A deeply reported article in the New York Times delves into the story of creating the 11th Street Bridge Park linking Anacostia with adjacent neighborhoods. The piece features LISC and our DC team’s integral and longtime involvement in a community-centered project that has aimed, from its inception, to nurture connection, growth and vitality without displacing Black residents in the process.
The excerpt below was originally published:
Can Anacostia Build a Bridge Without Displacing Its People?
By Megan Kimble, Photography by Andre D. Wagner, New York Times
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3. Building on a promise
By 2014, Mr. Kratz had quit his job at the museum and joined the staff of a longtime Ward 8 nonprofit called, fittingly, Building Bridges Across the River as the director of the still-inchoate 11th Street Bridge Park. Shortly after, he had lunch with Oramenta Newsome, who was at the time the executive director of Washington’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a federally certified financial institution that serves low-income communities. The city had added the bridge park to its budget, earmarking nearly $15 million for construction. That commitment gave the project legitimacy — “it just wasn’t me sitting in a basement somewhere coming up with this crazy idea,” Mr. Kratz said. But he still needed to raise tens of millions more from private donors to get the thing built.
Ms. Newsome had bigger ideas. She wanted a park, sure, but she also hoped to use it as a way to increase investment in Anacostia more broadly. She offered up Adam Kent, now LISC’s deputy director, to help write a so-called equitable development plan. With advice from Anacostia residents, Mr. Kent and Mr. Kratz settled on four things the bridge park needed to invest in before construction even began: affordable housing, work force development, small businesses, and arts and culture. The plan was published in late 2015, and soon after, Ms. Newsome committed LISC to investing $50 million in neighborhoods adjacent to the bridge park. It was a remarkable sum. Since 1982, when the organization was founded, LISC had spent less than $4 million in those same neighborhoods.
“When you have a shrinking city, there’s not as much to invest in,” said Ramon Jacobson, who is LISC’s current executive director. But as Washington grew, the momentum shifted. The bridge park was going to usher in enormous change for the neighborhoods east of the river, Ms. Newsome said when announcing the investment. “And the question for us was, Are we just going to shut our eyes to this or are we going to at least make a try at it?” she said at the time. Soon after, big banks and philanthropies offered support for the equitable development plan.
Without this kind of financial commitment early on, the trajectory of the bridge park could have been very different. Mr. Kratz had read a similar plan published by the much larger Atlanta BeltLine, a decades-long effort to convert an abandoned rail corridor encircling Atlanta’s downtown into a 33-mile loop of mixed-use trail. Because of its ambition, the BeltLine required a unique source of funding. City leaders decided to use something called a tax allocation district to pay for the $4.8 billion project. Land acquisition, construction and landscaping would be paid for with the increase in property tax revenue within the 6,500 acres around the planned BeltLine. It was supposed to be a virtuous circle: The BeltLine would increase property values and the resulting increase in property tax revenue would pay for the BeltLine. But this mechanism also led to gentrification, says Daniel Immergluck, a professor of urban planning at Georgia State University. Dr. Immergluck tracked home values within half-mile of the BeltLine between 2011 and 2015 and found that, even in neighborhoods where the trail hadn’t been built, those home values rose more than elsewhere in the city.