In November, the Mayor’s Office of the Clean City, which is carrying out the project’s groundwork while USEPA funds it, handed out 8,000 informational garbage-bin stickers to single-family homes across the pre-selected neighborhoods. Made durable to last and large enough to notice, each sticker lists four concise recommendations to improve household trash disposal and reduce litter: bag all trash in the bin, always keep the lid closed tight, don’t put trash out until shortly before pickup, and for free bin repairs or replacements, residents can access 311 via phone or internet.

The stickers are meant to be applied to each garbage bin, explained Julie Lawson, director of the Mayor’s Office of the Clean City. “Where are you making those decisions? At the cans,” she said. It’s too easy for people to forget the recommendations when they’re not in front of the person as they’re deciding how to handle their trash. “That’s why putting the sticker on the can was important.”

But some residents are skeptical that the stickers will make any difference in the amount of litter and illegal dumping in their neighborhoods. Overflowing trash cans and abandoned bulk items like mattresses, left to deteriorate on street corners, are common in the alley by the 600 Block of Lamont St in Park View, according to Liz Furgurson.

A resident of Lamont St. NW for eight years, Furgurson said she’s “at her wit’s end” with the trash situation, bulk dumping and “rats the size of cats” in her back alley. She explained that the area behind her house has been a problem since she moved in, and that while she’s spoken to city officials time and time again over the years, nothing has changed.

Now that the city is taking some action to fix the rampant litter and dumping problem in some of these areas, Furgurson worries that it won’t be enough. Putting a sticker on a bin under the assumption that people just need to be trained how to dispose of their trash properly is a passive approach to what she considers a big problem.

“I’m at the stage where I’m just losing hope,” Furgurson said. “I’ve been here for eight years and it’s just not any better. And it’s something that I think about a lot.”

David Boyd, a Department of Public Works (DPW) employee and 30-year resident of Columbia Heights, is more optimistic about the potential success of the stickers. Working for the organization responsible for trash collection at the houses involved in the pilot project, Boyd said he regularly witnesses how people handle their trash and believes most of the problems begin with lack of education.��

One example he offered was that of new residents moving to the community. Columbia Heights and Park View are two of the fastest-growing areas in the District, attracting a new, younger crowd. Many recent residents don’t know when trash day is, Boyd said, explaining how he saw a new neighbor put trash out on a Sunday even though collection is on Tuesdays. “During that time, you’re actually just feeding the rats,” Boyd said.

Doorknob hangers with information about trash day schedules and calling 311 are readily available at Boyd’s work, and so he’s made a point of hanging them on neighbors’ doors and helping to educate them.

Furgurson agrees that at least part of the issue comes from residents being uninformed, especially when it comes to the proper disposal of bulk items. “I have seven to eight mattresses in my alley right now,” she said. “People don’t understand that they’re supposed to call 311 for bulk collection. It’s free. It’s all they have to do. But just dragging [the mattresses] out into the alley and expecting them to just magically disappear isn’t working.”

The pilot project will continue into January, for another 10-12 weeks. During that time, Lawson and her team will continue to monitor the same streets and alleys they’ve been visiting since August, always careful to go at the same time, on the same day each week, to keep consistent with the methodology. Using a metric ranging from one to four (one meaning the alley could be cleaned by one person in a few minutes and four being someone should “call in the national guard,” as Lawson said) to track litter levels, the pilot project will be able to measure the effectiveness of the stickers and see what changes people have made to their trash disposal habits.��

ANC1A Commissioner Michael Wray said what he’s excited about the research quality of the project. There will be data that can be analyzed, and if changes need to be made to the messaging of the project, there should be some indicators of where to adjust. The results of the study won’t be fully available until summer, but Lawson is planning to open the project up for public comments in December. The clean street initiative is a work in progress – a step in what Lawson and her team hope will be a positive direction.

“Even if this particular wording [on the stickers] isn’t what we keep doing, I think the idea behind it could be effective,” Wray said.��

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“The insensitivity of the bike population is that everybody should be riding a bike anyhow,” said Dotti Love Wade, a lifetime resident of Columbia Heights and longtime ANC 1A commissioner. “Well, I’m 78 years old. I’m not about to [get] on no bike. I stopped riding bikes when I was in my 50s.”

Wade explained her frustration with the District Department of Transportation’s (DDOT) bike lane plans, which she said are eliminating valuable parking in the area and will exacerbate traffic problems on already congested roads. She also claimed that DDOT’s plans give no consideration to seniors like herself or people with disabilities.

Colin Browne, the communications director with Washington Area Bicyclist Association, also has grievances with the 14th St project; but quite the opposite of Wade, he said he doesn’t think the project goes far enough in prioritizing bikers’ safety. Repurposing the left-turn lane, which extends the length of the corridor, as a protected bike lane, separate from the bus lane, would have been a better design, Browne argued: “We’d obviously say that having a safe place to ride is more important than being able to turn left easily.”

