page_title: Marshall Heights (Washington, D.C.)
section_title: Neighborhood recovery efforts
hierarchical_section_title: Marshall Heights (Washington, D.C.) / History of Marshall Heights / Neighborhood recovery efforts
caption_attribution_description: English: A vacant lot at C Street SE and St. Louis Place SE in the Marshall Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in 2014. The Woodson Heights low-income townhouse development can be see in the rear.
context_page_description: Marshall Heights is a residential neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. It is bounded by East Capitol Street, Central Avenue SE, Southern Avenue, Fitch Street SE, and Benning Road SE. It was an undeveloped rural area occupied by extensive African American shanty towns, but the neighborhood received nationwide attention after a visit by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1934, which led to extensive infrastructure improvements and development for the first time. In the 1950s, Marshall Heights residents defeated national legislation designed to raze and redevelop the neighborhood. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom visited the area in 1991, at a time when Marshall Heights was in the throes of a violent crack cocaine epidemic. Limited redevelopment has occurred in the neighborhood, which was the site of two notorious child murders in 1973.
context_section_description: Limited redevelopment efforts have occurred in Marshall Heights since 1990.  In 1989, the Marshall Heights Community Development Organization (MHCDO) secured financing from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and purchased four empty lots on the 5300 block of Drake Place SE. The MHCDO built four houses there and sold them to low-income families. But many homes in the neighborhood were still in poor condition. As late as 1995, Marshall Heights still contained a number of home-made houses with sheet metal roofs. Most of the notorious Eastgate Gardens was razed in 1998, and the remainder in 2002. A new public housing development, Glenncrest, opened on the site in 2008. In 2010, the nonprofit National Housing Trust purchased Copeland Manor (Benning Road SE, C Street SE, and 49th Street SE), a 61-unit apartment building. The apartment building became a cooperative, and National Housing Trust agreed to a lease-to-buy arrangement with the tenants' cooperative. In 2011, the city took title to the Bass Circle Apartments (Benning Road SE, B Street SE, and Bass Place SE), a five-building, 119-unit apartment complex whose owners had defaulted on their mortgage. The tenants partnered with Bass Apartments LLC, a subsidiary of Telesis Corp., to obtain a $4.843 million loan and rehabilitate the complex.
  Infill problems are an issue in Marshall Heights, with several hundred empty lots scattered across the neighborhood. In 2014, a study by researchers from Bowie State University, George Washington University, and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer of the District of Columbia found that Marshall Heights was one of four neighborhoods in the city which made the largest median income and median property values gains since 2001.
caption: An empty lot, typical of the infill problems within Marshall Heights.
exif: {"Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "paint.net 4.0.12"}