Northwest One
The Post has an article about the pending plans for Northwest One, aka Sursum Corda.For residents of Eckington, this article may be particularly interesting as they can compare the plans for Northwest One with the housing proposed by St Martin's and Catholic Community Services.
I thought the article was interesting because it lays out a lot of the services that they are planning on providing to residents in Northwest One. On paper it all sounds great. Only thing that concerns me is that Sursum Corda also sounded great on paper when it was proposed forty-odd years ago. I hope we've figured things out better now.
Regardless, it's impressive to see that there's a $558 million price tag on this effort. That's an incredible amount of money and, hopefully, it signals to future residents-- both low and high-income-- that there's substantial commitment to the project to make it work. The article mentions breaking ground this year if the DC Council approves the plans so we'll see what this means for the area shortly.
posted by Anonymous @ 9.2.06
3 Comments:
T,
I believe that Sursum Corda and the proposed Catholic Charity housing project might be two different animals. Don't let the latin name bind the two. The St. Martin thing is not the only Catholic property, or even the only church sponsored (I'll have to do a little research into the background of Sursum Corda, but I'd rather not during my lunch hour) housing project in the District. Looking at a 8/25/74 Washington Post article (B1), Foster House, Gibson Plaza, Immaculate Conception amd Lincoln Westmoreland, "were built with churches as the prime sponsors."
St. Martin's thing is supposed to be about 180some odd units, not as large as the current Sursum Corda set up.
I don't want to get on the side of St. Martin, but I don't think the Sursum Corda model applies. There are other housing projects in the Shaw area that might be better examples. It might become another apartment building like the one between Q & R, which isn't that great and not that bad either.
... and it all comes down to the zoning. Always the zoning.
Well after dealing with the Mondie thing I feel a little better about zoning.
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