Built to replace Ellen Wilson housing project, townhouses are a mixed-income model After the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded a $25 million grant to a neighborhood group in 1993 to tear down 134 abandoned units at Ellen Wilson and replace them with an equal number of mixed-income homes, many civic leaders doubted whether middle-class professionals would live in the same development with public housing tenants. They clearly have, with a third of the Townhomes" residents now making market-rate monthly payments that subsidize those of people such as Jones who pay much less. The development did not replace public housing units on a one-for-one basis. When the Ellen Wilson project was demolished, most of its former residents never made it back into the townhouses that took its place. Today, there's a waiting list of 600 families for the development's subsidized units - and the District closed its waiting list for housing assistance in April with more than 70,000 names. But in a powerful measure of the Townhomes's success, it is now virtually impossible to tell where the surrounding, historic Victorian rowhouses of Capitol Hill end and the development begins. "We knew that Capitol Hill worked," said architect Amy Weinstein, who designed the development by meticulously emulating the Victorian townhouse aesthetic of Capitol Hill in the new townhomes. She also proposed two new streets through the former Ellen Wilson property. The resulting I Street SE and Ellen Wilson Place knit the Townhomes back into the surrounding neighborhood. "It was already a mixed-income, mixed-racial community," Weinstein said. You had senators living in English basements with an African American family who had been on the Hill for five generations living above. So we asked ourselves, how can we replicate this? We didn't really create anything new. Presented with the first pick of 134 homes, Jones chose a two- bedroom unit next to the main office. I wanted to be the first house on the corner so that if anything ever happened, I could easily get out. Jones, 59, grew up in Arthur Capper, another public housing project just across the freeway. While her more-affluent neighbors pay full freight, she and the Townhomes" low-income residents pay about 30 percent of their income to live between Sixth and Seventh streets, four blocks south of the Eastern Market Metro. The Townhomes exists under a limited equity cooperative structure, described by property manager Richelle Payne as the step between renting and buying. Both the initial payment to purchase a share in the co-op as well as the monthly carrying charge are determined by the resident's income.