S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  “This is not do-gooderism,” Jim explained. “Accountability is an important component of this.”

  In the mid-eighties, one Manna buyer purchased a renovated house on S Street. A few years later, it needed a new roof. The woman didn’t have the money to pay for one, so she went to Jim for help. Manna replaced the roof, a job that cost thousands of dollars. The woman reneged on her promise to pay the organization back—so Manna sued her. Jim and the woman worked out a settlement: Manna helped her to refinance her home, which saved her thousands of dollars. She used some of those funds to pay for the roof.

  “By becoming homeowners, they have a stake,” Jim said. “They have equity they can use to pay off debts, start a business, go to school, or help their kids do the same. They feel they can move up the economic ladder.”

  By the summer of 2013, about one thousand Manna homeowners citywide had compiled $60 million in equity. The foreclosure rate for Manna home buyers was 2 percent. A survey taken a year earlier showed that although most Manna buyers could have sold their homes for a significant profit, about 85 percent were still in them.

  It’s possible that property values in Shaw would have risen without Manna. The May 1991 opening of the Shaw Metro station—planned for more than twenty years—on the northeast corner of 7th and S Streets, had a dramatic impact on the neighborhood. Through the end of 1991, there were on average 1,688 weekday passenger boardings at the station. In 1997, there were 3,027. By 2011, foot traffic at the Shaw station had more than doubled, to an average of 7,163 weekday boardings.

  During the 2000s and 2010s, the area around S Street, and Shaw in general, experienced a development boom. John’s Place, the nightclub that was popular with drug dealers and hit men, was torn down and replaced by a three-story brick apartment building. The Hostess bakery underwent an ambitious renovation. The interior was gutted. The rusting steps leading to the front doors were replaced by gleaming new ones. Huge new windows were installed overlooking the S Street entrance. Eventually, the lower floors would be home to restaurants and boutiques. The upper floors would become loft offices.

  By the summer of 2013, S Street Northwest had been completely transformed from the lawless combat zone it was when Jim Dickerson first set foot on it. And Manna had paved the way, he believes: “We were doing renovations and development in the area when no one else was.”

  Nearly thirty years after New Community celebrated its first Easter in the neighborhood, the only original members remaining were Jim, Grace, and Nina Mason, who often plays the piano during services. Yet the church had stayed true to the “call and mission” statement that Jim had written at its founding: New Community would be a multidenominational church, with a racially, culturally, and economically mixed congregation. Lower-income and working-class people would be encouraged to take leadership positions within the church. There would be a special emphasis on helping children. Everyone’s gifts would be nurtured.

  “I had a vision about what the church could be, and in many ways that vision has been fulfilled. It’s a place for everybody, a place where people can have spiritual growth and healing,” Jim said. “We’ve done our own thing, which has emerged from our circumstances. We are local. We served the neighborhood.” Though he devoted countless hours to helping run Manna, lobbying city officials for affordable housing funds, and helping congregation members and people who hung out on S Street, Jim didn’t forget about his family back in Arkansas. Over the years, he reconciled with his mother, stepfather, and biological father before they died. For all their flaws, he never doubted that they loved him deeply. And he loved them deeply.

  Jim never regretted launching his church in the middle of a combat zone.

  “I knew God was there,” Jim said of S Street in the eighties. “I was not bringing God to the street. God’s presence was there, with those addicts, those drug dealers, those prostitutes, those murderers … I think what’s held us here is God’s calling.

  “I could have been doing a lot of things. The call of this held me and my family here.”

  Bernice Joseph was one of those Manna homeowners who declined to sell her home for a big profit. In the summer of 2011, she received a handwritten note from someone representing a developer that wanted to buy her four-bedroom condo on Riggs Street Northwest. The offer was for nearly $1 million.

