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D.C.’s Use of Eminent Domain Prompts Bruising Fight Over Ward 7 Project Abandoned by Walmart

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How hard could it possibly be for D.C. to get a new grocery store built in Ward 7, where residents have been clamoring for more fresh food options for decades? If the saga of the Capitol Gateway Marketplace project is any indication, it looks damn near impossible.

The District is currently engaged in a three-way battle with its own public housing authority and a Baltimore-based developer to try and make progress at the Northeast site, where two different mayors have spent the better part of the past 11 years trying to see a mixed-use project (complete with a new grocer) come to fruition. The city is currently trying to seize the land owned by the D.C. Housing Authority via eminent domain, a strategy cooked up by Mayor Muriel Bowser and her team last year, but the resulting legal battle has gotten ugly in recent months. It seems increasingly likely to Loose Lips that progress is still years away. Court documents and internal DCHA memos detail a bruising dispute over the long-stalled project.

And all this ugliness shines a light on the city government’s problematic relationship with DCHA, pointing to why the state of public housing in the District remains so dreadful. The housing authority controls this valuable piece of property, located adjacent to the Capitol Heights Metro station on the city’s eastern border, because it used to be home to a variety of public housing properties that were torn down and slated for redevelopment two decades ago. But DCHA could never manage to fulfill its stated mission and actually build any public housing there. Instead, the city stepped in and tried to wrest control of the land for its own purposes, sparking a legal firefight in the process.

“You have an entity that is, in theory, responsible for doing this stuff: Why not use them and let them do their job?” wonders Bill Slover, a former member of DCHA’s governing board recently ousted for raising questions about disputes just like this one. “It’s just a bully tactic that opens the door to what we already know: There’s no partnership between the city and housing authority.”

Before this article published, a DCHA spokesperson declined to comment on the project, citing the ongoing litigation, and a spokesperson for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, which is managing the project for the city, did not respond to requests for comment. After this article ran, DCHA Chief Operating Officer Rachel Joseph sent a lengthy email statement to LL, copying several DMPED employees, insisting that “the relationship between DCHA and D.C. government is not adversarial” and is, in fact, “the best that it has been in years.”

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