S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C. (34 page)

For a year or so after Baldie’s arrest, in August 1993, dealing on the block had seemed to continue at about the same pace. As the years went by, however, it declined, slowly but steadily at first, then more rapidly. By the time Baldie died, traffic was down to a trickle. By the early 2000s, it was all but gone.

“It got better little by little,” Jim said. “As time went on, there were fewer dealers on the street. There was no single event that brought about the change as far as the drug dealing.”

The record-breaking violence of the crack era disappeared along with the drug. In 1994, the year Baldie was sentenced, D.C. recorded 399 homicides. In 2000, the city recorded 242. In 2012, there were only 88 killings. It was the first time since 1963 that the District had recorded fewer than a hundred homicides in a year. Most large cities throughout the country experienced similar trends.

There are many likely reasons for the decline. There was the work done by Lou and his detectives, and by FBI, DEA, and ATF agents, to lock up killers and dismantle violent drug gangs. According to at least one study, higher levels of incarceration coincided with a decrease in crime, particularly violent offenses.

There was also the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI program to revitalize failing public housing projects by changing them into mixed-income, mixed-use developments. Beginning in 2003, District officials used more than $34 million in federal funds plus another $750 million in money from public and private investors to raze and redevelop the seven hundred dilapidated public housing units of the Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg Dwellings, between Capitol Hill and the Navy Yard in Southeast. The worn-out, crime-ridden buildings were replaced by an equal number of new public units, as well as by sixteen hundred new market-rate apartments, townhomes, and a building dedicated to senior citizens. Crime dropped dramatically during the redevelopment, according to an Urban Institute study.

On S Street, the renovation of the building that became New Community and the continued presence of the church set a tone. Instead of providing a haven for drug users, slingers, and prostitutes, the building became a place of worship, a home to the after-school program, and more.

The church hosted Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Jim helped ex-cons who were looking to turn around their lives, counseling them and helping them find jobs. Grace focused on providing educational opportunities for young people, launching an initiative to work with kids of all ages, particularly teenagers. After graduating from college, Jim and Grace’s daughter, Rachel, started an arts program for kids as well as adults.

Manna also had an effect on the immediate area, throughout Shaw, and eventually in other city neighborhoods, too. In the eighties, the nonprofit purchased and renovated forty properties within a two-square-block radius of S Street. A half-dozen of them were on S Street itself. Most of the dwellings were vacant, run-down single-family homes; some were apartment buildings that would become condos or co-ops. One building became a home for mentally ill people with AIDS. Over time, hardworking low-income people purchased the homes and moved in, transforming the neighborhood from an inner-city badland filled with drug dealers and strawberries to a stable community. Eventually, Manna renovated three hundred homes in Shaw.

Jim knows that simply having a job, particularly a low-paying one, doesn’t necessarily allow someone to improve his or her financial situation. Home ownership provides a permanent place to live and stability. It’s the best foothold for climbing up the economic ladder, Jim believes, and Manna does everything the organization can to help working people gain it. Besides renovating homes, Manna provides financial-literacy programs, savings plans, and continued support once a sale is complete. The idea behind the organization is to provide an opportunity to climb out of poverty, not to offer charity.

“This is not do-gooderism,” Jim explained. “Accountability is an important component of this.”

In the mid-eighties, one Manna buyer purchased a renovated house on S Street. A few years later, it needed a new roof. The woman didn’t have the money to pay for one, so she went to Jim for help. Manna replaced the roof, a job that cost thousands of dollars. The woman reneged on her promise to pay the organization back—so Manna sued her. Jim and the woman worked out a settlement: Manna helped her to refinance her home, which saved her thousands of dollars. She used some of those funds to pay for the roof.

“By becoming homeowners, they have a stake,” Jim said. “They have equity they can use to pay off debts, start a business, go to school, or help their kids do the same. They feel they can move up the economic ladder.”

By the summer of 2013, about one thousand Manna homeowners citywide had compiled $60 million in equity. The foreclosure rate for Manna home buyers was 2 percent. A survey taken a year earlier showed that although most Manna buyers could have sold their homes for a significant profit, about 85 percent were still in them.

It’s possible that property values in Shaw would have risen without Manna. The May 1991 opening of the Shaw Metro station—planned for more than twenty years—on the northeast corner of 7th and S Streets, had a dramatic impact on the neighborhood. Through the end of 1991, there were on average 1,688 weekday passenger boardings at the station. In 1997, there were 3,027. By 2011, foot traffic at the Shaw station had more than doubled, to an average of 7,163 weekday boardings.

During the 2000s and 2010s, the area around S Street, and Shaw in general, experienced a development boom. John’s Place, the nightclub that was popular with drug dealers and hit men, was torn down and replaced by a three-story brick apartment building. The Hostess bakery underwent an ambitious renovation. The interior was gutted. The rusting steps leading to the front doors were replaced by gleaming new ones. Huge new windows were installed overlooking the S Street entrance. Eventually, the lower floors would be home to restaurants and boutiques. The upper floors would become loft offices.

By the summer of 2013, S Street Northwest had been completely transformed from the lawless combat zone it was when Jim Dickerson first set foot on it. And Manna had paved the way, he believes: “We were doing renovations and development in the area when no one else was.”

Nearly thirty years after New Community celebrated its first Easter in the neighborhood, the only original members remaining were Jim, Grace, and Nina Mason, who often plays the piano during services. Yet the church had stayed true to the “call and mission” statement that Jim had written at its founding: New Community would be a multidenominational church, with a racially, culturally, and economically mixed congregation. Lower-income and working-class people would be encouraged to take leadership positions within the church. There would be a special emphasis on helping children. Everyone’s gifts would be nurtured.