  Bernice—B. J. to her friends—called a neighbor, a fellow condo owner, to talk about the proposal. The developer wanted to knock down her and her neighbors’ homes in order to build luxury apartments. The project would require the agreement of fifty-four condo owners, most of whom, like B. J., had units near 14th Street Northwest. Some owned units a few blocks east, on 11th Street Northwest. All of the condos were in the Shaw neighborhood.

  At the time, B. J., a single mother of four, had about $800 in her checking account and no savings. She was earning $28,000 a year as a teacher’s aide at a D.C. charter school for developmentally disabled adults. Two of her own children had already left home, but money was still tight. On the phone, B. J. and her neighbor joked about what they would do with a million dollars.

  Then B. J. tossed the letter into a wastebasket.

  Within a few weeks, many of her fellow condo owners attended a meeting in a church basement to discuss the offer. Tempers flared. People who wanted to stay put yelled at people who wanted to take the developer’s money. People who wanted to sell screamed at people who didn’t. Others wanted to hold out for more money. During the meeting, B. J. weighed in: “I’m not selling,” she said calmly.

  The developer kept trying to woo B. J. and the other holdouts into the fall and early winter. In December, the developer hosted a holiday party for the condo owners at a restaurant on nearby U Street Northwest.

  “I considered it a bribe,” B. J. said. “I went and I ate their food, but I didn’t change my mind.”

  B. J. was living paycheck to paycheck, but she saw no upside to selling—not for a million dollars, not for any amount. Ultimately, more than half of the owners decided not to sell. The developer’s proposal went nowhere. Eighteen months after it died, in June 2013, B. J. still had no regrets about turning it down.

  “This is not just a house,” B. J. said. “This is my home. This is where my kids come home from school and bring their friends to visit. This is where we can have a barbecue in the backyard. It’s a small backyard—but it’s mine.”

  From the outside, B. J.’s condo appears unremarkable. Her unit is one of a series of fifteen identical-looking three-story row houses that line the western side of Riggs Street. One block north, fifteen more identical row houses line the western end of S Street. There’s a common parking lot in between. Built as public housing in 1977, the brown brick buildings have the distinctly institutional look of a complex that would have “Dwellings” or “Gardens” in its name. Inside, there’s a small living area that runs into a small dining area, as well as a modest kitchen. The second and third floors each have two bedrooms.

  B. J. rides the bus for thirty minutes to get to her job, using the time to read history books and novels. She walks ten minutes to New Community, of which she’s a core member. She also walks to a nearby high-end grocery store. Her two children still living with her—daughter Bethany, eighteen, and son Rovaughn, nine—like their schools and have close friends in the neighborhood.

  “This is the first community I’ve built,” B. J. said. “That means a lot to me. I love my house. I like everything about living here.”

  B. J. is certain she never would have had any of this if not for Jim and Manna. She and her then four-year-old son, Gary, came to D.C. in 1990 from their native Grenada. Her second child, daughter Leonis, stayed in Grenada with relatives. In Washington, B. J. and Gary moved in with B. J.’s mom, who lived in a house on S Street Northwest one block from New Community. One day, B. J. saw a flier advertising GED courses at the church. She’d never graduated from high school, so she signed up.

  As she was leaving the church after class one day, a bunch
of young kids from the after-school program were filing in. B. J. thought, Wow, I need to sign up my boy, and soon registered Gary. In 1992, B. J. moved to an apartment a few miles from S Street, but she and Gary liked the after-school program so much that she brought him to the church by bus.

  In 1995, B. J. moved back to S Street to live with her mom. The same year, her third child, Bethany, was born. She asked Jim to christen the baby.

  “Sure,” Jim said. “But you have to come to church sometime. Not every Sunday, but sometime.”

  That fall, B. J. finally went to a service at New Community. She quickly assimilated into the congregation. Fellow church members took care of Gary and Bethany when she was working or running errands. Jim and Grace’s daughter, Rachel, became Rovaughn’s godmother when he was born, in 2003.

