Inside the DC Bubble

---for new townhouses in Southeast near the Baseball Stadium. Folks are camping out for when the units become available in July.

Bubble View:
---People say the market is soft and say they are crazy. Maybe they are.

Link: WaPo

The plan is to get The Yards' streetlights and sidewalks ready for baseball's opening day next spring, said the WaPo. Ultimately Forest City Washington and its partners will build or rehabilitate more than 25 buildings and fill them with 1.8 million square feet of office space, stores, businesses, restaurants, and residences.

"You really can create a neighborhood, and that's exactly what we're doing," says Deborah Ratner Salzberg, 54, president of Forest City Washington. "We are building . . . an active waterfront that will transform an entire section of this city."

DC is going to be a very different place in 2020. But without the baseball stadium this part of town would have been forlorn and forgotten.

Remember when there was nude dancing on 9th St? Now there are offices and million dollar condos. Remember when there were similar clubs in Southeast? Now there is a baseball stadium.

So what's wrong with moving nightclubs to the New York Ave. corridor in Ivy City and Trinidad? Won't invest dollars follow? Residents complain the clubs will be too close together. Fair enough.

Even Councilman Harry Thomas Jr., in the Wash Exam, said "the fiber of that neighborhood has been waiting for a lot of change." Many club owners already have bought property in the area, the WaPost reports.

Maybe people complaining the loudest, don't own property and fear they will be forced out. Don't nudie bars need workers? Hello . . . jobs.

With each new feature that comes to the southern half of the city you can almost feel Alexandria and all its trade associations moving further and further away. Not in a physical sense, but in terms of travel time. While they once claimed "we're only minutes from Capitol Hill," only a year or two from now that will change to "we're only an hour, except on game days."

The impact on traffic of the baseball stadium, the redevelopment of L'Enfant Plaza, the Waterside Mall, the Southwest waterfront, the condo development has caught the attention of Councilman Tommy Wells noted the WashExam. “Even when there’s not a baseball game. We’re going to have to come up with a new traffic plan to begin with,” he said.

Also in the works is the redevelopment of the Randall School at 65 I St. SW, which was sold last year to the Corcoran Gallery for $6.2 million. Under the proposal, two-thirds of the original school building would be preserved and renovated to house new classroom, exhibition and studio space for the Corcoran College of Art and Design. As many as 500 new condominium units will replace the remaining buildings.

Maybe its time for those trade associations to relocate back to the city.

The National Capitol Planning Commission gave a preliminary thumbs up for the estimated $5 million park in the old convention center site, reports the WashExam.

A triangular “bow-tie” section bounded by NY Ave., I, 10th and 11th streets, called for two fountains, fixed and moveable benches, a reading grove, and a variety of trees. It will be set up for lunchtime concerts and other events, and fit up to 1,000 people.

“We think it’ll be a very good gathering place, something that’s very needed downtown,” said Konrad Schlater, project manager in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development. “This basically gives us the green light to move forward with the basic concept.”

Also JBG is donating $2.5 million for Washington Canal Park, reports the WashBiz. The contribution is required by a D.C. Office of Zoning order establishing the planned unit development for the new Transportation Department headquarters.

Washington Canal Park, at the corner of Second and M streets, directly across from the new DOT headquarters, will be the first public park built as part of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative through a funding arrangement that includes the federal government and private developers.

Loyal reader Read Scott Martin recently wrote and challenged DC Bubble on our belief that the baseball stadium is helping spur growth near the waterfront. Rather than pointing to the stadium and the lack of developable land elsewhere, Martin asserts that "the Anacostia is revitalizing and growing because of good-old fashioned government intervention, not baseball. The military decided in the 1990s to move thousands of white-collar employees and contractors from Crystal City to the Navy Yard," then, then DOT moved its headquarters building there.

Ten years ago less than 3,000 people worked at the Navy Yard, and by the fall that number will be north of 16,000, Martin continued. "Baseball had nothing to do with [the growth]. As for running out of developable land, the Navy Yard rebuild was underway when the neighborhood north of Mass Ave. was still an urban prairie."

But wait, Mr. Martin, what's envsioned on the waterfront is a 24-7 community with offices, yes, but also entertainment and condos and apartments. A bunch of Navy contractors could not have spurred these other types of development. Most recently, Camden Living, a Texas apartment developer, bought two lots totaling about 41K SF in the 1300 block of South Capitol St. SW at the corner of O Street, just across from the baseball stadium site.

Crystal City, where the cadets were coming from, was famous for its 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. sterility. No one living there. No one dining out, shopping or whooping it up. Without the stadium, the waterfront would have developed much more slowly and very, very differently without the stadium. In ten years, M St. by the waterfront will look more like M St. in G'town than Crystal City.

Two parcels of land -- located about three blocks north of the proposed baseball stadium site in Southeast -- have been purchased by JPI, a Texas-based residential builder. One parcel at 900 First Street SE, now a strip club, is "likely to close," helpfully reports the Washington Post. The other property is on I Street between South Capitol Street and New Jersey Avenue SE.

JPI also is developing the newly constructed Lafayette Condo in Penn Quarter and Jenkins Row on Capital Hill, as well as various properties in the Commonwealth of Virginai and Merland.