The long-promised redevelopment of the Park Morton public housing complex is now facing further delays.

The D.C. Court of Appeals has sent the plans for redeveloping the Northwest D.C. complex back to the city’s zoning commission for re-examination. The decision will add more time to a process that has been held up in zoning litigation since 2017.

The Park Morton redevelopment is part of D.C.’s New Communities Initiative, a plan to replace public housing in several neighborhoods with new, mixed-income developments. The city promised residents of Park Morton, who have faced poor housing conditions and lead hazards, that it would build them new affordable housing without displacing them from the Park View neighborhood, utilizing a strategy called “build first.”

That build-first promise depended on the city building new housing at Bruce Monroe Park, located about a half-mile south from Park Morton on Georgia Avenue. The city’s plan was to build move residents from their original homes at Park Morton over to the new housing before demolishing their old homes to make way for further redevelopment.

But the city’s ability to actually build at Bruce Monroe has been in question since 2017, when a group of residents who live near the park sued the city’s zoning commission over the redevelopment plans. They had concerns about traffic and the effect that taller buildings would have on neighborhood character — and they also objected to the fact that the redevelopment would take away a significant amount of green space in the neighborhood.

In the opinion issued Thursday, Judge Roy McLeese said the zoning commission did not make enough of an effort to consider that opposition. The commission’s order approving the redevelopment of Bruce Monroe, McLeese wrote, “was an over ninety-percent verbatim copy” of the fact-finding and conclusions of the city’s development team.

The court’s decision will force the zoning commission to go back and deliberate again — this time, taking into account critiques of the project that center around building height and neighborhood density.

Associate judge Phyllis Thompson, who concurred in part and dissented in part with the court decision, wrote that the court’s criticisms of the zoning commission’s decision to move forward were “overblown.”

“I would not allow them to be a roadblock to what the Commission found to be this ‘very important’ project,” Thompson wrote. “This, I predict, is a formula for another round of appeals that will delay a project that the Commission has already thoroughly analyzed and unanimously deemed worthy of approval.”

At the Park Morton Housing complex, residents have had to contend with poor housing conditions for years as the redevelopment plan has been challenged in the courts.

“We’re in a housing crisis,” said Park Morton resident council president Shonta High. “And you can see that those who are … just a little more affluent than us feel that they have some sort of power over us and where we live.”

High said she wishes those who filed the suit would “get off their high horse and understand that everybody needs housing.” But she is also skeptical of the Housing Authority’s redevelopment plans.

Earlier this spring, the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA) decided to start offering residents vouchers to move off the property, a decision that appeared to acknowledge that the park was no longer a guaranteed part of the redevelopment plan and the city needed to start demolishing Park Morton in order to move forward with demolition onsite.

High says she urgently wants the city to be able to proceed with redevelopment, but she also feels she has not been given a firm enough guarantee that residents won’t eventually be displaced. (The city has repeatedly told existing residents they will have the right to return to a redeveloped Park Morton, but those kinds of promises have in practice faltered in other neighborhoods where public housing has been redeveloped.) High has proposed a redevelopment that includes homeownership options for Park Morton residents.

“I want [redevelopment] to move forward, guaranteeing that all of Park Morton’s residents — past, present and future — are all guaranteed to have a place,” said High. “I need a collective guarantee from everyone across the board.”

In response to the court’s decision, the Housing Authority said it was committed to moving forward with construction on the Park Morton site. In an email, a spokesperson wrote that there were no other options in the neighborhood for a “build-first” site, but “we are confident that we can proceed accordingly on-site just as we have always proposed to do until this scenario comes to a resolution.”

Earlier this month, the Housing Authority said it had issued housing choice vouchers to 58 Park Morton families to relocate, and 25 of those families had signed leases and successfully moved.

The slides from the May meeting of the Park Morton Steering Committee, which gathers Park Morton residents, developers, city officials to discuss the redevelopment, indicate that while eight families relocated from Park Morton have remained in Ward 1, fifteen other families had moved to other wards.

And amid this relocation, it’s not clear how the Park Morton redevelopment will be financed: As Washington Business Journal reported, Housing Authority Executive Director Tyrone Garrett recently told the D.C. Council he would likely need more money than the $36 million dollars the Mayor’s budget recently allocated to New Communities Initiative projects. Garrett told lawmakers he could not guarantee that work at Park Morton could begin within the fiscal year, in part because private partners had been hesitant to make large commitments during the current economic crisis.

The Deputy Mayor’s Office for Economic Planning and Development, which has partnered with the Housing Authority on the New Communities Initiative projects, did not respond to a question from WAMU about how much the litigation and delays to the Park Morton project have cost the city.

Critics of the challenge to the project often point out that their actions have held up the delivery of safe, affordable housing for low-income Black residents. The neighbors who filed the suit insist that their actions are justified, and that they have been working to protect a park that a diverse group of residents enjoys.

“We are disheartened by the reduction of dialogue, on complex and important policy matters such as affordable housing and urban planning, to accusations of bias or bigotry,” one of the appellants, Marc Poe wrote in an email to WAMU earlier this year. “Some of the proponents for the development were all too willing to portray the matter as a false choice between supporting affordable housing for low-income residents, and green space for affluent gentrifiers.”

In response to the court’s latest decision, Poe wrote that today “is not a NIMBY Celebration! This is a victory for [those] living around the park who don’t want developers railroading through a development. It is a victory for the many children, families and neighbors who exercise, play and garden daily at the park.”

“We support Park Morton residents who are calling for real equity in the land with homeownership and small business opportunities that so far have been dismissed by DCHA. Their fight is ours too,” Poe added.

Meanwhile, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration has been working to amend the city’s planning documents in an effort to make it more difficult for residents like Poe and his co-appellants to challenge redevelopment in the courts.

In response to the court’s decision about the Bruce Monroe parcel, Acting Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development John Falcicchio wrote that the decision “slows our delivery of much needed affordable housing for our families.”

“We as a city need to come together and move affordable housing communities forward for our families and not for the courts,” said Falcicchio. “While we assess these decisions, what we can also do is focus on amending the Comprehensive Plan. We call upon our partners at the DC Council to pass it in 2020 which will help us build critically-needed, affordable housing.”

Hank Brothers, a lawyer who participated in oral arguments for this case, says the project may be delayed for some time.

“If recent history is a guide, I think we can expect resolution to consume a good number of months, if not longer, and the pandemic situation likely will make the resolution timeline longer than otherwise,” he wrote in an email. 

Brothers is on the board of the DC Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, the firm that filed an amicus brief in support of the project in 2018. He calls build first the “most ethical way to treat residents” because it allows residents to stay in their neighborhood while new housing is built.

“This situation makes it clear that denying approval to this worthy project will adversely affect the ability of the city to implement the build-first principle, and at all New Communities sites,” he writes.

This story has been updated with comments from Marc Poe, Hank Brothers and additional information about financing for the Park Morton redevelopment. 

Additional reporting was provided by Eliza Berkon.