  In 1998, Jim hired B. J. as a part-time church administrator. By then her family was living in a $600-a-month two-bedroom apartment at the Whitelaw Hotel, a building in Shaw that had been renovated by Manna. Jim started encouraging her to think about buying a Manna home.

  “Becoming a homeowner was the last thing on my mind,” B. J. said. “My friends were all renters, and most of them lived in rundown buildings.”

  Eventually Jim convinced her. In 1999, she joined the Homebuyers Club, a program Manna requires all of its prospective homeowners to complete before making a purchase. Every Saturday for two years, B. J. and her classmates learned about budgeting and saving money.

  “They had us write down everything we bought throughout the week,” B. J. said. “If I bought a muffin for $1.25, I wrote it down. I learned how to manage my money, and I learned how to save.”

  Never a big spender, B. J. became even thriftier. By the end of the program she had paid off $5,000 in credit card bills. The Homebuyers Club required her to save $25 a week, which she did faithfully. Manna kicked in $50 every week, as it did for all Homebuyers Club members.

  In the spring of 2001, B. J. was walking on Riggs Street when she saw workers renovating one of the row houses. Manna staffers had offered to show B. J. properties she could buy, but she didn’t feel the need.

  “I decided that was going to be my house,” she said.

  B. J. started wandering over to watch the workers as they refurbished the condo. They would ask her what she was doing and she would reply, “I’m coming to look at my house.”

  That June, she bought the condo for $102,000. Between her part-time job with the church and her work as a child-care provider, she was earning about $18,000 a year while supporting three kids.

  She didn’t sleep well the first night in her new home. “The first night I slept here, it was so surreal,” she recalled. “I stood on the steps and stared at my dining room table. I was afraid it was a beautiful dream and I was about to wake up.”

  In February 1997, a few weeks after Baldie’s funeral, the D.C. Financial Control Board assumed more authority over the day-to-day operations of the police department. The board acted after a consulting firm recommended limiting Marion Barry’s influence on the police force, particularly in personnel decisions.

  The move was widely viewed as giving Chief Soulsby more power. When he was appointed, he’d faced budget cuts and a shrinking staff. “I don’t think he’s had a fair chance at managing the department the way he’s wanted to,” U.S. Attorney Eric Holder said. “The test of whether he’s a fit person to run the department starts about now.”

  Ten months later, Soulsby admitted he wasn’t a fit person to run the department.

  Lou called me: “You heard about Soulsby?” he asked. He sounded excited.

  “Yeah, I have.” I was at my desk in the Prince George’s County bureau, reading the budget of the following day’s stories on my computer screen. It was November 25, 1997, two days before Thanksgiving. A story on Soulsby was at the top of the local budget.

  Soulsby had suddenly resigned as police chief that afternoon, under multiple shadows of suspicion. He quit less than two hours before his best friend, Metropolitan Police Department lieutenant Jeffery Stowe, was indicted by a federal grand jury for shaking down married gay men and embezzling department funds. Stowe and Soulsby had been close for years. In fact, they were roommates, sharing a luxury apartment downtown.

  “This is great,” Lou said.

  Stowe was the lieutenant in charge of investigating extortion plots. But instead of tracking down blackmailers, he’d been running his own shakedown scheme, an FBI affidavit alleged. He targeted patrons of the Follies Theatre, a gay bar in Southeast, not far from the Capitol. Stowe would prowl around outside the bar, looking for parked cars that contained baby seats, an investigator told me. According to the affidavit, he would then write down the license plate numbers and use a police computer to learn to whom the car was registered and where he lived. Two months earlier, court documents alleged, he’d tracked down a married man who’d gone into the Follies Theatre and demanded $10,000 from him. If the man didn’t cough up the cash, Stowe threatened, he would send photos of the man inside the bar to his wife and boss.

