The DC Housing Authority finally has a possible co-developer for Greenleaf Gardens. Here’s how it happened.

In October, the DC Housing Authority (DCHA) Board of Commissioners voted 5-4 against the agency commencing negotiations with their preferred co-developer for Greenleaf Gardens. By that following month, however, the Board voted 5-4 in favor, enabling the agency to move forward with the Exclusive Right to Negotiate (ERN) with that co-developer. What made the difference?

Largely, the agency’s efforts in the interim to reengage the community and its stakeholders on the status of the project and the roadmap ahead, which represented a welcome pivot from how engagement has gone up to this point. Here’s how the redevelopment process went from conceptual to doable.

Redevelopment of Greenleaf Gardens was in the works years before an RFP was issued

Although a request for proposals (RFP) to redevelop Greenleaf Gardens was only released in April of 2019, this effort has actually been in the works for nearly eight years.

In April of 2013, DCHA informed Greenleaf residents of its plans to apply to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for a $500,000 Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grant as a preliminary step toward redevelopment. The Choice Neighborhoods program was an evolved form of HOPE VI, coupling a redevelopment of the public housing community itself with the addition of wraparound services, or efforts to alleviate non-housing-specific issues the residents may be experiencing.

The planning grant would have given DCHA two years to furnish a Transformation Plan for its selected community, reimbursing the awarded agency for costs associated with the process of creating the plan. Successful completion of the Plan could have put the agency in line for an Implementation Grant of up to $30 million to accomplish the Plan’s goals. As reported at the time, the physical conditions of the property were found to be distressed by that time, making Greenleaf eligible for a Choice grant.

Also by then, the specter of development had already been gravitating toward Greenleaf from the east and from the west, respectively between the 2008 completion of Nationals Park inspiring speculation around DCHA’s James Creek and Syphax Gardens communities, and the lengthy redevelopment of Waterside Mall starting in 2007, which remains in-progress.

While DCHA’s application was denied, the intention had already been made clear: as written in Hill Rag, “DCHA intends to redevelop Greenleaf whether or not it receives the grant since the buildings are near the end of their useful lifespan.” Meanwhile, another neighborhood planning and engagement process had already been set in motion, led by the city’s Office of Planning (OP) and encompassing the same area the planning grant application covered: the Southwest Neighborhood Plan.

The Southwest Neighborhood Plan foreshadowed engagement angst

OP had begun previewing its planning efforts since fall of 2012, and had convened meetings with stakeholders around the time DCHA submitted its grant application. In September of 2013, OP held a public meeting at Arena Stage to launch its engagement process for what would become the Small Area Plan (SAP) for Southwest. SAPs are neighborhood-level framework documents that provide guidance for how growth and development should take place moving forward.

OP held a handful of public meetings leading up to June 2014 in order to compile a draft of the Southwest SAP, and the Plan also states that there were two meetings held in fall of 2013 solely for Greenleaf residents on-site at the Southwest Family Enhancement Center. Just before the draft came out, many of the neighborhood’s most influential members (whom OP had invited to participate as part of an advisory committee), including some ANC 6D commissioners and Greenleaf Gardens Resident Council President Dena Walker, had signed off on an open letter to OP raising concerns about whether residents’ concerns were being adequately addressed. The redevelopment of Greenleaf was one of the foremost issues raised:

“The community has repeatedly voiced concerns about preserving and accommodating the future of Southwest’s residents living in the large Greenleaf housing development. However, OP’s only Greenleaf-related recommendations were land use changes that would facilitate demolition of the Greenleaf area with no concomitant recommendations for keeping the Greenleaf community intact. Southwest still bears the scars of social injustice from the mass displacement of residents from the urban renewal process of the 1950s. We should not let this unfortunate history repeat itself.”

In November 2014, the Draft SAP was released for public comment, and much of the discussion continued to center around Greenleaf and the high stakes associated with its redevelopment. Of 182 comments OP culled from a mayoral hearing on the Plan, 17 (including from one Greenleaf resident) specifically named the Greenleaf redevelopment as a point of concern, yet OP’s responses to the comments mentioned Greenleaf more than twice as often.

“DCHA is leading the effort on the Master Plan with the Greenleaf residents and will also be responsible for any future development on the Greenleaf parcels,” OP replied to comments on the SAP that questioned the lack of specific commitments vis-a-vis the Greenleaf redevelopment. “The Southwest Neighborhood Plan will help inform the DCHA Master Planning process.”

The final SAP was approved by the DC Council in July of 2015, with the Greenleaf redevelopment cited throughout and goals for this project identified.

“Neighborhood residents support the responsible redevelopment of the Greenleaf public housing community to ensure that all current qualifying residents have the option to remain in Southwest and receive workforce and education tools and programs to prosper into the future. The community supports transparency and clarity in communications throughout the process as the DC Housing Authority (DCHA) embarks on planning and redevelopment. The community seeks to provide guidelines and expectations for new development, like the replacement of all subsidized units and the contextual design and massing of new buildings. The community voiced a desire to see emphasis on the human capital portion of the transition, with residents receiving all the support and capacity-building measures needed to ease transition and succeed in employment, education, and other matters.”

The Plan also recommended that DCHA be incorporated into a city-led Interagency Working Group with OP and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) that, in the interim, would identify city-owned sites well-suited for build-first opportunities, which would allow Greenleaf households to relocate from their current units directly into newly-developed housing units before their buildings are razed and replaced.

