D.C.'s Ward 5, one of the fastest-growing areas of Washington, sometimes seems split between old and new.
A sprawling ward spanning Northeast Washington and a small segment of Northwest, Ward 5 includes time-honored landmarks such as the National Arboretum, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and Gallaudet University, as well as most of the city’s industrial zones and facilities such as the trash-dumping station. Deluxe new apartment complexes have sprung up in recent years, abutting neighborhoods contending with crime and poverty. Well-heeled city newcomers have flocked to Ward 5 — while thousands of former residents, many Black, have moved out and others struggle to hold on to their homes.
Now, the ward’s seat on the D.C. Council is up for grabs, after council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D) announced he was running for attorney general. And, just like the ward, the field of candidates is divided along generational lines.
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On the one hand: Harry Thomas Jr. and Vincent B. Orange, two men in their 60s who have both held this ward’s council seat, and resigned from the council — Thomas amid criminal charges. On the other: A new crop of candidates, some of them in their 30s and early 40s, who are gambling that Ward 5′s growing population would rather start anew than reelect leaders of the past.
“It’s going to be a really interesting race. We’ve got candidates who have been here a long time and we’ve got newer residents,” said Emily Lucio, an advisory neighborhood commissioner. “The question on voters’ minds is, do you want somebody who’s done this before or do you want somebody new with fresh ideas?”
Gordon-Andrew Fletcher, chair of the ward’s Democratic Party and one of the youngest among the six candidates who have filed to run for the council seat, has been repeating a pitch that quietly elides Orange and Thomas when he knocks on doors: “I have the most experience of any of the new candidates running,” he says on one porch after another.
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But new candidates aren’t what some are looking for.
“You have my vote every single time,” Eric Sims said to Orange, when he saw the candidate helping residents of the Brookland Manor housing complex carry away free turkeys and canned green beans two days before Thanksgiving.
Sims, who has lived at the complex for 30 years, said he is not interested in anyone but Orange, who served on the council for 13 years until he resigned in 2016, under criticism for accepting a job heading the D.C. Chamber of Commerce when he had lost his reelection race but was still a council member. The city’s ethics board later found he had not violated any conflict of interest rules.
Orange has run in nearly a dozen elections in the District, most recently losing his reelection bid as an at-large council member in 2016 and a race for an at-large seat in 2020. Sims says he’s voted for Orange every time he sees him on a ballot.
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Some of Thomas’s supporters go back even further — they used to know his father, Harry Thomas Sr., who served on the council for 12 years until 1999 before Thomas’s own five-year stint.
“I remember when I was young, and my father and your father used to interact,” said Steven Stevens, a 53-year-old electrician who was one of about 20 people who gathered with Thomas at the Denny’s in Ward 5 for a recent campaign event. “Whatever happened in the past, that’s the past; we all have something we need to be forgiven for.”
Thomas resigned in 2012, and pleaded guilty the next day to federal charges of stealing more than $350,000 in funds meant for youth programs. He was sentenced to 38 months in prison and ordered to return the money he stole. According to the Office of the Attorney General, Thomas and two others involved in the theft still owe about $35,000 to the District, though Thomas has been making regular payments as required.
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On the campaign trail, Thomas has been pitching himself as “a shining example” of a reformed returning citizen after his prison term.
With the primary six months away, the candidates have not yet distanced themselves much on policy — at their first debate, in which five candidates participated, every one of them agreed with the council’s recent tax increase, opposed the council overturning voters’ decision on increasing the tipped minimum wage, expressed concerns about ranked-choice voting and approved of public campaign financing. While some have put forward ideas such as State Board of Education member Zachary Parker’s proposal for a tax credit to help people born in D.C. before 2005 stay in the city, or Orange’s plan to make tuition free at the University of the District of Columbia, much of the campaign is about personal appeal rather than political leaning.
The ward has changed significantly since the days when Thomas and Orange were on the council. Ward 5’s population grew more than 20 percent from 2010 to 2020, making it the second-fastest-growing ward in the city. Developers built 7,183 new units there in that decade, increasing the ward’s housing stock by 20 percent.
