Today in Pictures - CityCenter DC

CityCenter DC - the mega development in the heart of downtown - is at last celebrating an executed lease for office space at the two office buildings on 11th Street.  Law firm giant Covington and Burling officially announced this week they will occupy 420,000 s.f. in the office buildings when they move in the summer of 2014, accounting for 80% of the office space.  Developers Archstone and Hines and Qatari financial backer Barwa Bank.

The 10-acre project will feature two condominiums, two apartment buildings, and the two office buildings, as well as 295,000 s.f. of retail that developers are hoping will create a new fashion center downtown.  Developers hope to turn over the retail space to tenants in late 2013, with retailers beginning to open in early 2014.  In their excitement at the office lease, Hines released a new rendering of the office building at 10th & H Streets.

Below are photos of the project from this week:

Photography by Rey Lopez

Today in Pictures - Archstone's NoMa Apartments

Archstone's First + M apartments in NoMa was just the second apartment building to go online in the once quiet neighborhood, but thanks to its distinguishing design and sheer size, is helping transform the area that is now busy during the day and even sometimes at night.  Occupancy of the building began June 1, and the leasing office says that 162 of the 469 units are now occupied.

The building was designed by Davis Carter Scott and broke ground in June of 2010, and features 192 one bedrooms, 206 two bedrooms, and 71 three bedrooms – as well as a smidgen of ground floor retail.  Amenities include a communal "chef's kitchen" that opens onto an outdoor dining area, a 5000-square-foot 24-hour gym, a large interior courtyard, a “Rooftop Resort” that features a heated lap pool and sun deck, an internet cafe, a theater, two soundproof music studios, a bike workshop, even a pet spa.

Washington D.C. real estate development news

Archstone's "First + M" Apartments Doubles NoMa Housing Stock

Walk by Archstone's First + M apartments in NoMa at night, and you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re done and ready for move-in. While the building is still surrounded by some scaffolding and a few traffic barriers, the sleek mixed-use complex, with its distinctive wavy concrete panels and vaguely fortress-like glass towers, looks very much like a present ready to be unwrapped. “Construction is on or slightly ahead of schedule,” says Peter Jakel, Communications Director at Archstone. "We're currently on schedule for preleasing in March, for first move-ins in May."

Next up? An adjacent 435-unit building, tentatively titled “First + M II,” at 35 M Street NE.

First + M (the first), which was designed by Davis Carter Scott and broke ground in June of 2010, features 469 units – 192 one bedrooms, 206 two bedrooms, and 71 three bedrooms – as well as 2500 square feet of ground floor retail. The finished building will also offer tenants a long list of amenities, including a communal chef's kitchen that opens onto an outdoor dining area, a 5000-square-foot 24-hour gym, a massive green courtyard, a “Rooftop Resort” that features a heated lap pool and sun deck, an internet cafe, a theater, two soundproof music studios, a bike workshop, and, yes – a pet spa. This list, along with the overall dearth of housing in NoMa – the 496 units in First + M will boost NoMa's housing stock by a full 50% - should ensure the project's rapid success.

This is just the latest development in NoMa's swift rise from federal office hinterland to arguably the District's buzziest real estate hotspot. Even today, walking north from Union Station or east from Shaw and into the heart of NoMa is a bit like stumbling across a stand of sunflowers in the middle of a desert. Wasn't this a parking lot just last month?

According to the NoMa BID, the neighborhood's resident population is expected to double in the next two to three years, and projects in the planning stages – a total of 9 million square feet of office space, 860,000 square feet of retail space, and another 6500 residential units - will more than double NoMa's available square footage.

Doug Carter, founding principal at Davis Carter Scott, has been

quoted in these pages as saying he wanted the First + M building to be “a little more forward looking,” and it is. Emphasis on “a little.” Standing at the intersection of First and M Streets, one might experience a temporary wave of vertigo, so identical are the recently-completed buildings and the almost-completed First + M project. Conventional mixed-use structures – ground-floor retail, underground parking, residential units up top – are no doubt efficient, and good for the community, but NoMa might be approaching the “too much of a good thing” saturation point. The blossoming of NoMa is a very good thing for the District, and a checkerboard neighborhood of monolithic glass towers is, without question, preferable to a desolate expanse of surface parking lots and abandoned warehouses – but then, these aren’t the only two choices, are they? Building a neighborhood essentially from scratch is a rare and precious opportunity. Why recreate Ballston?

Washington, D.C. real estate development news

Celebrating NoMa

The NoMa BID annual meeting tonight will bring together residents, decision makers and business leaders to celebrate progress and unveil new plans for the coming year including a new approach to parks.