Construction began on DDOT’s 14th Street NW protected bus and bike lane pilot project in June. Running from Euclid to Newton St NW along Columbia Heights bustling main drag, the added bus lane is intended to improve public transport through the corridor, which was shuttling over 15,500 passengers a day while only going 3.6 miles an hour.��

Plastic flex posts were added to the tandem bus and bike lanes’ length to protect cyclists from traffic and prevent cars from impeding public transport. In taking over the large strip of roadway for the project, DDOT eliminated .��

“That’s just not fair to the residents,” Wade said. “What are we supposed to do with our cars?”

Wade’s granddaughter lives in an apartment on 14th and Harvard Ave and can no longer pull up in front of her building to unload groceries or even pick-up or drop-off passengers. What’s more, many of the residents in the buildings impacted by the project are seniors, Wade said. She wondered aloud how they’ll be able to get around once the weather gets bad.

On the other hand, Browne said that he doesn’t think the elimination of parking spaces for bike lanes is a problem. Many people in the District don’t own cars, and even many who do, don’t drive them regularly, he reasoned. He conceded that parking will always be necessary to some extent because some people need to drive to get around; if parking is kept for those who need it, there wouldn’t be an issue of space.����

“We’re not opposed to all parking,” Browne said. “But if preserving parking is getting in the way of people having better options that doesn’t require the inconvenience and expense and detrimental climate impacts of car ownership, I think that’s a problem.”

Crosstown lanes

A development project was kickstarted in 2018 to create protected bike lanes in three areas of the city. The District, having adopted a transportation plan called four years earlier, identified the need for a bike lane connecting Brookland in the east to Park View and Columbia Heights in the west. The District had also recently committed to ending traffic fatalities by 2024 through “Vision Zero,” and protected bike lanes and street redesign could help achieve that goal. DDOT’s Crosstown Bike Lanes project was born.

As of October, there is now a one-mile protected bike lane connecting Wards 1 and 5, which ends on the west side at Kenyon and Warder street. The bike lane currently only runs the length of one residential block in Park View.

“We like it,” said Julia Hustwit, a resident on the 400 Block of Kenyon St NW. On a warm Saturday morning, she was about to head out on a bike ride with her husband and toddler.��

What excited them most about this bike lane, they said, didn’t specifically have to do with bikes. Hustwit explained that cars frequently speed down the street, having just come off a multi-lane ramp that feels like a highway. Now with the bike lane taking up one lane of the street, drivers are forced to slow down.

The loss of parking spaces to the new bike lane has exacerbated the limited parking situation on the street, which will only increase when rush hour restrictions that haven’t been enforced during the pandemic resume, according to Hustwit. She has a garage behind her house, but when there’s no street parking, residents often park their cars in the alley in back of the building and sometimes even block her car in.

While Hustwit and her husband enjoy biking and think expanded bike lanes are good for sustainability, they also see the loss of street parking as a hardship for many in their community, she said. The neighborhood is home to many elderly and disabled residents, as well as lots of families with children. Hustwit’s reasoning for having a car is, in part, being able to transport her toddler, she explained.

“I’m pro-bike lanes, and I’m generally not a proponent of an enormous amount of parking, but they need to enforce the laws and do what they say they’re going to do,” said Hustwit

As for the bike lane on her street, she hopes they extend it further. “It is weird it just stops there,” she said, pointing to the end of the block.

Browne, an avid cyclist, couldn’t agree more.

“One of the key problems [with the 14th St and Crosstown projects] is they don’t connect to each other, and there are currently no plans for them to do so,” Browne said. “They come within eight blocks of each other. It’s a huge missed opportunity for an actual connected network.”

North to south

There are still more Crosstown bike paths planned in the area, according to ANC 1A Chairman Kent Boese. DDOT previously presented plans to construct similar bike paths running north to south on Warder St and Park Place. So far, that piece of the project appears to be stalled.

“Frankly, we expected the north-south bike lanes to be completed by now,” Boese said. While he acknowledges that COVID has likely played a role in delaying the project, possibly because the atypical traffic patterns during the pandemic made it difficult for DDOT to evaluate them properly, he said there is plenty of historic data they can use and it might even be an opportunity to think about traffic differently.��

The ANC 1A is holding a virtual meeting this Thursday at 7 pm with DDOT to discuss these planned projects and get community feedback. They’re hoping to keep pushing the projects forward.

Boese said he is conscious of the competing interests around the bike lanes, and that he and the other commissioners are working to come up with “win-win opportunities to improve transportation networks, minimize impacts to on-street parking, and identify other infrastructure opportunities to improve pedestrian safety.”

