, since relocated north, captured the tension between the dreams of an America promised to and experienced by people who were not truly free, challenging this country to redeem itself.
“Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)”
-Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America”
Ward 3 residents inviting a reckoning here insist the city should be involved. It was here at the Wardman that Thurgood Marshall stayed when he tried the Brown v. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court, while other major hotels in D.C. practiced racial segregation. He returned in 1967, for his swearing-in as a Supreme Court justice.
“I’m not saying I’m not grappling with it. There could be a financial cost — personally, my apartment may not be worth as much,” Rebecca Barson told my colleague Paul Schwartzman when she joined a group challenging the Wardman Park developers two years ago. “I also think I have benefited as a White person from systems I didn’t create, and this is an important moment to do what’s right for the greater good.”
It’s an inversion of the NIMBY noise you usually hear from neighborhoods like this, where the residents may vote blue, but turn beet red when the prospect of low-income housing threatens to devalue their homes.
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Here, the neighborhood groups fighting the 900-condo designs cast the number and price point of the project’s affordable housing element (the minimum effort required by the city) as an example of bad faith. The plans include 72 units — 8 percent of the total — at prices aimed at those making 60 percent of the city’s average median income, which is about $85,000. Maybe a single lobbyist can afford to live there?
“That’s not what our firefighters, teachers, beauticians, cashiers can afford,” Kaston said. Most affordable housing advocates want to see those prices for families who make 30 percent of the average income, about $45,000. “Those are the people who should be able to live in the city, too.”
It seems like an impossible task. The sprawling property sold, the demolition has begun, and the developers haven’t played ball with any incentives the city is offering to them to make their behemoth more affordable.
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“We have urged the current property owner to avail themselves of the High Amenity Neighborhood Tax Abatement, which would capture a third of the new homes at affordable and workforce levels,” said John J. Falcicchio, D.C.’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development. “Despite direct conversations … they have not applied …We stand ready to engage with them.”
But Kaston’s group, the Wardman Hotel Strategy Team, is done waiting on the city. They got their own guy to draw up plans for a multi-income, social housing complex with 500 units, a grocery store and community space. (I’d rope in Andy Shallal to open one of his Busboys and Poets restaurants — named in tribute to Hughes — on the ground floor.) The entire complex sits atop a Metro stop. It’s perfect affordable housing. And the group had a small victory last month that may help the plan work.
Every project larger than three acres in D.C. is supposed to go through a Large Tract Review process. It’s not something that can shut down a project, but it mandates that the developer interact and solicit feedback from community agencies on the impact of their venture. Somehow, the massive project didn’t trigger that review.
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The advocates challenged it, and the developer — who did not return an interview request — now has 60 days to complete the review. They hope the 23 city agencies — from schools to police to the health department that were tapped to respond — weigh in. Heavily.
Several council members are angling for the city to buy the place back from the developer, or take it over using eminent domain.
“We have $500 million in the Housing Production Trust Fund,” D.C. Council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) said in a November housing committee meeting where the Wardman was discussed. “$150 million of $500 million really isn’t that concerning.”
Remember, it happened once before in this ward. This time, it would be a righteous takeover.
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