Voters in D.C.’s predominantly White and wealthy Ward 3 did something remarkable: They elected an unabashed progressive education advocate over a moderate budget analyst to represent them on the D.C. Council.
Matthew Frumin, the advocate, was inaugurated earlier this month, having defeated Eric Goulet, the analyst, in last year’s winner-take-all Democratic primary. Goulet had been endorsed by former D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and The Washington Post. In years past, that combination of center-left endorsements would have easily won over the deep-pocketed ward.
So, what had Frumin been telling those voters?
“I’ve been saying this: Ward 3 came to look the way it did” — that is to say, White and rich — “because of exclusion based on intentional policies — exclusion and then segregation,” Frumin told me. “And we need intentional policies to remedy what happened in the past.”
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And instead of tuning him out, voters leaned in to hear more.
He held book readings at his home in American University Park, where residents gathered to learn about the District’s racial history. It’s not pretty. In fact, Ward 3′s history is pretty ugly. From the last decades of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th century, Black people, including those formerly enslaved, along with Civil War veterans, built a community in the Fort Reno area. Vibrant and thriving, it included homes, businesses and a school.
Then local White-run citizens associations representing Tenleytown, Chevy Chase and Cleveland Park called for the federal government to acquire the neighborhood and turn Reno into parkland and schools for White children.
And that’s what they did — tore down the Black town and stole the land. As researcher Irina Cortez said in a 2003 study for the National Park Service, “Tenleytown acquired a beautiful new park and new schools, but the cost of all of this was the destruction of an entire community of people with hopes and dreams for themselves and their children.”
Apparently, enough of the ward’s 41,000 registered Democrats were ready to start understanding more about how the past affects the present — and begin working to do something about it.
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Frumin believes improving schools throughout the city is key.
“The schools in Ward 3 are very, very strong and they are the glue that holds communities together,” he said. “That’s the thing that the city has been bedeviled in trying to replicate. But that is one of the things Ward 3 can be a model for.”
As of the 2021-2022 academic year, nearly 70 percent of Ward 3 students were proficient in language arts, compared with about 30 percent of D.C. students overall, and 56 percent of Ward 3 students were proficient in math, compared with just under 20 percent of all city students, according to a report by DC Kids Count.
That’s due in no small measure to a median income for a Ward 3 household with children of at least $250,000, according to DC Kids Count. The poverty rate in the ward is only 8 percent. In predominantly Black Ward 8, the poverty rate is 30 percent and proficiency rates were 12 percent for language arts and 6 percent for math.
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Today, White households in D.C. have 81 times the wealth of Black households — with 1,500 households in the city worth more than $30 million, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
“There are parts of the city where it will take more investment to create successful schools but that is what we should be doing,” Frumin said. “To me, making sure we have great neighborhood schools in every community is an economic development issue because it keeps families in the city. And it’s also public safety, because if you are creating places where children feel like they are getting a sense of opportunity, that is going to keep them out of trouble.”
His remedy also calls for making Ward 3 more diverse — ending its identity as a privileged White enclave maintained through decades of restrictive racial covenants, real estate redlining and denying Black residents access to capital.
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But diversity doesn’t mean just building more “affordable housing,” as the District has begun doing. With the relocation of only a few low-income people to the ward, the discontent among longtime residents can already be heard.
As someone noted on a community email group: “My elderly aunt had to move out of her rent controlled apartment in one of the big buildings in Ward 3 because there were too many voucher tenants who were making life unbearable with noise, smoking, and increased assaults. They also didn’t feel safe in the neighborhood any longer and felt like crime was getting worse.”
In Ward 3 last year, the violent crime rate was 0.9 per 1,000 people, according to D.C. police, compared with more than 5 per 1,000 people citywide. But, as someone else noted on the email group, the rate in neighboring Chevy Chase, Md., was only 0.2.
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“You have a 4.5x higher chance of being a violent crime victim in Ward 3 than Chevy Chase. That’s a big difference,” the person wrote.
Frumin acknowledged those concerns, saying that the safety of Ward 3 is tied to the city as a whole and that if there are “tens of thousands of hopeless people out there, nobody is safe. Part of the solution is finding housing for low-income residents, “but if that’s the only people we brought into the ward, that would not be the full solution,” he added.
Frumin also wants to see more middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans moving into the ward.
He believes that Ward 3 owes something to the city and that residents want to use their political and economic clout to help fix systemic issues that prevent people from enjoying the basics of life — such as safe neighborhoods and good schools. His campaign theme could have been taken from a quote by the abolitionist Charles Sumner, who felt that when it came to social justice, the District should be “an example for all the land.”
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Frumin recalled his early years as a lawyer in D.C. searching for a house. He found one in American University Park and told a Black friend, who also was looking to buy a house, about it.
“I said, ‘Come look at this place; it’s really great.’ But he never did, never said why, and it puzzled me,” Frumin recalled. Years later, he came across an article about the ordeal of “buying a home while Black,” in which the writer was reluctant to live in a neighborhood where few people looked like him and his children.
How to remedy that? He’s not quite sure. But he is pretty confident about one thing.
“I think the vast majority of Ward 3 residents do not care about the color of the skin of the person who lives next door, but they do care if that person takes their parking space,” he said.
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