ANC 1A Commissioner Jason Clock is also concerned about seniors and those with mobility impairments being impacted by the loss of street parking. Still, he said he also believes these are important steps toward improving transportation infrastructure to support the rapidly expanding community.��

Such community changes, Browne said, are likely the route of the conflict over bike lanes and parking spots in the community.��

“Parking is a visible and easy thing to latch onto as a means of expressing frustration,” Browne said. “There’s often some subtext there, where bike lanes are seen as an indicator of change in the neighborhood…it’s ultimately not the fault of the bike lane; it’s the fault of a bunch of other sorts of things that are happening in a changing and growing city where people feel like they’re being excluded or being left behind. Not building a bike lane isn’t going to change that.” Though he does think those concerns need to be addressed.��

But for Wade, the prospect of her and her neighbors losing accessible parking is a concrete fear. She’s experienced it before when, as she explained it, ‘white people moved out to the suburbs’ to avoid integrating. But for them to get to their jobs in the city, they had to commute through neighborhoods like Columbia Heights. To ease traffic congestion spurred by the new commute patterns, the District “stripped the yards, widened the streets, took away all the trees,” said Wade, recalling how beautiful it once was to drive from Sherman Ave up New Hampshire�� Ave where the canopy of trees overlapped like an arbor.��

“They cut them all down and widened Sherman Avenue…to ease commuters coming in and out of the city to downtown government,” Wade recounted. “They did the same thing with 13th street. They took all of the parking spaces. Once they put Metro in, they gave us our parking spaces back, but now they’re taking them back again.’”

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Prominent polls had Democrat Joe Biden winning the presidential race by a double-digit margin and congressional races leaning blue. But today, the presidential race is still too close to call. Democrats have lost seats in the House and they look likely to remain the minority in the Senate.

According to a report, trust in the media has already been on the decline in the country; experts say that decline is tied to polls.��

“Polls can be granted the aura of invincibility,” because they appear as hard, fast numbers, said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor at American University and author of Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.��

However, “beneath the surface, there is a good deal of ambiguity; there’s a good deal of art rather than science,” he explained.��

But this doesn’t make polls less valuable, he said.��

Campbell has studied the history of polling in American elections and concludes that while polls can provide important information for the democratic system and, more often than not, are accurate, they should be viewed with skepticism.��

“I think that polls should not be ignored or dismissed or rejected because they might be wrong,” said Campbell. “I think polls should be treated warily. And that voters and polling audiences, if you will, should be a bit more skeptical about polling … Maybe they will be now.”

Pollsters such as Republican strategist Frank Luntz has said the credibility of polling had been damaged beyond repair. He was quoted in Axios Wednesday, calling the political polling profession

This sentiment is echoed by voters who feel duped by polling in back-to-back presidential elections. Zack Colston, 26, an actor living in Los Angeles, said that he was wary of polls after the 2016 election but had hoped the problem had been fixed. Now, he says he won’t trust polls ever again.

��‘‘’Fool me once, fool me twice, etc., etc.,’” Colston said.

Polling failures can be traced back to the 1940s when polls incorrectly predicted Republican Thomas Dewey would beat Harry Truman in the . And it is not the first time that polling for consecutive presidential elections has turned out to be wrong. However, the landscape of survey-taking has changed.��

“The new reality … is that voters are not waiting for a pollster to call them on landlines or even on cell phones,” said David Colton, formerly executive editor at USA Today. “No, voters live on social media now; they exchange views online with friends in the comments sections on Facebook, and we are all suspicious of surveys, scams and phone calls for privacy and other reasons.”��

Data seems to back this up. According to a 2019 study by the , only 6% of people called in telephone surveys are willing to talk.

While some observers such as Colton believe that current polling methods aren’t reflective of the 21st century, Campbell argues that the industry is too big to fail. Field survey research is a multi-billion dollar industry and election polling is only one small piece.��

He says not to count out the professionals just yet.��

“If polling were that fragile to be disrupted and doomed by a single national election, that would have happened long ago … It’s a resilient industry. It’s a big industry. It goes much beyond election polling,” Campbell said.��

The post A failure of political polling? first appeared on 91����.

Ben Walton, who drove from California with a friend to witness Election Day in the nation’s capital, dressed as President Trump at the outdoor gathering, wearing an orange suit, red ‘Make America Great Again’ hat and holding a sign reading, “Need a ride to Russia on Jan 20^th Moscow or Bust.” However, his hope for the night isn’t that one particular candidate will win over another, but rather that people will “relax and be more civil to each other,” he said.

“We’re out here to make people laugh – hanging out, having a good time, seeing what’s going on,” Walton explained. “The last four years have been pretty untenable. We can’t do another four years where we’re at each other’s’ throats all the time, especially with coronavirus being such an issue. Hopefully, everyone can get along with the result no matter what. I won’t be bothered if Trump wins; I won’t be bothered if Biden wins. I just hope we can all be more civil to each other.”

Music, dance and visual arts were prominent elements of the gathering. A gogo-band played instruments and sang from a truck next to McPherson Square as a crowd gathered. Several people danced along to the music as a line of police officers stood across the street in front of boarded-up businesses.

Behind the block party, in the square, more subdued attendees watched election night results roll in on a jumbotron.

In BLM Plaza a dance group called The People’s Dancers formed a circle in the crowd, first performing and then teaching their choreography to their audience. Owoada Ayorinde, the creator of the dance troupe, said that the point of their work is to de-escalate crowds during protests.

“We’re trying to avoid conflict between people with different ideological views,” Ayorinde explained.

