Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Groundbreaking held for Aurora, first building in White Flint's new sector plan


Yesterday, LCOR hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for Aurora at North Bethesda Center, "the first building to break ground since the new sector plan for White Flint,” according to project manager Mike Smith. He said he was pleased with the attendance, which included county officials, community activists and the development team.

The 18-story high rise will have 341 units and will be located in North Bethesda Center. The center will be a “city within a city,” according to its website, which also says the 32-acre plot will include 202,000 s.f. of retail and bring in 5,400 new jobs. Too bad a city center can’t be elected president.

Aurora, which will be built 1,200 linear feet from the White Flint metro station, will include 42 “affordably priced” units, meaning 12.5 percent of the building will be “well below market price … to help augment the affordable housing supply in the community,” Smith said. The other 298 units will be market rate.

It will reside across the street from a 24-hour Harris Teeter, perfect for buying frozen pizzas and asparagus at 4 a.m. (because who doesn’t buy frozen pizzas and asparagus at 4 a.m.?).

“It’s a really great amenity for our residents to have a grocery store available at their beck and call,” Smith said.

Aurora, which was designed by WDG Architecture, has a project budget of $86 million and construction by KBR has begun.

“We are well underway with construction activity on site,” Smith said.

He said the units will be available in rough two years, in mid-2014.

Washington D.C. real estate development news

1 comments:

Ben said...

The "city within a city" comment bothers me. We don't need developments that are self-contained and cut-off from the environment around them. It's one thing to market a development as being so convenient one will never have to wander far to get what one needs, but it's quite another to market your development as a place that is an altogether separate entity and place from its surroundings.

That being said, it's good that this plot is being developed. It's difficult to believe that it took this long for the COunty and developers to realize that all of tehse empty plots of land surrounding a Metro station might actually be valuable and worth developing.

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