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As the face of the ward transformed, so did the people who live in it. Ward 5 still has the largest Black majority of any ward west of the Anacostia, but it has gone from 76 percent Black to 57 percent Black in just 10 years’ time. As the ward’s poverty rate has declined but still stayed significantly higher than the other wards west of the Anacostia, local leaders have found themselves advocating vaccine access for the ward’s low-income seniors and fighting over where to permit construction of new luxury housing, all at once.
The 2020 Census showed that the White population of Ward 5 had grown by 80 percent and the Latino population by more than 120 percent, with the addition of nearly 10,000 new White residents and nearly 5,700 new Latino residents. While the overall population of the ward grew rapidly, more than 5,200 Black residents moved out.
All six candidates seeking the council seat are Black, and many of them have focused their message on preventing the displacement that they’ve observed across the city and particularly in some neighborhoods of Ward 5.
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Fletcher says the transformation is palpable even before he sees who’s behind the doors he’s knocking on. “I don’t want to presume, but you can get a good idea who’s in the residence — if it’s an older or newer resident — from the doorbell alarms,” he says, gesturing to the Ring cameras that are frequently present on the doors of newer, wealthier homeowners.
Younger candidates such as Fletcher, Parker and former high-level Bowser administration appointee Faith Gibson Hubbard are all trying to drum up the name recognition and affectionate connection that Thomas and Orange already have among many longtime residents of the ward. Advisory neighborhood commissioner Lauren Rogers also recently filed paperwork to run for the seat.
Gibson Hubbard stopped at the home of Garland L. Trent, a master electrician. “I want to live in a ward where everyone can grow and thrive. I don’t see that happening,” she said. Soon Trent was opening the door wider to show off the home he gutted and renovated, then tell Gibson Hubbard about his mother, a lifelong Washingtonian, and his fears about crimes committed by disaffected youth. “More people need hope,” Gibson Hubbard said, and Trent exclaimed, “You’re really trying to win my vote here! I’m about to tear up.”
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Lucio said she’s heard from newer neighbors recently who want to talk to politicians about issues such as public schools and traffic safety. “There have been several incidents recently in Ward 5, like when the young girl was killed by a driver … That shook a nerve with a lot of people. I think there are a lot of people paying much more attention now.”
Jatarious Frazier, a Democratic Party activist who has lived in the ward for about four years, said he likes seeing newcomers get involved. Some young people have started paying attention to issues that have long been a sore spot in Ward 5, such as pollution, and have helped advance the causes of their older neighbors, he said. They’ve joined the recent fight trying to prevent the city from building a $20 million school bus terminal in Brentwood, and convinced the District to spend $20 million to turn a long-vacant Ivy City school into a recreation center, a request some had been making for decades.
Frazier lived near Union Market several years ago, left for another neighborhood, and then returned. He couldn’t believe the new development he found. “Some of the butchers, you could go and buy fresh meat and produce. Most of those are gone. They have been replaced. You have your Trader Joe’s, your more millennial, avocado toast kind of establishments.”
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He’s not sure which version of the neighborhood he preferred. “That is the great millennial conundrum: Which one of those things do you want?” he said, noting that older people who’ve lived in the area their whole lives might enjoy brunching on avocado toast as much as young people. “I’ve seen a lot of dilapidated properties that are now remodeled. They’re completely unaffordable. But they look amazing.”
Several candidates have been speaking about how to make housing more affordable in the ward. “Developers are handed the keys to the city … and they are allowed not to keep their promises,” Parker said at the first debate among the candidates earlier this month. “We need oversight and accountability to ensure that they are keeping their promises. We need family-sized units so [a resident] who lives with her daughter, her grandchild and her great-grandchildren can keep her unit.”
While Parker, Rogers, Gibson Hubbard and Fletcher try to make inroads with longtime residents, Orange and Thomas are trying to connect with new voters who weren’t around before. Orange recently hosted an event where residents were encouraged to bring their pets.
Sierra Craig, a 34-year-old who moved to Ward 5 less than five years ago, was among the youngest to attend Thomas’s gathering at Denny’s. She met him last year when he worked for the D.C. Democratic Party and only then learned that he used to serve on the council. Still, she thinks he can appeal to people like her who don’t remember him from his council days. “If he’s pushing for greatness for Ward 5, the support will be there,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported the length of time Democratic Party activist Jatarious Frazier has lived in Ward 5. It is about four years, not 40. The article has been corrected.
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