Over the past eight months, waves of protests across the country frequently devolved into violence, whether between protesters, or protestors and police. Given the tense nature of this election, as some watch party attendees characterized it, police in the District geared up for a potentially volatile election night. However, few violent or hostile incidents broke out at the gathering.

One of the biggest clashes arose between protestors holding a banner reading, “Trump lies all the time” while chanting, “we need to teach our children not to lie. Trump lies all the time,” and a smaller protest group with “Jesus saves” signs.

One of the people holding a sign with the name Jesus on it was Silvia Roca. A native Spanish speaker, Roca’s husband translated for her, explaining that they were there to pray for President Trump and had been there every day for the past 21 days.

“I believe God is going to use the president for the betterment of the country, to establish principles and values to the country,” Roca said.

Though the gathering was primarily peaceful, there were many vocal anti-Trump attendees. Peter Dennis and Claudia Brown started Americans for Impeachment in 2019, pushing for the president’s removal from office, which they said, “Congress dropped the ball on.” They’ve re-crafted Trump’s slogan from The Apprentice, Dennis explained, with their slogan becoming, “Trump, you’re fired.”

“We’re here today to celebrate with the American people and to see through what Congress couldn’t do,” Brown said.

According to the Metropolitan Police Department, three people have been arrested in relation to protests at the gathering. Another Watch Party is planned for Wednesday afternoon in BLM Plaza, according to the People’s Watch Party website.

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Lucy Werner, a volunteer with the organization, said she’s been in the District for the past five days, passing out everything from Kind bars to chips and salsa to pizza to voters and anyone else who happens to pass by.

Mid-day Nov 3, the group was outside the Union Market voting supercenter handing out free waters and Shake Shack cheeseburgers. Pizza to the Polls partners with local restaurants who donate the food to encourage people to get out and vote, Werner explained.

The organization is non-partisan. “We are just here literally to support everyone – anyone and everyone who walks by. It is free food for all,” said Werner.

The post Voting has never tasted so good first appeared on 91����.

In 2016, 56% of voters were over the age of 50. They had the largest turnout of any demographic, were more likely to cast their ballots in person, and voted predominantly for Donald Trump.

But Baby Boom voters — born between 1946 and 1964 — and beyond, face a risk that wasn’t present four years ago.��

��“Because of the virus, I decided to vote by mail,” said Nancy Braley, 71, and a resident of Beverly, Massachusetts. She frequently votes early, she said, because she usually escapes New England winters in Florida.

But this year, the pandemic has kept her grounded. Even at home, she mailed in her ballot.

The reported Oct. 28 that 71.1 million ballots had already been cast in this election, 47.8 million of which were by mail. Concerns about the spread of COVID-19, particularly among older voters, deter many from voting in person on election day.��

Over 200,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since the pandemic began, and according to data from the , 95% of those deaths were people 50 years and over.

Trying something new — the mail

Had mail-in voting not been an option, Braley said she would have braved her local polling station. Other seniors are turning to new methods of voting for the first time in their lives.

Carol Garbarino, 80, and a retired homemaker, is a Massachusetts native who has always voted in person. However, for the first time, she and her husband voted by mail. Their polling station is at a school, Garbarino explained; they were worried about “germs.”����

Massachusetts is one of at least that have made voting more accessible for residents who don’t feel comfortable going out on election day. Registered voters were sent applications for absentee ballots, which could be deposited in a�� dropbox returned by mail with no postage charge. So far, of the roughly 4.7 million registered voters in the state, about 1.2 million have already voted absentee, according to reported as of Oct. 28.��

However, like Braley, Garbarino said that if mail-in ballots weren’t accessible she would have still found a way to vote in this election even if it meant voting in person.��

Issues propel voters to polls

Issues like health care, social security and getting the virus under control are among Garbarino’s top concerns. She is not alone. An Oct. 1 found that Biden is leading Trump by 27 points among senior voters, a group the President won in 2016.��

In campaign ads, both Biden and Trump have claimed the other will make cuts to social security, a program many seniors depend on for financial security.��

What’s more, the Affordable Care Act goes before the Supreme Court a week after elections. Trump has made no secret of his intent to strike down the Obama-era act, which could leave 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions uninsured and unable to qualify for affordable health insurance, according to a 2017 . Trump has said he will replace the ACA with Trumpcare but has yet to release a plan.��

��Lynn C. French, 74, is a District of Columbia native with a pre-existing condition — kidney disease. As a Democratic committeewoman, she said she usually votes by mail because she’s typically working in polling centers on election day. This year, she voted by dropbox. “My daughter has me under lock and key in my house,” French said.��

Voting by mail “iffy”

Dan Lanning, 68, of McKinney, Texas, a project manager at an energy economics consulting firm, voted last week in person.��

“Voting by mail is just too iffy for everybody,” Lanning said. He didn’t want to wait in the long lines, which he predicts will be prevalent on election day.��

“We knew who we were going to vote for,” Lanning said, speaking for him and his wife. “We’d already made our decision. And there wasn’t going to be anything that’s going to be coming out that’s going to be game-changing, either way – whether it’s positive or negative,” he said.

