the commercial area(s) are only a couple blocks away: Barracks Row is one block away, Penn Ave is about 4 blocks .. navy yard stuff is also about 4 blocks.

I am thinking that it must be this
http://www.huduser.org/periodicals/fieldworks/1001/fworks1.html

Looks like Duany Plater-Zyberk/New Urbanism stuff (Seaside, FL, etc.), only sans porches as Anonymous pointed out.

As @MWanzer and @Anonymous said, these are a HOPE VI development from the late 1990′s. The Ellen Wilson homes were one of the city’s more notorious housing projects, and were razed to make way for this development. It is mixed income in the sense that former Ellen Wilson homes residents were guaranteed a spot, and there are quotas for the number of units available at different income bands (<50% of region's median income, 50-100% median income, 100-150% median income, etc).

My partner and I lived here for several years, and there are a couple interesting things about this development:

–Instead of building a bunch of cookie cutter houses, which would have been cheaper, the architects built several different types of houses, with different layouts, facades, etc. On Eye Street, there are at least 10 different types of houses. Even details like the font of the house numbers changes from one to the next, so it looks more like an organically developed street rather than another housing project. The architects won some pretty big awards for this design, even though it is a little Disney-ish.

–There are a few houses that are owned outright by individuals (fee simple), but the vast majority of units are owned in a funny co-op structure that gives everyone, regardless of income, shares in the development. I believe this was intended to expand the feeling of homeownership to lower income people.

–This development has been around for about 10 years, and is doing very well. It is a great mix of young professionals, retired folks, urban poor, and everything in between. After living there several years, I would call HOPE VI an unqualified success.

The ongoing townhouse development south of the freeway by EYA is another HOPE VI project replacing the old Capper-Carrollsburg homes. I think this is one of the last in the country, as the GOP decided this little experiment wasn't worth the effort and defunded the program early in the 2000's. There is controversy about how successful it is for the housing project residents, as there's a serious time lag between the project being razed and the new development opening (where are people supposed to live for the years in the meantime?). But overall, this was a great idea that I hope gets resurrected at some point in the future.

When these houses and units were initially offered for sale it was the low income units that were the hard sell. Many people who qualified to buy them assumed that because they were so nice the units were out of their price range (which they were not.)

Does anyone remember the former prison camp type housing project that was there before?

I want this model for Potomac Gardens. Sadly the Hope VI program was largely gutted.