DCHA begins master-planning the Greenleaf redevelopment

As the SAP process began winding down in late 2014, DCHA, along with the agency’s selected master planner Perkins Eastman and consultant HR&A Advisors*, began engaging residents in order to put together a master plan for redeveloping Greenleaf Gardens. As the meetings and charrettes began including the broader Southwest community in October of 2015, DC Councilmember Charles Allen (Ward 6) introduced a resolution affirming that councilmembers urge DCHA to “prioritize” build-first as part of the redevelopment process. The Council did vote in favor of that legislation.

Shortly after that resolution was put forth, ANC 6D unanimously passed the “Resolution in Support of Avoiding the Displacement of Public Housing Residents During the Redevelopment of Public Housing Buildings in the Southwest Neighborhood”, expressing their support for a build-first strategy, identifying 21 city-owned sites that could be used for build-first, and requesting that the aforementioned interagency working group be established.

However, the push for build-first also engendered more confusion among residents in and around Greenleaf, as more questioned why the identified city-owned sites weren’t up for grabs, as some were later selected for other projects and others began to seem unlikely options. DCHA’s status as an independent agency outside of the purview of the mayor’s office required a higher degree of political will and interagency coordination than was present at the time.

For example, the Unity Health Clinic site, previously cited as a build-first opportunity, was chosen for the Ward 6 replacement homeless shelter in May of 2016. That same year, rumor had it that the parking lot at Metropolitan Police Department’s First District headquarters was also a potential build-first site; by 2018, however, then-DMPED director Brian Kenner rejected the idea, recommending that DCHA “build first” on Greenleaf’s surface parking lots. In 2018, Councilmember Allen posited the fire truck maintenance site on Half Street SW as a potential build-first site as he worked to get the facility relocated — that relocation never took place.

All three sites were also among those highlighted as potential build-first opportunities in the final Redevelopment master plan, although the possibility began seeming far-fetched very quickly. Even before concrete steps were taken to get redevelopment off the ground, it seemed like opportunities to ensure build-first and prevent displacement were slipping away, particularly as other public housing redevelopment efforts throughout the city failed to build first for those residents.

Redevelopment Plan released and redevelopment efforts begin

In April of 2016, Greenleaf residents got their first look at the potential redevelopment plan for their community, a proposal that included specific scale and density prescriptions for the current Greenleaf sites and proposed a total of nearly 1,900 new residential units, including replacement units for residents. The final redevelopment plan was published in spring of 2017; Tyrone Garrett began his tenure as DCHA director six months later.

At first, it appeared that the agency wanted to hit the ground running to consummate the redevelopment plan, as DCHA put out a request for qualifications (RFQ) for potential co-developers in December of 2017. Per the finalized redevelopment plan, the undertaking was long overdue: DCHA had spent nearly $20 million on maintenance for the community between 1996 and 2016 and the properties were “functionally obsolete.”

The Greenleaf Advisory Council, a group of stakeholders DCHA had organized as a sounding board for the redevelopment efforts, were introduced to the finalist groups from the RFQ in spring of 2018, five of which would submit a plan during the request for proposals (RFP) phase. Meanwhile, Greenleaf residents heard very little about the status of the redevelopment efforts before news broke of the RFP in April of 2019.

Three months after the RFP came out, DCHA held a meeting at Greenleaf Gardens with residents to give them an update about the state of Greenleaf’s properties (whose deplorable states had been verified by a series of inspections), the redevelopment process (which would take 3-5 years before the initial build-first properties break ground), and the residents’ right to return to the completed property. While some residents asked about the rumored city-owned build-first sites, Garrett stated that the city had not offered any of those sites to the agency.

DCHA returned to Greenleaf with the final four RFP respondent teams in December of 2019, giving each team the opportunity to introduce themselves and little time for much else interaction. Each of the finalist teams had build-first sites, controlled by development partners within each team so as to avoid any delays in acquiring city-owned sites, identified in their proposals, although details were not shared at this stage. Most residents heard nothing else about the redevelopment until the agency requested the right to begin negotiations with their preferred co-developer in October of 2020.

Co-developer selection paired with improved engagement plans

Despite not reaching out to Greenleaf residents about the development prior to the Board’s October meeting, the agency has since made a great leap of effort to reestablish engagement.

To keep residents in the loop, the plan moving forward is to convene monthly meetings, ideally with the selected co-development team, to update Greenleaf residents; the December meeting occurred on the 10th. The meetings have been via online platform WebEx thus far, and although internet access is not guaranteed for public housing residents, hard copies of the presentations are distributed beforehand, along with instructions for residents to access the meeting by computer or by phone. Roughly two dozen Greenleaf residents attended each of the two November meetings, comparable to the total number of attendees for the July 2019 meeting. Each meeting participant was also called on individually to give them an opportunity to comment or ask questions.

For stakeholder groups, DCHA’s Andre Gould called the Greenleaf Advisory Council together prior to the November DCHA board meeting to update them; the Council will be convened on a quarterly basis moving forward. DCHA also uploaded videos of the recent resident engagement sessions to a dedicated webpage that was set up last year, along with previous presentations.

If the agency can keep up this same engagement energy throughout the years-long, multi-phased development process, it would represent a welcome – and necessary – pivot from how previous redevelopment efforts at the city’s other public housing communities have been conducted, as well as a pivot from how the engagement process began years ago.

*Note: A member of Greater Greater Washington’s Board of Directors is also a partner with HR&A Advisors. Our board has no influence over editorial decisions, nor content in any way.