Van Ness Public Housing

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It appears that Frumin tolerated the voucher program in exchange for the mayor supporting the bike lane program. He blew what limited political capital he had and now he looks like a fool. The ANCs have been captured by the GGW crowd but pretty much every neighbor on the corridor is fired up about up this.

I would not make any assumptions about the “GGW” crowd. I am pro transit and housing development but very against this terribly mismanaged program. In fact it will likely result in me moving to Virginia because as a renter with a child, I’m not going to expose him to the risk of being in an unsafe building.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It appears that Frumin tolerated the voucher program in exchange for the mayor supporting the bike lane program. He blew what limited political capital he had and now he looks like a fool. The ANCs have been captured by the GGW crowd but pretty much every neighbor on the corridor is fired up about up this.

I would not make any assumptions about the “GGW” crowd. I am pro transit and housing development but very against this terribly mismanaged program. In fact it will likely result in me moving to Virginia because as a renter with a child, I’m not going to expose him to the risk of being in an unsafe building.

Unfortunately you can’t be pro housing development and anti bad voucher program. They are one and the same in DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It appears that Frumin tolerated the voucher program in exchange for the mayor supporting the bike lane program. He blew what limited political capital he had and now he looks like a fool. The ANCs have been captured by the GGW crowd but pretty much every neighbor on the corridor is fired up about up this.

I would not make any assumptions about the “GGW” crowd. I am pro transit and housing development but very against this terribly mismanaged program. In fact it will likely result in me moving to Virginia because as a renter with a child, I’m not going to expose him to the risk of being in an unsafe building.

Unfortunately you can’t be pro housing development and anti bad voucher program. They are one and the same in DC.

It's not pro-housing development. Nothing is being developed, it's all existing buildings. Existing tenants are being pushed out in favor or voucher tenants. It's replacement. Let's not kid ourselves that this is affordable housing "creation".

Previous tenants, law obedient citizens move out somewhere where they don't have to deal with degeneracy, many of them are rent control older tenants and families. People who need housing and have very few options, and often have to move somewhere less convenient while thugs get preferential treatment and cannot be touched with a ten foot pole.

This program needs to be reformed. First, make screening mandatory and allow landlords to avoid problem tenants and also make it easy for landlords to get rid of voucher tenants who cause problems easily. People with untreated mental illness or severe drug addiction or criminal tendencies should not be forcibly integrated into the buildings and neighborhoods of people who live by different set of rules. The former do need housing and are often the ones unable to procure it, but not in the settings where their issues cannot be handled and addressed. Residential buildings are not mental health institutions, drug rehabs or low security prisons. There are plenty of low wage people who want better lives, who want to raise kids in safer neighborhoods, and are law obedient, rule following, and hard working who need housing help.

[Anonymous]

Most screening of voucher holders has been made illegal by the DC Council. As the WP has noted, vouchers can’t be lost, even if crimes committed in unit or non-payment, unlike public housing. They are merely re-located nearby.

“Returning citizens,” addicts and the mentally ill are prioritized for the PSH vouchers. The way the program operates reflects features, not bugs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good.

Public housing should be spread equally across all wards. Glad to see Ward 3 is finally making baby steps towards carrying its fair share.

+1 from this Ward 3 resident

“This” Ward 3 resident lives miles from upper Connecticut Ave and certainly never walks along it. Guaranteed.

My guess is deep into AU Park near Mass or deep into 20015 right next to RCP at about 27th

Both bastions of the limousine liberals - equity consequences for Thee but not for Me! Enjoy Murch y’all (scurries back to all white Janney/Lafayette with zero apartments )

It won’t be that way forever. Don’t worry, they’re coming for you too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good.

Public housing should be spread equally across all wards. Glad to see Ward 3 is finally making baby steps towards carrying its fair share.

+1 from this Ward 3 resident

“This” Ward 3 resident lives miles from upper Connecticut Ave and certainly never walks along it. Guaranteed.

My guess is deep into AU Park near Mass or deep into 20015 right next to RCP at about 27th

Both bastions of the limousine liberals - equity consequences for Thee but not for Me! Enjoy Murch y’all (scurries back to all white Janney/Lafayette with zero apartments )

It won’t be that way forever. Don’t worry, they’re coming for you too.

Oh, they’re coming for that Missing Middle in AU Park. With Frumin leading the charge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good.

Public housing should be spread equally across all wards. Glad to see Ward 3 is finally making baby steps towards carrying its fair share.