“There wasn’t going to be anything that’s going to be changing our mind on it. Waiting until the day of the election … there’s too many things that could get in the way of doing that.”��

Sheila Reid, a 73-year-old registered voter in the District, said this is the first year she isn’t voting in person. Instead, she took her ballot to her local dropbox. Her decision has more to do with her anxiety about the election than fear of getting the virus.

For Reid, the president’s “cavalier” and “irresponsible” handling of the pandemic and the “blatant, overt racism” she sees in society are driving her vote.

“Every vote is important,” she said. “I think this is one of the most important votes we’ve ever had in American history.”

Mark Anderson, the executive director of , echoed that idea. “It feels like, and I think it is truly a crossroads election. The direction of our country is on the ballot.”��

A decisive moment

We Are Family is a DC-based organization that supports “inner-city” seniors, particularly working with non-white, low-income communities, which Anderson said have been hit hardest by the pandemic. For the seniors and staff’s safety, the group is not driving residents to the polls on election day as usual. Instead, they are offering help with filling out mail-in ballots and finding local drop boxes.��

Anderson says the election is “immensely important” to his clients.

“Most of them are African American,” Anderson said. “Some may have grown up in the south under the lash of legal oppression. They persisted through all of this, and this moment in American history carries some of the echoes of the darkest period of our time as a country – things that these seniors wish had been left in the past but clearly have not been. And now, for them, I think they see it as a decisive moment.”

French, who was part of the civil rights movement, still has pictures from another important election to her: Barack Obama’s first presidential election. She described the lines at her local polling station, where her daughter had once attended school, zigzagging through the parking lot and up and down Kenyon Street and Georgia Avenue.��

“It was a celebration,” she said. “We couldn’t believe we were voting for a Black man for president.” This election has a similar feeling of importance she explained: “Just as with Obama, it was a point of honor; with this, it’s like, ‘we’ve got to get Donald Trump off our neck.’”������

French is hopeful that people will turn out to vote in this election: “People are saying they’re going to vote like their life depends on it…’Heck yeah!’”

The post ‘Vote like your life depends on it’ first appeared on 91����.

There are currently four first-time candidates running for election to the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 1A, a locally elected volunteer body representing much of Columbia Heights and Park View. And while COVID-19 has made it hard for them to campaign, several of the candidates claim the pandemic and its effects on their communities is what drove them to run for office.��

Dieter Lehmann Morales, a 28-year-old paralegal, said he never anticipated running for political office. He’s now on the ballot to represent his Single Member District (SMD) 1A02, a northwest portion of Columbia Heights.

“There comes a time, I guess, in every person’s life, where you realize things aren’t working the way that they should be, or that the people who are representing us are not really representing us; they’re not looking after us,” Morales said. “At what point do we say, enough is enough. It’s time for me to use my own privilege and my own capacity to make that change happen.”

Morales is a Mexican immigrant who came to the United States when he was eight years old. If he wins this election, he will be representing what he describes as a diverse and “vibrant migrant community” with a large Salvadoran population. Some residents are undocumented immigrants, he said, which makes it difficult for them to advocate for themselves. Morales noted that there isn’t a lot of minority representation in government. He’s looking forward to being someone his constituents can relate to and rely on, knowing that he comes from a similar background as them, speaks their language and has an understanding of the issues they face.

Mukta Ghorpadey, a Columbia Heights resident, running for commissioner in SMD 1A07, explained a similar motivation for her shift into politics. She recounted how she was able to apply her work as a high school career counselor to helping neighbors get unemployment benefits and resources after many lost their jobs early in the pandemic. The experience alerted her to the lack of infrastructure in place to provide such information to her community. Joining the ANC seemed to her the best way to help her neighbors.

The ANC is a unique feature of the District, which lacks statehood and therefore the traditional state governmental systems, like representative legislatures. The District’s Home Rule Charter establishes a mayor, city council and ANCs as the city’s governmental system. And the ANC, Ghorpadey said, is “the most local form of public office, and I think that can make it super powerful. People are more likely to know me—because I’m their neighbor—than the people on city council. That’s the nature of local politics.”��

However, not all residents are aware of their hyperlocal representatives. Michael Jones has lived in Columbia Heights for over 20 years, but said he doesn’t know what the ANC is or does, let alone who his commissioner is. While Jones said he thinks affordable housing is the biggest issue affecting his community, with the area getting “pretty pricey,” he doesn’t know where he would seek out community resources if he needed them or how to engage with his local government.��

Olivia Cheng and Jam Rubio recently bought a house in Columbia Heights, but have been living in the neighborhood for nearly three years. Neither knew who their commissioner was but expressed an interest in wanting to know more about the community and ways to stay informed. “I feel like I want to be a little bit more involved, and I should, but I just don’t really know how to,” Cheng said.