So just how are things going? "Fabulously. Things are amazing," says NoMa BID President Robin-Eve Jasper.

According to the Broker Roadshow Book released this month, the BID has $4 billion in assessed value this year with another $1 billion under construction. There were 380,000 s.f. of private sector space leased in the last year. Twenty restaurants and shops opened in the last three years. New residents signed leases for 1,200 apartments, and another 2,200 units are under construction.

First + M

"I think we reached a point where people are feeling confident about the neighborhood," Jasper said. "It’s building on itself now."

NoMa BID reports a 17 percent increase in average household income since 2010. Jasper said that increase helps coax stores and restaurants to come into the area.

More residents soon will call NoMa home as Archstone's First + M apartments prepare to welcome tenants. The leasing office opened this week, and Jasper said the first residents are expected in June.

With all of those new residents, the neighborhood will need parks. Jasper said a "public realm vision" will be unveiled at the annual meeting. Without giving away all the secrets, she did say that the vision considers how people use parks to create the most useful spaces.

Construction also continues in NoMa. Two new projects are neck-and-neck in the race for being next in the ground: JBG Companies' Hyatt Place Hotel at the planned Capital Square site and MRP Realty's residential building at the planned Washington Gateway site.

Capital Square

JBG says it plans to break ground on the 200-room hotel this summer. It will be completed next year.







A spokeswoman for MRP said permits are still in progress, but the project is on track to start work this summer.

Several projects started construction in the past year, including Trammell Crow's Sentinel Square office project and Stonebridge's third building at Constitution Square.

And there still is more to come in the already booming area that exceeded initial expectations.

Jasper said that initial estimates were about $1 billion investment and 15,000 jobs, but says that today there are 45,000 jobs just in the NoMa BID. "All the right pieces were there, the right people to push to make things happen," she said, adding that the plans were not too restrictive or directive with planning and regulation. "And it enabled the private sector to come in and do what it does best."

"The vision that I have, for what it’s worth, is that in the next few years you start to feel this gravity and cohesion in the neighborhood generally where...there’s a vibrant commercial spine in the area of 1st street, and there’s a great feeling and sense of community in all of the adjacent neighborhoods," she said. "And if you go several streets out -- to all the row houses and apartment buildings --that people feel they’re all part of it. That this whole part of town becomes an area that has its own gravity."

Washington, D.C., real estate development news

CityCenter on the Launch Pad

Two months away: So say developers of CityCenterDC, for now downtown Washington DC's largest surface parking lot, who are poised to announce an official start to their transformative mixed-use plan to develop nearly 700 units of housing, 185,000 s.f. of retail, 520,000 s.f. of office space, and central shopping plaza, to replace the site left vacant when the forgettable convention center was demolished in March of 2005. Officials say they are nearly set to announce a late April or early May start date to the project, despite any lack of signed tenants to date.The upcoming groundbreaking is in keeping with the April start date Hines officials promised DCMud in June of last year, though it represents a slippage from original intentions to start construction in early 2008 amid the financial crisis. Current tenants such as Bolt Bus have been given until the end of March to vacate the site. With a spring construction start, developers should wrap up construction by late 2013, just as the Convention Center Marriott is nearly finished next door, a pair of events that should have a profound impact on downtown and Mt. Vernon Square, already a bottleneck for traffic.

Filling the chasm downtown, the Hines-lead team, chosen by Mayor Anthony Williams, will rebuild 10th Street and add an east-west oriented pedestrian shopping plaza, hotel, apartments (458), condominiums (216), parking (1500+ spaces) and two office towers. The central retail plaza will be framed by stepped-down buildings to encourage a naturally lit shopping thoroughfare, in what Mayor Adrian Fenty predicted will be a "bustling area where people come after work to shop or eat or to hang out, a city center." The whole site is designed to achieve LEED Gold certification.Construction without an anchor tenant would be an important indicator of faith in the downtown commercial market, as DC's retail spaces show strong demand, financial markets stabilize and the Washington DC office market remains buoyed by an expanding federal presence. CityCenter's backers have been energetically courting large tenants to sign on prior to construction and have tantalized news purveyors that brand name leases are "in the works." Howard Riker, Vice President at Hines, told DCMud last June that the team was reworking some of the floorplans to make way for a major tenant, soon to be announced, and the team has been close to signing several tenants that could have anchored the project, a prospect that still might be close at hand, but there are "no signed leases to date" says Hines' Dawn Marcus. Larger office projects such as Monday Properties' 35-story office tower in Rosslyn have since broken ground sans lessee.