+1 from this Ward 3 resident

“This” Ward 3 resident lives miles from upper Connecticut Ave and certainly never walks along it. Guaranteed.

My guess is deep into AU Park near Mass or deep into 20015 right next to RCP at about 27th

Both bastions of the limousine liberals - equity consequences for Thee but not for Me! Enjoy Murch y’all (scurries back to all white Janney/Lafayette with zero apartments )

It won’t be that way forever. Don’t worry, they’re coming for you too.

Another dumb comment.

Missing middle describes a form of housing not its residents but all missing middle housing I am aware of is market rate housing.

And this type of housing wouldn't be coming for someone whatever that even means.

Oh, they’re coming for that Missing Middle in AU Park. With Frumin leading the charge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good.

Public housing should be spread equally across all wards. Glad to see Ward 3 is finally making baby steps towards carrying its fair share.

+1 from this Ward 3 resident

“This” Ward 3 resident lives miles from upper Connecticut Ave and certainly never walks along it. Guaranteed.

My guess is deep into AU Park near Mass or deep into 20015 right next to RCP at about 27th

Both bastions of the limousine liberals - equity consequences for Thee but not for Me! Enjoy Murch y’all (scurries back to all white Janney/Lafayette with zero apartments )

It won’t be that way forever. Don’t worry, they’re coming for you too.

Another dumb comment.

Missing middle describes a form of housing not its residents but all missing middle housing I am aware of is market rate housing.

And this type of housing wouldn't be coming for someone whatever that even means.

Oh, they’re coming for that Missing Middle in AU Park. With Frumin leading the charge.

Connecticut Ave is lined with buildings full of homeless and addicts on vouchers paying over market rates. Thats coming to AU park in a few years thanks to the current Council and mayor.

[Anonymous]

I'm late to this thread, but just wanted to chime in and say that I'm among the people who have fled Van Ness due to voucher tenants. Specifically, I lived in one of the large rent-controlled apartment buildings on upper Connecticut. I moved to DC to attend grad school, and I was attracted to the area because it seemed pleasant enough, had good Metro access, and was relatively affordable for someone on a lower income, like me. What ensued was the most stressful living experience of my life. People smoking weed in the hallways. Constant police activity. The guy down the hall from me had a lengthy criminal record (including carjackings and robberies). The guy above me would smoke weed and blare rap with his window open in the middle of the night. (I'm sure he was gainfully employed, with a sleep schedule like that.) Trashy parents screaming at their 6 kids with their windows open. Stabbings and assaults inside the building. Trash/litter everywhere. Roaches coming from nearby filthy units. Ugh, it was awful.

Another commenter pointed out that your experience in these buildings can vary depending on your proximity to voucher tenants. I found that to be true. My hallway was actually mostly fine--the neighbors were a mix of elderly people, students, and other hard-working lower/middle-income folks (the people hit hardest by idiotic DC housing policies). It was the wider environment of the building that was hell. I never knew what kind of bullshit I'd encounter in the lobby or outside of the building. The constant scent of weed coming from neighboring units, as well as occasional auditory pollution (screaming, rap music, etc) were the biggest problems I dealt with in my own unit.

It was also sad to see voucher tenants terrorize the Giant and the CVS by the Metro stop.

When I realized that it would be hard to escape voucher tenants without significantly increasing my rent, I just left DC. I now live in NoVa, where I am happy to say I live the quiet, peaceful, crime-free life that I'd imagine Van Ness used to offer.

It's sad, because I actually really like Van Ness as a neighborhood. I liked the community of businesses in the area (Bread Furst, Sfoglina, Politics & Prose, etc) and found the environment to be charming. I wish I could have experienced it 10-15 years ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm late to this thread, but just wanted to chime in and say that I'm among the people who have fled Van Ness due to voucher tenants. Specifically, I lived in one of the large rent-controlled apartment buildings on upper Connecticut. I moved to DC to attend grad school, and I was attracted to the area because it seemed pleasant enough, had good Metro access, and was relatively affordable for someone on a lower income, like me. What ensued was the most stressful living experience of my life. People smoking weed in the hallways. Constant police activity. The guy down the hall from me had a lengthy criminal record (including carjackings and robberies). The guy above me would smoke weed and blare rap with his window open in the middle of the night. (I'm sure he was gainfully employed, with a sleep schedule like that.) Trashy parents screaming at their 6 kids with their windows open. Stabbings and assaults inside the building. Trash/litter everywhere. Roaches coming from nearby filthy units. Ugh, it was awful.

