A Picture Tour of Shaw

Last night I had the pleasure of taking a short tour of Shaw (where one of Bread for the City's Centers is located) lead by Andrew from ONE DC. There were about a dozen of us on the tour, and true to his organization's mission, Andrew talked a lot about the history of affordable housing in Shaw. If you want to get all the history, you should get on his next tour (which was great), but here are some nice pictures of the neighborhood.

We started right outside the ONE DC building on S St NW.

This is walking down 6th St, just off Rhode Island. The sign on that building says something like "making room in your community for good things." It's probably going to remain vacant, but it used to be a bike shop.

This is going to be, in about ten years, the largest co-op in DC. Right now it's co-owned by the tenants and another non-profit.


Andrew had us stop at the 7th Street Garden (attached to our NW Center) and talked a little bit about how the closing of the O St Market affected food security in Shaw.

This is a plot (or parcel) located at 7th and R NW. Andrew says ONE DC teamed with a developer to put in a bid for the land to create nice looking affordable housing. After first accepting the bid, Mayor Fenty withdrew support, and the land remains vacant.

We end at ONE DC, where we ask some questions and take some materials.

This is by no means comprehensive. All in all, the tour lasted about two hours, still mostly on 6th and 7th Streets. Though I didn't cover it here, Andrew also discussed the Hostess building that's been looking a mess for as long as I've been here, the old Convention Center that displaced housing in Chinatown before getting turned into a parking lot, the new Convention Center that does nothing for the community except take up space, and some of the Section 8 buildings that were gentrified by harassing low-income residents. All in all, informative and not the least bit unbiased. I wouldn't have it any other way.