Thanks for the Megabytes

Urban uplift has gone through many phases in the last few decades -- from the militant community empowerment experiments of the 1960s, to the large-scale government housing projects of the 1970s, to the new public-private partnerships of the 1980s and 1990s. The latest enthusiasm is "technological empowerment" -- symbolized nowhere more clearly than Edgewood Terrace in Northeast Washington, D.C., which has achieved that peculiar status of the famous left-behind community.

The drive down Rhode Island Avenue to Edgewood Terrace is, in a word, depressing -- rows of degraded houses, schools with boarded-up windows, half-abandoned community centers, pawn shops and multiple liquor stores with grown men loitering out front. But just off Rhode Island on Edgewood Street is the rebuilt Edgewood Terrace, until recently one of the worst housing projects in the country. With its purple, red, and yellow colors, its bold high-tech sign, and its new urban finish, the development looks out of place next to the worn-down brownstones that surround it.

Inside the apartment complex is a large multi-room computer center -- called "The Gateway@ Edgewood," with a sign on the wall that says "Sponsored by Microsoft" -- where at 8:30 on a Friday morning "Verizon Session 7" is learning how to use a Microsoft database. There are nine students in the class, five men and four women, all black and in their early 20s, sitting in front of their own computers. Some look bored and uninterested; others attentive and ahead of the day's lecture, which is being delivered by a smiling, sweater-vested man named Alfred Attey.

"What we're trying to do here is use technology to empower residents, to connect them to one another, to rebuild community," explained Keith Kroell, the director of funds development at the Community Preservation and Development Corporation, the nonprofit that bought, rebuilt, and now manages Edgewood Terrace.

Only six years ago, most of Edgewood Terrace -- a group of three distinct apartment complexes built as HUD-subsidized, mixed-income housing in the early 1970s -- was nearly torn down. The area had become a drug and homicide haven, variously called "Little Beirut," "The Killing Fields," or "The Edgewood Terrorist Community" by locals. Like much HUD-subsidized housing, it was so poorly managed and dilapidated that elderly residents would often be trapped in their apartments for days because no one would fix any of the elevators. One area resident described sleeping with her babies in the bathtub to protect them from stray bullets. A local social worker recalled with a laugh the "legend of Spiderman" -- a resident who fell to his death scaling the wall of one of the apartment buildings in an attempted break-in.

In early 1995, a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal told the tale of two Edgewoods: Edgewood I, which was owned by a Seattle syndicate and used as a tax shelter, had become an uninhabitable war zone. Edgewood II, which was owned and managed by Eugene Ford, a local developer who built both buildings in the 1970s, was well-run and well-maintained. But the degradation of Edgewood I inevitably spilled over into the entire community. Crime rates soared out of control; common spaces fell apart; and what began as a mixed-income community became a half-empty welfare trap filled with Section 8 residents who couldn't leave and drug dealers who didn't want to. The only solution, HUD officials and the General Accounting Office concluded in the early 1990s, was to tear down the decrepit buildings, move the tenants, and sell the land.

Led by Rogerline Nicholson, a 69-year-old retired government cook who passed away last November, the residents fought back. Many had lived on the property for over 20 years. They hated the conditions but did not want to move; they wanted to rebuild. Nicholson revived a long-defunct residents' association. She deluged HUD, Congress, and the District government with phone calls and demands.

At that point, the Community Preservation and Development Corporation, a nonprofit created by Eugene F. Ford in 1989 to preserve affordable housing in the tri-state area, stepped in. CPDC convinced HUD to sell Edgewood I, the most degraded of the properties, for $1 and to help finance renovations with $17 million of mixed-income HUD grants rather than the usual low-income Section 8 funding. CPDC assembled another $5 million in bank loans and District government grants and began its "Comprehensive Redevelopment Plan." (CPDC has a similar deal with the D.C. Public Housing Authority to buy and renovate Edgewood III.)

"There are really four parts to what we're trying to do here, which together reflect the values and goals of the residents," said Al Browne, the vice president of CPDC. "We're rebuilding the physical space to make Edgewood a nice place to live. We're working to build partnerships and training programs that connect Edgewood to the economic mainstream. We're working to provide opportunities for kids with youth development and education programs. And we're working to make Edgewood a mixed income community, to make it housing of choice rather than housing of last resort."

Mixed Success

But what makes Edgewood unique is its commitment to technology, which permeates everything CPDC has done since 1995. Edgewood was one of the first recipients of HUD's "Neighborhood Networks" grant program, which began in September 1995 to help low-income communities build "community technology centers" and foster "microenterprise development." The goal of "closing the digital divide" has become an article of faith in the urban uplift community and the new holy grail of the civil rights movement. It is, all in one, the great problem and the great solution.

Edgewood's plan, as it developed, was not only to build a technology center where residents could get job training, but to connect every single apartment to the Internet with high-speed T-1 lines and to provide every resident who wanted one with a fully-equipped "thin-client" computer, which works like a desktop but runs off a centralized server.

CPDC's first major corporate partners were Fannie Mae and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), which funded job training programs in customer service and technology support. Then, in early 1998, CPDC approached Microsoft to get support for building a fully wired community, offering computer training classes, and building a community intranet -- called "EdgeNet" -- that would allow residents to interact in an electronic village.

"We looked at the project and saw that it met our parameters for what we were trying to do at the community level," says Chris Roberts, a former Microsoft engineer who ran the Edgewood project for the Seattle-based software giant and still sits on Edgewood's Technology and Economic Advisory Council. "We believe in connected communities where people have access to technology regardless of their socio-economic status."

Microsoft donated $100,000 -- mostly in software, along with a small amount of cash -- to get the program started, a figure that has since ballooned to more than $1.7 million (again, mostly in software). Other partners soon came to the table, including Neiter Technologies, which sold Edgewood the thin-client terminals, and Data General, which sold the central server.

In June 1998, Microsoft president and CEO (then executive vice president) Steve Ballmer came to Edgewood Terrace to deliver the keynote address at the grand opening of the Gateway@Edgewood. A few months later, Microsoft used Edgewood in a national ad campaign -- a tribute to the supposedly unlimited power of computers to create job-training heavens out of inner-city hells.

Compared to what it was five years ago, Edgewood Terrace is indeed a heaven where it was once a hell, and for that CPDC deserves a large measure of the credit. The apartments -- at least the model apartment -- are beautifully renovated. In addition to the Gateway computer center, there is a Children's Technology Center with two more rooms full of high-speed computers. All the common areas are painted in bright yellow, purple, and red. Facilities include a meeting room for the Residents Association, classrooms and conference rooms, and 24-hour security with multiple cameras to monitor the premises.

But there have also been a number of problems with the technology rollout. The original computer terminals were defective and the central server was unequipped for the amount of traffic it received, causing the whole network to shut down. As of this spring, 592 apartments had been renovated and wired. Only "around 72 or 78" of those had "thin-client" terminals, while another 90 are connected by PC. "There's been some severe backlash. People expected this stuff to be up and running a long time ago," says Browne.

To help pay for this buildout, CPDC received a $500,000 Department of Commerce grant. The terms of the grant required an independent evaluation "to make sure the community's goals were met." Earl Dowdy, a social scientist at Georgetown University, heads the evaluation, which began nearly two years ago and is still ongoing.

"The problem with Edgewood Terrace is the management of expectations," says Dowdy. "A lot of people began to wonder whether it was all worth it, whether things would happen as CPDC promised. Edgewood has gotten a lot of attention because of Microsoft's involvement, the television commercial, and all the media focus. But the fact is a lot of residents are very frustrated. They call the technology