At first, his efforts to root out the criminals earned him a contract on his life, Rhett said. But eventually he was able, through careful negotiation and consistent prodding to "lower the comfort level of some undesirable tenants."

Greenway is now Meadow Green Courts, about 465 units between Minnesota Avenue and East Capitol Street NE. The drug dealers are gone. Open green space marks the sites where the most decrepit buildings once stood. And more than 200 original tenant families have moved back into bigger renovated apartments with rents below market rates.

The $18 million rebirth of Greenway is a joint venture between developer Edmondson & Gallagher and the Marshall Heights Community Development Organization, an 18-year-old nonprofit where Rhett works as special assistant to the president.

For two years while Marshall Heights executives wrote grant proposals, lobbied developers, raised cash and hired contractors, Rhett worked the street.

He talked with construction workers, joked with the maintenance crew, called on the shopkeepers, listened to the residents. He pestered the police and kept tabs on the troublemakers. He helped evict, buy out or otherwise "motivate" problem tenants to leave, he said, by getting to know the dealers and their girlfriends who leased the apartments. Through straight talk, firmness and respect, he convinced them to go.

"I let the bad guys know it’s nothing personal, but business is business and they would have to move on."

Rhett’s job, in short, is to run interference on the street. He got rid of the members of the maintenance crew in cahoots with the dealers. He convinced the owner of a deli across the street to get rid of the pay phones drug dealers were using as business lines. The shopkeeper lost a lot of income on the phones, Rhett said, and probably wouldn’t have agreed to take the loss if he didn’t know Rhett as an OK guy. It’s the gritty details that make the difference, Rhett said.

"You can’t redevelop a community from behind a desk."

Renovations at Greenway will wrap up next month, but there are still hurdles ahead, said Michael Crecenzo, vice president of housing and economic development at Marshall Heights. The new apartments are bordered not only by some of the neighborhood’s last single-family houses but also by two deeply troubled public housing complexes. Green Meadow Courts must be 95 percent leased in the next 12 months to satisfy the requirements for the tax credits.

"But three out of four people who come to us are not credit worthy," Crecenzo said. "We’re competing for a very small pool of good tenants."

Marshall Heights will be satisfied to break even on this project, he said. "Most private investors aren’t."

Marshall Heights has built or renovated about 175 housing units in some of the most afflicted neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River, including the city’s only single-room occupancy residence, which houses 60 people in furnished rooms on Nannie Helen Burroughs Avenue NE. Some 48 new single-family homes are in the works across the ward.

Similar organizations are active throughout the city, providing services not long ago considered exclusively the government’s domain. Funded by public and private dollars, and free to form partnerships with for-profit firms, Community Development Corporations build houses, renovate apartments, lure new businesses, make commercial loans and offer an increasingly vast array of social services, often more efficiently than governments or charities.

"We do the unconventional," said Marshall Heights President Lloyd Smith. "We do the things the city is unable or unwilling to do."

In fact, the city sometimes turns to Marshall Heights to provide the services it can’t. The organization helps D.C. General Hospital, D.C. Public Schools and other agencies provide health care, drug treatment and educational services the city cannot provide on its own.

"Out here, people think we are the government," Smith said.

But the organization is different from government in at least one way, Smith said. It establishes personal connections in the neighborhoods.

In the worn down shopping center across from Greenway, the neighborhood eccentric stops his rambling long enough to greet Rhett. Once a big-time pimp with a Cadillac, he went off the deep end years ago after watching his best friend get killed, Rhett confides. Now he hangs around the liquor store and waves to Rhett as he drives by.

Later on his neighborhood rounds, Rhett pulls up to a curb on Eastern Avenue where an elderly man has taken up residence on a lot where Marshall Heights recently built two single-family homes.

"You back?" Rhett asks.

"Yes, I’m back," says the man.

Rhett sighs. It is going to be difficult to sell the $125,000 homes with this gentleman’s encampment of boxes, lawnmowers, chairs and a bed spread on the lawn.

Marshall Heights works mostly in scattered sites — one house here, two houses there — creating pockets of sturdy housing in the midst of decay and despair. Property comes from tax rolls or through bargains with the city, which many say has fallen down on the job.

Rhett pointed out a vacant, unboarded house on 61st Street NE that has been decaying for years. As trash, broken glass and weeds filled the yard, the city did little more than nail a sign to the door reading "Reclaiming the City." Two doors down, Marshall Heights renovated a three-bedroom house and sold it for $93,000.

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator