News Articles, Main Page

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 10, 1998; Page J01

Caple Green had a dream of selling bagels and creating one of the few sit-down restaurants in Marshall Heights.

Henry Gibson and his friends collected enough small investments from neighbors to start a self-serve laundry in a section of Columbia Heights where there was none.

In Anacostia, a nonprofit development group teamed with Safeway to open a sparkling modern supermarket.

These are tales from the other Washington, the city away from the Mall and the federal government and the downtown business center. This rich and rooted Washington of neighborhoods, private lives, personal dreams and diverse aspirations is filled with a number of examples of residents and nonprofit organizations building a better city in ways small and large.

A new documentary makes the case that the Washington of neighborhoods is where some of the most important work to build a better city is taking place.

"Rebuilding Washington's Neighborhoods" is scheduled to be broadcast Sept. 18 at 9:30 p.m. and Sept. 20 at 1 p.m. on WETA-TV Channel 26.

The one-hour program features entrepreneurs such as Green and Gibson, as well as first-time homeowners who strengthen neighborhoods simply by their presence in growing numbers.

But the heroes also are the men and women behind various nonprofit community development corporations scattered across the city. These are groups started some years ago by civic activists who believed private developers and banks could not be relied upon to nurture economic life anywhere outside downtown.

"The private developers have never been interested in neighborhoods, so we have to fill that vacuum," Robert Moore, president of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, says in the documentary. "We hope that we make it so economically stable that we will bring the private developers back in large numbers."

Of course, the community development corporations can't do it alone. Ironically, they often need the money of banks and the savvy of private developers to realize their visions. As the documentary makes clear, the banks in particular, but some developers as well, have changed their attitude and now look more favorably on investing in D.C. neighborhoods.

"The banks have been tripping over each other to make these loans," Ernest Skinner, an executive with Citibank, says in the documentary.

The video program is the work of executive producer Virginia Wolf, of Virginia Wolf Productions in Rockville, and videographer/editor Frank Maniglia Jr., of MVI Post in Falls Church. It was funded by several of the banks and foundations that invest in neighborhood housing and small business projects.

Alternating between a town meeting discussion and field interviews in Washington's neighborhoods, the documentary looks first at affordable housing development. In the last decade or so, community development corporations have assembled and invested more than $135 million to build or renovate 3,000 units of affordable housing, according to the nonprofit agencies.

Some of that housing has been developed by Manna Inc. The nonprofit development corporation has been able to accomplish its work despite the claim by some private developers that housing in the city is hard to build profitably.

"We believe we can develop an economic equation to make these deals work," Dominic Moulden, executive director of Manna, says in the documentary.

Any profits are plowed back into building more housing, Moulden says. Families that qualify for affordable housing must have incomes lower than about $56,000, or 80 percent of the regional median.

One of those who purchased her first home through Manna is Donna Morris, who settled on a neatly renovated block in LeDroit Park. She says in the documentary that Manna helped realize her dream of home-ownership and disprove "the stereotype [that] for people to be a first-time home buyer you need to have a lot of money, you need to have this big-time job and all these savings."

Switching to neighborhood economic development, the documentary visits Chesapeake Bagel Bakery on Minnesota Avenue NE, the franchise owned by Caple Green. Green says it took awhile for bagels to catch on in an African American neighborhood but, in his third year of working days that begin at 2 a.m., his business is a success, and he says his example should prove restaurants can make it in under-served neighborhoods.

In Anacostia, Safeway developed the Good Hope Marketplace retail center, the largest retail development in the neighborhood in 20 years, and sold it to the Anacostia Economic Development Corp. to encourage neighborhood development. The project has 200 jobs, and it's the first time the entire ownership of such a Safeway project has been turned over to a nonprofit, according to a Safeway real estate manager. Albert Hopkins, president of the development corporation, says his group is reinvesting the revenues in new projects for the neighborhood.

In Columbia Heights, Moore, of the Development Corporation of Columbia Heights, shows off the Nehemiah Center, at 2400 14th St. NW, a shopping center which the group developed with Horning Brothers, a private developer, and other community and private support.

Tenants include BIG WASH, the self-serve laundry started by Henry Gibson and his neighbors on Belmont Street. They raised $30,000 in the neighborhood by selling shares of $100, enough to help qualify for bank loans and other financing, and the shareholders have earned their money back, according to Rita Bright, one of the co-founders.

The business has created one full-time and six part-time jobs. BIG WASH stands for two things, Bright says: Belmont Investment Group Working At Self Help, and Believers In God Working At Spiritual Healing.

Farther south on 14th Street is Blueboy Blueprinting, owned by Hiram Russell, who says neighborhood businesses may be small, but their benefits are direct: "Smaller businesses tend to look within the community when it comes to hiring."

Blueboy and Powell's Manufacturing Industries in Marshall Heights, owned by James Powell, are among two dozen neighborhood businesses participating in a program started by the Greater Washington Board of Trade to pair neighborhood ventures with big business partners in order to extend their market reach. The result is a net import of dollars to the neighborhoods, says Lyles Carr of the Board of Trade.

Blueboy, for example, has been enlisted by Clark Construction to work on drawings of the new convention center planned for Mount Vernon Square, and Powell is selling some of the mops and brooms and brushes his company makes through Giant Food stores. According Carr, the two dozen small businesses in the Board of Trade partnership will reap $1 million through the program this year.

Powell says the new business his company has acquired has allowed him to hire more neighborhood residents and start a welfare-to-work program. He adds, "We're talking about building communities from the ground up."

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