Another commenter pointed out that your experience in these buildings can vary depending on your proximity to voucher tenants. I found that to be true. My hallway was actually mostly fine--the neighbors were a mix of elderly people, students, and other hard-working lower/middle-income folks (the people hit hardest by idiotic DC housing policies). It was the wider environment of the building that was hell. I never knew what kind of bullshit I'd encounter in the lobby or outside of the building. The constant scent of weed coming from neighboring units, as well as occasional auditory pollution (screaming, rap music, etc) were the biggest problems I dealt with in my own unit.

It was also sad to see voucher tenants terrorize the Giant and the CVS by the Metro stop.

When I realized that it would be hard to escape voucher tenants without significantly increasing my rent, I just left DC. I now live in NoVa, where I am happy to say I live the quiet, peaceful, crime-free life that I'd imagine Van Ness used to offer.

It's sad, because I actually really like Van Ness as a neighborhood. I liked the community of businesses in the area (Bread Furst, Sfoglina, Politics & Prose, etc) and found the environment to be charming. I wish I could have experienced it 10-15 years ago.

Nothing has really changed, except now there is a “legal” marijuana dispensary on site to service this growing client base. Honestly most of us have given up on Matt Frumin who seems most interested in renaming parks and bridges. Sadly, our last hope is Eagle Ed and Trump to somehow help us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is amazing several years into this debacle, that has been decades in the making, how few people understand what is happening with these older buildings.

The underlying issue is that DC has permanent rent controlled buildings in affluent areas where landlords are forced to accept rents well below what the market would otherwise yield.

The landlords came up with a very creative solution a few years ago that lets them have their cake and eat it too and unfortunately the city abetted this by changing the law.

There were two changes that enabled this.

The first is the city adjusted what section 8 vouchers pay and indexed the payments to the neighborhood so that vouchers that only pay $1300 for a 1 BR in Ward 8 pay $2700 for a 1 BR in Ward 3 - in fact the city decided to index the payments above what the units even rent for in affluent areas, assuming that to get landlords to accept Section 8 vouchers they would need to pay more than market rates.

This probably would not really have netted that many units going to voucher holders because landlords discriminate and the rental market in Ward 3 has always been very strong so while some voucher holders would have likely found units it would not have been very many and would not have been concentrated.

But the landlords devised a very clever work around that the city signed off on which is the city decided that landlords could rent their rent controlled units to voucher holders at the Section 8 rents but still count them as affordable housing.

So overnight landlords were in essence able to double their rents in rent controlled units to above market rate for the entire Ward while not actually improving the units which they would have had to do at great cost to get the same rents on the open market.

So this has cost the city (though a lot of the money comes from the Feds) a great deal of money in the form of over payments for subpar rental units and eviscerated what used to be naturally occurring affordable housing (well not really as it was dictated by regulations) in otherwise expensive Ward 3.

The city can and should fix this by getting rid of two big loopholes in the process here - voucher holders should not be enabled to overpay for units which benefits no one but landlords and rent control units should have some type of income requirements on them which they don't today so the people who benefit from rent control are the ones who need lower rent and probably there should be no back door ways to transfer rent control units to make sure they go to deserving tenants.

If you did this over time you'd in fact get some section 8 tenants into rent controlled buildings but they'd be paying the same rents as the other tenants so the city would benefit directly by paying less in rent and you'd only have a low percentage of rent control units and would likely avoid the concentrated poverty that abets a lot of the out of control behavior.

But you now have two powerful constituencies benefiting from this system - landlords and low income residents and both groups will furiously oppose any fixes that undo this even though it is a really stupid system.

I still don't understand why people think it is OK to subsidize poor folks living in very expensive areas, when many working taxpayers could not afford these areas. For the price of one unit in Ward 3, you could afford two elsewhere. Yes, there are problems with concentrating poverty and dysfunction, but there are also problems with spreading poverty and dysfunction to different areas at twice the cost.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm late to this thread, but just wanted to chime in and say that I'm among the people who have fled Van Ness due to voucher tenants. Specifically, I lived in one of the large rent-controlled apartment buildings on upper Connecticut. I moved to DC to attend grad school, and I was attracted to the area because it seemed pleasant enough, had good Metro access, and was relatively affordable for someone on a lower income, like me. What ensued was the most stressful living experience of my life. People smoking weed in the hallways. Constant police activity. The guy down the hall from me had a lengthy criminal record (including carjackings and robberies). The guy above me would smoke weed and blare rap with his window open in the middle of the night. (I'm sure he was gainfully employed, with a sleep schedule like that.) Trashy parents screaming at their 6 kids with their windows open. Stabbings and assaults inside the building. Trash/litter everywhere. Roaches coming from nearby filthy units. Ugh, it was awful.

