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Amanda Voisard

Life is calmer on this side of town for Stanley Tucker and his 10-year-old grandson.

Their new D.C. neighborhood has cafes and restaurants, a grocery store. They’re across the street from a gleaming new college campus building.

They moved to Northwest Washington when swankier apartment buildings along Connecticut Avenue — for decades the avenue of apartment-dwelling young professionals, or the pieds-a-terre of retired federal workers — increasingly welcomed local and federal housing vouchers.

Tucker, a 67-year-old Air Force veteran who has endured the fire-hazard, broken-down places that long have been home to Section 8 subsidy holders, now lives in a $2,300-a-month apartment thanks to his voucher, which covers about 85 percent of the rent. “It’s real nice,” Tucker said.

The stated intent of the vouchers — an alternative to bricks-and-mortar public housing — has long been choice and mobility, but it hasn’t always worked out that way.

Tucker’s problem, now, is that the neighborhood is still designed for the folks who can afford that $2,300-a-month rent. And the wine-and-cheese shop, the Giant with an extensive probiotic yogurt selection and the gourmet market serving squid ink paella aren’t in Tucker’s budget.

Seeing a need, some enterprising volunteers opened a food bank. And just a year in, it’s about to be shut down.

The change in the Ward 3 demographic has led to some<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-the-homeless-in-upscale-apartments-it-hasnt-gone-as-planned/2019/04/16/60c8ab9c-5648-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html" target=_blank> epic </a>and uncomfortable clashes as D.C.’s canvas bag-toting, blue-voting, beaujolais crowd is sharing Zip codes and even doormen with both the Stanley Tuckers of D.C. and folks with mental illness who came straight from a shelter or the streets. Some new residents of the Van Ness part of Connecticut Avenue have lobbed furniture off their balconies and bathed in the lobby fountains.

This continues to jangle the ward, from a recent community meeting where a retired social worker described seeing a child dangle from the balcony above to recent primary debates, where candidates pointed to the change in demographics as an explanation for increasing crime.

Van Ness/Forest Hills Public Safety Meeting

But for the folks like Tucker, finding safer housing and a gentler neighborhood solves just a part of his problem. He needs access to health care, food subsidies and social services.

This became clear to Judith Ingram and others who worked with Ward 3’s Mutual Aid program.

Ingram is the type of person who figured she should do something productive with the extra time she gained in her day when her federal job went remote and she stopped losing two hours to a commute.

With Mutual Aid, she helped deliver groceries to needy or immobile seniors in the Ward 3 neighborhood, a leafy enclave that’s also home to American University and the University of the District of Columbia.

And she quickly saw there was a greater need. By the time the pandemic reached its second year, Ingram and another volunteer, Barbara Ferris, hammered out a deal to use the back two rooms of a shuttered drugstore on Connecticut Avenue that belongs to the University of the District of Columbia as home base for a food pantry.

“We opened in May 2021 and served 62 households that first weekend,” Ingram said. “Our weekly numbers quickly hit 100 households, and by last week our 100 percent volunteer-run pantry had hit the 118 -household mark.”

The line last Sunday was all the way down Van Ness Street when the pantry opened at 1 p.m.

“Just pick one, baby,” Cheryl Barnes, 57, told one of her three grandkids, as they debated which cereal to put in their cart.

“There’s nothing in the way of services around here,” said Barnes, who lives a block from the pantry. “So they’ve really helped me get by when I’m taking care of my grandbabies.”

An Audi passed by with the color and shine of a cherry sour.

“I lost my job during the pandemic,” said Eric Ferguson, 46, a studio engineer who found new employment but is still struggling to catch up on debt. The food pantry has helped him stay afloat. “A lot of people are struggling, and you don’t know it.”

There was a large family of Afghan refugees, a mother with nine children, and a guy who rode a giant tricycle and fashioned a pinstripe suit jacket into a short-sleeved overcoat.

“There is a need here, no doubt about it,” said Berdette Thomas, 72, one of the volunteers at the food pantry who is frustrated with the lack of resources available to struggling folks in this part of town.

“Housing first, yes. It starts with a roof over your head,” Thomas said. “But there have to be follow-up services. And they’re just not here.”

The food pantry was a start. But it may not be a solution for long.

“UDC has told us to vacate the space by the end of July and said they have no other space to offer,” Ingram said.

They’ve sent over another memorandum of understanding to the university, seeking to extend their time in the space. They sent letters to university President Ronald Mason Jr.

The university spokesman has not returned my requests for comment on this, but since I’ve been asking, Mason’s office set up a meeting with Ingram and Ferris.

Supporters set up a petition with<a href="https://www.change.org/p/udc-keep-the-ward-3-food-pantry-doors-open" target=_blank> Change.org</a>.

Ingram is going to emphasize the importance of their location, that Ward 3 needs a service like theirs and that food insecurity may not be easy to see but is growing more dire every year.

“This highlights that as we recover from this pandemic, we have to be incredibly deliberate as a community to ensure a more equitable and inclusive recovery,” Radha Muthiah, president and CEO of the Capital Area Food Bank, said after the food bank’s shocking report last month showed how many folks in the D.C. area struggled to access food in the past year.

“One in 3 residents of the greater Washington area needed support in the last year getting good food on their table,” Muthiah said. “There’s no way to get around how profound and staggering that is.”

It’s a problem that has to be solved one block at a time, in every city ward.

University of Southern California

Petula is a columnist for The Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts.

Petula Dvorak

A food pantry that popped up to meet D.C. needs is losing its home

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