  Stowe and Soulsby’s high-end digs also raised suspicion. Their apartment typically rented for between $1,700 and $2,000 a month. But the lieutenant and the chief were paying only $650 a month. Stowe had reportedly obtained the steep discount by lying to a building manager, claiming that the unit would be used for undercover police work. Soulsby said that he knew nothing about the discounted rent.

  A little more than two years earlier, Soulsby couldn’t stop grinning when Barry announced his appointment as chief. That afternoon, as he made public his resignation, Soulsby teared up.

  “I cannot allow another controversy to impact on my officers and to detract from their accomplishments,” he said. “My concern for the welfare of my officers and the people they serve transcends my own personal welfare.”

  Soulsby did not acknowledge any wrongdoing. He said he was stepping down for the good of the department, “not because I feel I have done anything wrong.”

  In an interview, Soulsby told a Post reporter that he was actually happy to be stepping down: “I need to take some time off and chill out. I’m just tired, very tired. I’m tired of fighting these silly battles.”

  The morning after the resignation, I called Lou early, as soon as I’d finished reading the articles on Soulsby and Stowe.

  “This is awesome,” I said. “And it’s just the beginning.”

  Lou and I were convinced that it was just a matter of time before Soulsby was charged with a crime. Like any other defendant, Stowe would be looking to cut a deal with prosecutors to help himself. He had to have dirt on Soulsby. If Stowe dished on Soulsby and the feds could corroborate his accusations …

  “I can’t wait until that fat son of a bitch is marched into court in handcuffs,” Lou said. “I’ll be sitting in the front row.”

  “Save a space for me,” I said. “I’ll be sitting right next to you.”

  Soulsby’s resignation was the main topic of conversation the next day when I went to Lou’s house for Thanksgiving. He now invited me every year.

  “What I don’t understand is why he felt he had to lie about me, why he had to attack my integrity and reputation,” Lou said. “He was the chief of police. He had the authority to transfer me. He could appoint anyone he wants. All he had to do was say he was going in a different direction—or nothing at all.”

  “Maybe he felt he had to discredit you because of the Roach Brown investigation,” I said. “But I don’t think it was premeditated. At the press conference, when I asked him what was going on with you, he got this look on his face—he seemed upset. I think he made it up on the spot. And when I gave him a chance to back away from it, in the elevator, he just dug in deeper.”

  “He’s a sick guy,” Lou said, shaking his head. “He’s told so many lies, I don’t think he knows what’s true.”

  “But he’s not that sick. He knows right from wrong. It’s amazing someone like that could become police chief in a big city.”

  �
�He’d do anything to be chief, and Barry knew it. That’s why he got the job. I can’t wait to see him walk into the courtroom as a defendant,” Lou said.

  “They’re going to need a really big orange jumpsuit,” I said, imagining the nearly three-hundred-pound Soulsby finally doing his perp walk. “A whole cotton field’s worth.”

  In federal court in January 1998, Stowe admitted to having lied to get reduced rent on the luxury apartment for himself and “another person” and pleaded guilty to wire fraud. Stowe also admitted that he’d embezzled $55,000 in MPD funds and pleaded guilty to two counts of extortion for shaking down two married men who’d visited the Follies Theatre.

  “I know you all have a lot of questions—probably thousands of questions—and I wish I could answer them,” Stowe told reporters. “Some of those questions concern other people that are in [MPD] and possibly others. Unfortunately, I cannot do that at this time. I wish I could.”

  For the next few months, Lou and I routinely swapped rumors we’d heard about Soulsby’s imminent arrest or indictment. But nothing materialized.

  Years passed. Federal prosecutors kept postponing Stowe’s sentencing as the investigation continued.

  In the end, the information Stowe spilled led the feds not to more police misconduct, but to union corruption. In October 2002, Jake West, the former president of the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental and Reinforcing Iron Workers, pleaded guilty to two counts of embezzling union pension funds. According to court papers, West spent more than $51,000 in union funds on golf, dinners, and items for his home in suburban Virginia. Six other union officials and employees would also plead guilty in the case.