Another commenter pointed out that your experience in these buildings can vary depending on your proximity to voucher tenants. I found that to be true. My hallway was actually mostly fine--the neighbors were a mix of elderly people, students, and other hard-working lower/middle-income folks (the people hit hardest by idiotic DC housing policies). It was the wider environment of the building that was hell. I never knew what kind of bullshit I'd encounter in the lobby or outside of the building. The constant scent of weed coming from neighboring units, as well as occasional auditory pollution (screaming, rap music, etc) were the biggest problems I dealt with in my own unit.

It was also sad to see voucher tenants terrorize the Giant and the CVS by the Metro stop.

When I realized that it would be hard to escape voucher tenants without significantly increasing my rent, I just left DC. I now live in NoVa, where I am happy to say I live the quiet, peaceful, crime-free life that I'd imagine Van Ness used to offer.

It's sad, because I actually really like Van Ness as a neighborhood. I liked the community of businesses in the area (Bread Furst, Sfoglina, Politics & Prose, etc) and found the environment to be charming. I wish I could have experienced it 10-15 years ago.

Nothing has really changed, except now there is a “legal” marijuana dispensary on site to service this growing client base. Honestly most of us have given up on Matt Frumin who seems most interested in renaming parks and bridges. Sadly, our last hope is Eagle Ed and Trump to somehow help us.

I'm still waiting for someone -- anyone -- to give me one concrete accomplishment achieved by Frumin since he took office. Just one.

[Anonymous]

Good lord. I’m mostly addressing the mom looking to move to an apartment in upper NW.

I too am a mother of young children in a coop along Conn Ave. When I first moved here from elsewhere in the city, I remember going on DCUM and seeing several fear-mongering post like this about upper NW. I was terrified and feared I made the wrong decision.

Now, I own my unit in an almost entirely owner-occupied building, so it’s a bit different, but I’m happy to report that these kinds of posts are overly dramatic, at best.

I feel totally safe walking down Connecticut to frequent the lovely shops and restaurants in the several commercial districts. If anything, I see more a boom and feel safer now than I did when I moved a few years ago. I’ve only lived in NW DC (Logan, West End, Glover Park), and I feel safer here than in any of those other neighborhoods — plus see way fewer homeless people or anything sketchy.

Now, I’m aware of some of the more problematic buildings (Van Ness does feel a bit sketchier than other neighborhoods along Conn Ave), and do agree that there are problems that need to be fixed. But that’s not representative of the vast majority of upper NW business districts and apartment life.

These people would like you to believe Ward 3 is skid row. Don’t believe them. It’s a lovely place to live with children — a great balance of city life and nature (plenty of parks and greenery, the zoo!).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Good.

Public housing should be spread equally across all wards. Glad to see Ward 3 is finally making baby steps towards carrying its fair share.

Ward 3 does beyond its fair share by paying taxes that support services to everyone else in DC for not much in return.

When there are DC-wide events like the FIT DC events — Ward 3 is never an option for picking up packets. And during Covid we had to go to other Wards to receive vaccines and testing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Thanks for the personal attack but I’m not concerned about someone getting something I’m not getting (I guess you’re talking about free or subsidized housing? Not sure but I don’t want that anyway). What I am concerned about is people not getting something they need (services, ideally in an institutional setting where they can’t be declined) but instead getting something that someone in an ivory tower thinks they need (an apartment on Connecticut Ave).


The Ward 3 councilman has refused to request a moratorium on new voucher residents. Until he changes his position or is unseated we will get more of this.

There doesn't need to be a moratorium as much as a carveout in the DC Human Rights law (with cross reference in the Landlord tenant laws) providing that no private building owner has to accept vouchers for more than 10% of their units, with buildings consisting of 10 units or less being exempt from having to accept vouchers altogether. That's a reasonable compromise and much more manageable for building owners. The eviction laws also need to be tightened up to permit rapid evictions for residents who are physically violent or verbally threatening to other tenants or building management.

This is a good suggestion. Ward 3 is one of the few wards to see an increase in crime. It was up by 30 percent last year.