After 20 years, a great deal of work by the attorneys of Crowell & Moring, UDC Professor Louise Howells and her students and most important the resiliency of the residents, 1372 Kenyon Street is now a tenant owned property. They closed on June 18 and let me say this was quite the journey.

An absolutely unscrupulous landlord, who through some subterfuge and shenanigans took over a building that he truly should never have owned. Then he mistreated the residents, refusing to fix code violations before attempting to sell the building right out from under them.  Although the landlord was offered $2.5 million for the building he refused, and instead was forced the sell the tenants the building for $586,000 and had to pony up his own money to pay off the remainder of the mortgage.

Last night the tenants gave me this great award plaque, but it is really they who are the heroes.

CVS Pharmacy at Georgia Ave. and Princeton Pl. is open and ready for business. This one will service our neighbors in Park View on Georgia Avenue.

Dear friends:

Justice Park, once an open-air-drug market and prone to violence. The park closed in on all sides by high walls, hidden from street view was a perfect venue for criminality of all sorts. Well we shut that down and it has been closed for more than a year.

Across the street, the city will start constructing a new Justice Park very soon.  But what to do with the old one. Residents agreed that the park should be transformed into new affordable housing and this week, Mayor Fenty, DMPED Valerie Santos, ANC-1B chairman Gayle Holness and Commissioner Sedrick Muhammad announced that Maria Corrales of Capitol Construction and Keystone Construction have partnered to build the new housing.

Here we are  at the announcement Thursday.