Built to replace Ellen Wilson housing project, townhouses are a mixed-income model
November 3, 2013 | Washington Post
Washington, DC (November 3, 2013) – When Juanita Jones moved into her newly constructed townhouse on Capitol Hill, she kissed the floors, the walls and the doors, and hoped she would be able to afford to stay. That was in January 1999, when Jones became one of the first residents to move into the Townhomes on Capitol Hill, a federally funded project that replaced the abandoned Ellen Wilson public housing project with mixed-income townhouses.
Fourteen years later, Jones is still there, and the city’s first social experiment with mixed-income housing has become a model for other developments, even if it made only a modest contribution toward solving the District’s affordable housing problem.
After the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded a $25 million grant to a neighborhood group in 1993 to tear down 134 abandoned units at Ellen Wilson and replace them with an equal number of mixed-income homes, many civic leaders doubted whether middle-class professionals would live in the same development with public housing tenants.
They clearly have, with a third of the Townhomes’ residents now making market-rate monthly payments that subsidize those of people such as Jones who pay much less.