Public interest in politics and civic engagement often focus on the national branches of government. Presidential election years usually see higher voter turnout, while midterm numbers tend to drop. In the last two presidential elections, 2016 and 2012, voter turnout in ANC 1A was 61% and 64%, respectively. During the past two midterm elections, voter turnout in that ANC area dropped to 47% in 2018 and 37% in 2014, according to data from the DC Board of Elections. Assuming these trends continue, the upcoming election will likely see greater voter participation across all elections.��

Voter turnout doesn’t translate directly to participation in ANC elections though, as voters are often more likely to leave blanks on their ballots for elections that are unfamiliar. ANCs serve two-year terms, their races coinciding with congressional elections. According to DC Board of Elections data, in ANC 1A during the 2018, 2016, and 2014 elections, between 20% and 34% of residents who voted did not vote for a commissioner.

Low civic engagement on the local level, particularly from young voters, is one frustration Commissioner Matthew Goldschmidt noted. “Civic engagement is still seen as good, but for some reason, young people think that good is only done at the national level,” Goldschmidt wrote in an email. “Because our politics and news media has become so nationalized of late, young people don’t understand that what happens at the municipal level affects them 10,000x more than what happens at the White House.”��

Goldschmidt, who has served two non-consecutive terms in the ANC, is not running for re-election this year. However, he didn’t rule out running again in the future. For this election, he’s encouraged fellow neighbor and first-time candidate Chris Hall to run. Hall wrote in an email that he is running because no one else in his SMD was interested and they need representation. Without an ANC email, contacting District agencies to address neighborhood issues could take weeks to resolve. Goldschmidt further explained, “going to your ANC is often more effective than calling 311 when your trash hasn’t been collected.”

91���� also reached out to Judson Wood, the fourth new ANC 1A candidate, but has not heard back.

The ANC functions as an advisory body, acting as an intermediary between residents and the District government and federal agencies, explained Commissioner Kent Boese, chairman of ANC 1A. While he conceded that the advisory body has no concrete authority, their advice is weighed heavily by consulting agencies. Projects such as defending the redevelopment of Park Morton, pushing for the expansion of crosstown bike lanes and advocating for the renovation of the recreation center are all within the scope of a commissioners’ role and have been priorities for Boese.��

Smaller community concerns like trash pick-up, stop signs and speed bumps are also managed by commissioners. Boese recalled a commissioner recently telling him about an issue with street cleaning signs being posted on the wrong side of the block. Residents who received parking tickets contacted their ANC and their commissioner was able to sort out the issue. “He was able to get the right people involved,” Boese said.

Boese is one of eight commissioners running for re-election, unopposed.��

ANC 1A – Map overview of the expected commissioners by SMD after elections

The post Who’s on your Ward 1 ballot: New CoHi-Park View neighbors run for ANC first appeared on 91����.

“We’re doing pretty good, even though everything is virtual,” Camargo said. She believes their rapid response to making online learning accessible to all students contributed to their great enrollment numbers this fall.

Even though students are attending classes virtually, DIW has not relaxed its expectations. Dancers must join their virtual-classes on time, as the school maintains its rigid attendance policy. Since teachers can’t walk around their students, making adjustments as they go, instead, they make an effort to call out students by name, using verbalized technique corrections to engage kids and give them the feeling of being together. To ensure students are getting quality technique-training, an administrator monitors each Zoom class, so there’s always a back-up to the teacher.��

Camargo admits that virtual classes have their challenges, especially for young children whose attention spans are already small. But overall, most students who have trained with them already have the necessary foundational focus. It also helps that “our students are at DIW because they want to be here,” Camargo said.��

COVID has presented additional dance costs, a struggle for some families. Practicing dance safely and effectively requires an adequately fitted space, such as wood floors and a ballet barre or safe alternative, which some families don’t have readily available. Portable dance floors and ballet barres typically cost over $100 each, and while household items like a chair can often be substituted, Renee Davis-Marcel, a DIW parent, said they’re not very supportive.

“The big problem now is that we don’t have nearly the resources we had last year, as far as cost, and costume fees, and now we have to buy equipment for the household,” Marcel said. She feels the pressure to get her son a ballet barre, both for safety reasons and to motivate him, something that’s been difficult without the stimulation and support of classmates. Still, she’s concerned about taking on the financial burden while she is already struggling due to the economic effects of COVID.

“The resources that we had as a family, as far as putting money towards dance education during a pandemic, it gets harder and harder to justify,” Marcel said.��

Since the pandemic started, Marcel’s son has been able to keep his scholarship, which she said she appreciates.

More than 80% of DIW students are on scholarship or financial aid, according to William Keiser, public relations coordinator at DIW. Students either receive merit-based scholarships or need-based financial aid. Families are always welcome to reapply for financial assistance if personal circumstances change, and they need the amount adjusted to continue the program.

“That is our priority, to make it affordable,” Camargo said of the classes.

Michael, Marcel’s son, is 11 and has been a student at DIW for about five years. He also has autism, which often manifests as severe anxiety. Michael began with DIW’s summer camp but joined the dance classes last year. When he first started, it would sometimes take Marcel half an hour to get him out of the car; a year later, she can see the positive impact dance has had on him, she said.