“I had a vision about what the church could be, and in many ways that vision has been fulfilled. It’s a place for everybody, a place where people can have spiritual growth and healing,” Jim said. “We’ve done our own thing, which has emerged from our circumstances. We are local. We served the neighborhood.” Though he devoted countless hours to helping run Manna, lobbying city officials for affordable housing funds, and helping congregation members and people who hung out on S Street, Jim didn’t forget about his family back in Arkansas. Over the years, he reconciled with his mother, stepfather, and biological father before they died. For all their flaws, he never doubted that they loved him deeply. And he loved them deeply.

Jim never regretted launching his church in the middle of a combat zone.

“I knew God was there,” Jim said of S Street in the eighties. “I was not bringing God to the street. God’s presence was there, with those addicts, those drug dealers, those prostitutes, those murderers .
.
. I think what’s held us here is God’s calling.

“I could have been doing a lot of things. The call of this held me and my family here.”

Bernice Joseph was one of those Manna homeowners who declined to sell her home for a big profit. In the summer of 2011, she received a handwritten note from someone representing a developer that wanted to buy her four-bedroom condo on Riggs Street Northwest. The offer was for nearly $1 million.

Bernice—B. J. to her friends—called a neighbor, a fellow condo owner, to talk about the proposal. The developer wanted to knock down her and her neighbors’ homes in order to build luxury apartments. The project would require the agreement of fifty-four condo owners, most of whom, like B. J., had units near 14th Street Northwest. Some owned units a few blocks east, on 11th Street Northwest. All of the condos were in the Shaw neighborhood.

At the time, B. J., a single mother of four, had about $800 in her checking account and no savings. She was earning $28,000 a year as a teacher’s aide at a D.C. charter school for developmentally disabled adults. Two of her own children had already left home, but money was still tight. On the phone, B. J. and her neighbor joked about what they would do with a million dollars.

Then B. J. tossed the letter into a wastebasket.

Within a few weeks, many of her fellow condo owners attended a meeting in a church basement to discuss the offer. Tempers flared. People who wanted to stay put yelled at people who wanted to take the developer’s money. People who wanted to sell screamed at people who didn’t. Others wanted to hold out for more money. During the meeting, B. J. weighed in: “I’m not selling,” she said calmly.

The developer kept trying to woo B. J. and the other holdouts into the fall and early winter. In December, the developer hosted a holiday party for the condo owners at a restaurant on nearby U Street Northwest.

“I considered it a bribe,” B. J. said. “I went and I ate their food, but I didn’t change my mind.”

B. J. was living paycheck to paycheck, but she saw no upside to selling—not for a million dollars, not for any amount. Ultimately, more than half of the owners decided not to sell. The developer’s proposal went nowhere. Eighteen months after it died, in June 2013, B. J. still had no regrets about turning it down.

“This is not just a house,” B. J. said. “This is my
home
.
This is where my kids come home from school and bring their friends to visit. This is where we can have a barbecue in the backyard. It’s a small backyard—but it’s mine.”

From the outside, B. J.’s condo appears unremarkable. Her unit is one of a series of fifteen identical-looking three-story row houses that line the western side of Riggs Street. One block north, fifteen more identical row houses line the western end of S Street. There’s a common parking lot in between. Built as public housing in 1977, the brown brick buildings have the distinctly institutional look of a complex that would have “Dwellings” or “Gardens” in its name. Inside, there’s a small living area that runs into a small dining area, as well as a modest kitchen. The second and third floors each have two bedrooms.

B. J. rides the bus for thirty minutes to get to her job, using the time to read history books and novels. She walks ten minutes to New Community, of which she’s a core member. She also walks to a nearby high-end grocery store. Her two children still living with her—daughter Bethany, eighteen, and son Rovaughn, nine—like their schools and have close friends in the neighborhood.

“This is the first community I’ve built,” B. J. said. “That means a lot to me. I love my house. I like everything about living here.”

B. J. is certain she never would have had any of this if not for Jim and Manna. She and her then four-year-old son, Gary, came to D.C. in 1990 from their native Grenada. Her second child, daughter Leonis, stayed in Grenada with relatives. In Washington, B. J. and Gary moved in with B. J.’s mom, who lived in a house on S Street Northwest one block from New Community. One day, B. J. saw a flier advertising GED courses at the church. She’d never graduated from high school, so she signed up.

As she was leaving the church after class one day, a bunch of young kids from the after-school program were filing in. B. J. thought,
Wow, I need to sign up my boy
, and soon registered Gary. In 1992, B. J. moved to an apartment a few miles from S Street, but she and Gary liked the after-school program so much that she brought him to the church by bus.

In 1995, B. J. moved back to S Street to live with her mom. The same year, her third child, Bethany, was born. She asked Jim to christen the baby.

“Sure,” Jim said. “But you have to come to church sometime. Not every Sunday, but sometime.”

That fall, B. J. finally went to a service at New Community. She quickly assimilated into the congregation. Fellow church members took care of Gary and Bethany when she was working or running errands. Jim and Grace’s daughter, Rachel, became Rovaughn’s godmother when he was born, in 2003.

In 1998, Jim hired B. J. as a part-time church administrator. By then her family was living in a $600-a-month two-bedroom apartment at the Whitelaw Hotel, a building in Shaw that had been renovated by Manna. Jim started encouraging her to think about buying a Manna home.

“Becoming a homeowner was the last thing on my mind,” B. J. said. “My friends were all renters, and most of them lived in run-down buildings.”

Eventually Jim convinced her. In 1999, she joined the Homebuyers Club, a program Manna requires all of its prospective homeowners to complete before making a purchase. Every Saturday for two years, B. J. and her classmates learned about budgeting and saving money.