A Neighborhood Isolated: How Geography and Economics Cut Off Key Services

Editor’s Note: This feature is part of an ongoing series.

As nonprofit leaders and volunteers in Washington’s Parkside-Kenilworth neighborhood work to improve education and child-care services, they face an array of challenges.

The neighborhood, wedged between Interstate-295 and the Anacostia River, is one of Washington’s poorest. As the map below indicates, few services are available nearby, and the highway and river form geographic barriers that make it difficult for some residents to find doctors, social-service agencies, and grocery stores outside of the area.

But neighborhood leaders, with help from a federal Promise Neighborhoods grant, are working to bridge these gaps.

The Promise Neighborhoods program is a federal effort to help communities design antipoverty projects modeled after the Harlem Children’s Zone, in New York. That much-acclaimed effort, championed by President Obama, offers a comprehensive set of academic, medical, and social services to help children from “cradle to college.”

Twenty-one projects, including the one in Washington, have received federal money to start Promise Neighborhoods efforts.

In Washington, this effort includes a partnership with the Urban Institute, which pulled together information that shows what services are available in the neighborhood—and how far residents have to travel to find access to other services.

This interactive map, created by The Chronicle using data from the Urban Institute, offers a closer look at the neighborhood. The Promise Neighborhood, in an area split between wards 7 and 8 in D.C., is shown in light blue.

Related: Measuring a Vision: A ‘Promise Neighborhood’ Faces the Challenge of Charting Progress