“He’s so much more confident. He was able to transfer the skills he learned, in terms of performance and bodywork, to his schoolwork,” Marcel stated.

She credits dance, and specifically DIW, with that change in her son. “They never stopped encouraging us to take classes,” Marcel said.��

While funding for nonprofits, especially related to the arts, is often a concern for organizations, DIW appears to be safe for the moment. They were proactive in their fundraising and received COVID-19 relief grants, said Jared Fischer, the development manager at DIW. While they received fewer grants in 2020, they ended up with around $400,000 more in funding than they received the previous year. Individual donations are also slated to be higher than last year, Fischer said, though the exact amount is still to be determined.��

However, nothing is guaranteed for next year, Fischer said. Grant awards and their amounts can change due to budget cuts, shifting priorities or competition; and individual donors could have a change of heart or wallet, particularly if economic fallout from the pandemic continues or worsens.

As a mom who sees the benefits her son gets from DIW, Marcel worries about the school’s ability to fundraise during the pandemic. In the past, she said, she’s helped with funding campaigns.

“As a parent of a family with autism and developmental disability, I have to be more of an advocate for my own kids too, so that does translate to political activism in terms of having the city continue to fund our school and after school programming…You should have more money going into the arts. The arts are what save us.”

DIW closed its physical doors on March 13 in response to the swelling pandemic. Within two weeks, Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a stay-at-home order, shutting down all non-essential businesses; meanwhile, DIW was already shifting to full virtual learning. As a nonprofit working primarily with underrepresented kids, they faced special challenges with getting students online, said Camargo.

Lack of access to internet and streaming devices was the first barrier the school had to overcome, and they did so by issuing hotspots and tablets to 30% of their students, according to a COVID response email from DIW.��

“Now we’re also worrying about not just the technical disparity, but also, are our kids eating? Do they even have the energy that they need to dance?… We had to figure out all of those gaps within our community,” Camargo explained.

Even before COVID raged, DIW offered programs beyond dance, aimed at creating a diverse and inclusive community, and promoting economic equity. The Dance Institute claims it takes a holistic approach to training. This encapsulates mental and physical health by providing students with meals, nutritionists, and physical therapists. Mentoring, counseling and academic support are also offered. Camargo made clear that these programs are now more important to the community than ever.

��Columbia Heights has the highest rate of COVID-19 infections of any DC neighborhood, according to . It’s also a neighborhood that is nearly 50% Black, the demographic most at risk for the virus. As a Black-led dance school, catering to primarily Black students in the neighborhood, DIW is playing an essential role in the community at this time.

DIW is planning to reopen the studio to students in late October; however, Camargo said she is confident they will only take such a measure if it is safe to do so.��

“I know that DIW is probably one of the few [dance studios] that is still closed because we really want to make sure, being that we’re in Columbia Heights, which is the hardest hit sector where COVID was more prominent…we have really been taking precautions and making sure that when we open we’re doing it right. We’re committed to keeping everyone safe,” Camargo said.��

In the meantime, the school is preparing for a virtual youth talent show on Nov 1, part of their continued community engagement. They are also due to participate in , a yearly fundraiser on Dec 1, which they raised $5,000 from last year.��

“Typically, when you think of a dance studio, you think of a girl ballerina,” Marcel stated. “He’s [Michael] also a part of the community, too. I hope that we can keep that frame there: that dance is not only for the girls, but for guys too. A story about dancers doesn’t typically have an 11-year-old with autism who’s a gamer and likes electronics and hip-hop music, but that’s part of it too”.

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��The victim, Bernard Langley, was transported to a local hospital where he is undergoing surgery, according to Chastity Nelson, his sister-in-law. Nelson said the bullet went through Langley’s leg but that he’s going to be okay.

����

Gunshots rang out on the crisp, sunny day in the residential neighborhood that abuts McMillan Reservoir, and Nelson was there to hear them. She said she was in the basement of the house at the time, her sister doing her daughter’s hair when she heard three shots and ran outside. Langley was coming up the steps saying he’d just been shot, Nelson recounted.��

��“It had to have been a random shooting,” Nelson said. “He doesn’t have any enemies. He cuts grass for everyone around here; everybody knows him. They’ve lived in this house for about 13 years,” she continued.

The crime scene closed down a block of Columbia Rd NW as officers and police dogs combed the area for evidence, causing a traffic jam on Michigan Ave NW and Warder St NW. The occasional car horn and dogs barking were the only noises that punctuated the otherwise quiet Saturday afternoon in the area.

��The investigation is still ongoing. Police have described the suspect, asking the public to be on the lookout for a Black male, around 20-25 years old, with long dreadlocks and wearing a green jacket and dark-colored pants. If you have any information, you are encouraged to call or text the 3rd District police department at 202-727-9099.

