D.C. housed the homeless in upscale apartments. It hasn’t gone as planned.

quote:

---

The SWAT team, the overdose, the complaints of pot smoke in the air and feces in the stairwell — it would be hard to pinpoint a moment when things took a turn for the worse at Sedgwick Gardens, a stately apartment building in Northwest Washington.

But the Art Deco complex, which overlooks Rock Creek Park and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is today the troubled locus of a debate on housing policy in a city struggling with the twin crises of homelessness and gentrification.

Located in affluent Cleveland Park and designed by Mihran Mesrobian — the prewar architect behind such Washington landmarks as the Hay-Adams Hotel — Sedgwick Gardens was once out of reach for low-income District residents.

---

quote:

---

That changed two years ago, when D.C. housing officials dramatically increased the value of rental subsidies. The goal was to give tenants who had previously clustered in impoverished, high-crime areas east of the Anacostia River a shot at living in more desirable neighborhoods. At Sedgwick Gardens, the effort met with wild success. As of February, tenants with city-issued housing vouchers had filled nearly half of the building’s roughly 140 units. Mixed-income developments aren’t rare in the District, where officials often require that new buildings preserve some space for working-class residents. But the situation at Sedgwick Gardens is different: Many of the new tenants are previously homeless men and women who came directly from shelters or the streets, some still struggling with severe behavioral problems.

---

quote:

---

The result has been a high-stakes social experiment that so far has left few of its subjects happy. Police visits to the building have nearly quadrupled since 2016. Some tenants have fled. In February, responding to complaints, the city began staffing the building with social workers at night to deal with problems that arise.

---

quote:

---

Some tenants with vouchers say they have been made to feel unwelcome by their new neighbors, a dynamic that has unavoidable undertones of race and class in a largely white neighborhood.

---

quote:

---

That meant vouchers could be used for one-bedroom apartments renting at up to $2,648 a month, according to Housing Authority documents. At Sedgwick Gardens, the going rate for one-bedroom units was about $2,200 per month in 2017, according to a former tenant who moved in that year without public assistance.

---

quote:

---

Cleveland Park is a bastion of urbane liberalism where just 1 in 20 voters supported President Trump in the 2016 election. Yet from the beginning, Simkins said, it was clear that some of the building’s older residents were discomfited by the new basement dwellers.

---

quote:

---

Tenants say they have also confronted a slew of less serious nuisances such as panhandling, marijuana smoke in the halls and feces discovered on a landing in the stairwell.

---