Saint Elizabeths campus seen through fence

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Excerpt:
Posted by Drew Costley on Oct. 18, 2010 at 3:57 pm


The federal Department of Homeland Security typically conjures up images of airport screening, border guards, hurricane damage, or terrorist attacks. A group of business owners and local activists in Congress Heights, though, are hoping the arrival of the department's offices will help the neighborhood become the District's next Barracks Row or Adams Morgan.

Through the Congress Heights Main Streets project, founded two years ago, they're trying to bring new investment to the community, in Ward 8. DHS will move its headquarters there from Tenleytown within a few years, and the neighborhood is trying to capitalize on the construction and the estimated 14,000 jobs that will arrive with the department. The area needs it badly; the average unemployment rate in Ward 8, according to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, was 26.5 percent.

The Congress Heights Main Streets project, which extends from Fourth St. Southeast to Milwaukee Pl. Southeast, wants to create a cleaner and safer environments around the 58 businesses in that community.

“As you know when you ride around the city there are different neighborhoods that looked bad and now they look good,” says James Bunn, chairman of the Congress Heights Main Streets project. “Our intention is to have a corridor that looks like Barracks Row.”

Bunn, who is a Ward 8 resident and chairman of the ward's business council, has owned the Bunn Building at 3127 Martin Luther King, Jr. Ave SE since 1970. He and other Congress Heights Main Streets organizers say they want to create a cleaner, and safer, neighborhood for the 58 businesses in the area now. They hope that, in turn, will mean in more restauranteurs and other businesses move in.

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