3D is on the scene of a confirmed shooting at 500 Block of Columbia RD NW . Lookout is for a B/M, 5'10, 20-25yrs of age, medium complexion with long dreads, Green Jacket and dark color Pants.
Have info? Call (202) 727-9099/text 50411

— DC Police Department (@DCPoliceDept)

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��Responding to the misinformation, DCHA spokesperson, Jose Sousa, dispelled the claims about a 30-day timeline in an email to the resident council and other involved parties. However, he also wrote that the Housing Authority is working with residents to help them choose relocation options. DCHA’s goal is that all families living in buildings slated for the first phase of redevelopment will be moved by the end of the year, Sousa wrote. Building 617 is part of that first phase of construction.

��This latest development comes less than a week after a virtual Council Committee hearing on a bill that would move redevelopment forward. Community members at the hearing voiced their concerns that the current plan doesn’t reflect the residents’ interests.

“I strongly advise you, do not…do not vote for this and mark this up,” High testified.�� “Because there’s no solid plan in place, no guarantee for residents. There aren’t enough units being built, as promised. Residents are being displaced.”

The hearing on the alley and street closures signify a concrete step toward a redevelopment plan that a number of people in the community disagree with.

Marie Muschette, who has been a resident of Park Morton for nearly 50 years, said she doesn’t like what’s happening with the redevelopment, or how quickly DCHA is moving people off the property.

“It’s nice around here. Nothing wrong with the property,” Muschette said. “They [DCHA] just need to fix it up. They need to do their job.”

Park Morton has been slated for redevelopment since 2008 as part of the city’s New Communities Initiative, a government program intended to revitalize the most run-down subsidized housing in the District. Park Morton is one of four sites NCI is focusing on.

The project is supposed to entail one for one replacement of existing public housing units and the opportunity for residents to return to the redeveloped property. However, some community members and residents see the project as an effort to gentrify the neighborhood further and push primarily Black residents out; they don’t believe the NCI promises will be kept, according to High and other community members.

“How often do we see these new developments keep on with the same pattern: force people out of their homes, demolish public housing complexes, and fail to redevelop on-site or replace units at one to one,” said Mark Friend, a member of Showing up for Racial Justice DC.

��Park Morton is a 174-unit complex spread across 12 buildings; each unit is a two-bedroom apartment. The redevelopment plan for the site has 189 new units, split between multi-bedroom apartments, flats and townhouses. However, only 57 of those units will be reserved for public housing residents. The other units will be split between moderate-to-affordable housing and market-rate units, ensuring another principle of NCI: mixed-income housing.��

��“It says everyone has the right to return,” Empower DC organizer, Daniel del Pielago said in reference to the promises of NCI. “So how will they return if there’s only 57 units built on the sit��?”

��The original redevelopment plan included two properties off-site to be built before construction on Park Morton began. The build first plan was intended to help ensure residents were not displaced from the neighborhood. Many residents said they were led to believe that they would have the option, once all redevelopment was completed, to either remain at the property they relocated to or return to Park Morton.��

The Avenue, built across the street from Park Morton in 2012, provided 27 public housing replacement units. Bruce Monroe Park, just a few blocks away, was intended to be another build-first site, which would have created the necessary 90 additional units. However, a lawsuit brought by neighbors of the park and subsequent ruling from the has delayed the development indefinitely.

��In response to the build first site set-back, the developers, The Community Builders and Dantes Partners, and city council member for Ward 1, Brianne Nadeau, are pushing to redevelop the Park Morton site. They maintain that Bruce Monroe will still be built, but as a later phase of the project, once the zoning commission sorts out the legal tie-up.��

��“I want to be very clear,” Nadeau testified. “The court remanded the Bruce Monroe decision back to the zoning commission, but I have every intention of seeing that part of the project through to completion. There will be no downgrading of the number of replacement public housing units. And I will not rest until we have built every last one of them and all of our families have a chance to return.”

��For residents who have waited years for these promised new units, that guarantee doesn’t mean much. And when redevelopment is contingent on empty buildings, residents feel the pressure to move, Pielago said.��

��Once residents have moved away from the property, the likelihood of them returning to new units once they’re developed, even with a right to return, drops significantly; and it continues to decrease the longer they’re away from the community. In best-case scenarios, only 30% of displaced residents return, according to William Jordan, a member of Georgie Avenue Community Development Task Force.

��Park Morton has already lost a substantial amount of its residents, with more expected to leave over the coming months. As of Aug. 24, a total of 107 families have opted to take housing vouchers. Forty-five of them have already been relocated. In the end, only six families have chosen to remain on the site, according to the housing authority.��

��“It’s not what we wanted it to be, but I can’t tell a family that they can’t take a voucher,” ANC1 Commissioner, Michael Wray said.

��However, many of these residents don’t feel they really have a choice, Pielago said. They’re often making a decision driven by the fear that they’re about to lose their home.��

��During the hearing, Pielago read the testimony of a Park Morton resident who had taken a voucher. He said she wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation:

��“I have no idea when I’ll come back or if I will come back,” Pielago read. “We are all being moved with no idea of what will happen. I will be moving soon now because I’m a voucher holder. I’m concerned about having to pay utilities at my new place, which will add an extra expense for me. I feel like our community is being destroyed.”

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