Gerry Widdicombe, Director of Economic Development for the Downtown Business Improvement District (BID) notes the difference 185,000 s.f. of retail will make for downtown. "This is really the capstone for downtown DC. We have about 5 million square feet [of buildable space] left on vacant lots or dilapidated office buildings...the old convention center site is about 2.5 million [s.f.] of that, 1.8 million is the air rights building, then we're almost built out." Widdicombe credits former city leaders with setting parameters of a strong residential presence rather than solely office space - despite the commercial's greater tax base value, and for fostering a vision of a retail center. "Everything's working pretty well. The thing we're lacking is retail, hopefully we'll have an Apple store, maybe a Bloomingdales, to get us over 500,000 s.f. of destination retail." He notes that when the BID formed downtown had 95 surface paking lots and 30 dilapidated buildings. "Now we've got 5."

Putting that concept to paper, and soon to ground, is the worldwide team of Foster + Partners, which created the master plan and is bookending the site with apartments (overseen by Archstone) and office towers, and Shalom Baranes, designing the interior condominiums and integrating the retail. Along with a new 10th Street and I Street, the plan introduces a new vertical pedestrian street ("9 1/2 St"), an east-west pedestrian promenade, and at their intersection an expansive public plaza encompassed by two-story retail spaces with street-level access. The dominance of retail is not lost on its designers and developers, who sloped rooflines downward to the plaza and raised ceiling heights, a major sacrifice in a height restricted city, while stacking an extra floor of retail and creating - if successful - a destination akin to the European fountain, albeit less historic. DC is a city without plazas, and the architects have their sites set on a remedy.

"The real focus of the project is the public realm and retail" says Robert Sponseller of Shalom Baranes, a design principal for the project. "If you take the architecture aside, DC has always lacked a critical mass of urban retail. We're stuck with low height, so our retail space is squeezed. Here the ceiling heights are 16-22 feet, with a 2nd level of retail around the public plaza area...these are literally modeled on the best European street designs of Barcelona and Berlin." Sponseller says the alleys, or "intimate pedestrian streets," in his words, are 24 feet in width beneath residences that stoop to 4 or 5 stories above the plaza. "The Foster plan is remarkable for its clarity and simplicity. There is great pedestrian access, its really an intense, mixed-use project" says Sponseller.

The northern tier of the lot will be filled by a public park on the western margin, a hotel north of I Street in the middle, still just conceptual and without a flag, and a lot on the east owned by Kingdon Gould that has no firm plans for development at this time. Gould obtained the land in a swap with the city, giving up real estate at the Convention Center Marriott to get the northeast parcel of CityCenter.

Hines is a Houston based, privately owned real estate investment firm with offices in 68 U.S. cities and 15 countries. Old convention center photo courtesy Wrecking Corporation of America.

Washington, DC real estate development news

Gaithersburg Apartments Celebrate Start Tomorrow

Archstone will hold a ceremony tomorrow morning to celebrate the start of their "Archstone Olde Towne" project. The mixed-use development will replace several old buildings with a 389-unit, four-story apartment building with 15,000 s.f. of ground-floor, street-front retail. Preston Partnership designed the building, in a form intended to reflect historic Gaithersburg structures. Archstone broke ground on the project on December 30th, and has since changed the name from "Westchester Olde Towne."

The project is a block from the Gaithersburg MARC Rail Station, and will feature "beach-entry lagoon-style pool," "re-oxygenating fitness center," and in-house pet salon for sundry four-leggers. The Gazette reported that Archstone had contested Woodfield Investments' application for a nearby apartment building as a competitor for HUD funds, an appeal that was dismissed by the city, and which ended amicably with both projects approved by the city and both granted HUD funds; Archstone received an $89.9 million FHA insured Section 221(d)4 loan through CWCapital.

Archstone also started a 469-unit apartment in NoMa last summer, and maintains that it still has stated plans to break ground on CityCenter this spring.

Gaithersburg, MD, real estate development news

Archstone Breaks Ground on Gaithersburg Apartments

Development plans approved for the heart of Gaithersburg back in 2008 by the Montgomery County Planning Board are finally coming to fruition as just last week Archstone broke ground on their "Westchester at Olde Towne" project. The mixed-use development will replace several old buildings with a 389-unit (194 one-bedrooms and 195 two-bedrooms), transit-oriented apartment community, rising four stories, spanning 6.49 acres, and featuring 15,000 s.f. of ground-floor, street-front retail. The architectural design is courtesy of the Preston Partnership, and takes its cues from historic Gaithersburg structures like the old Gaithersburg School and the Thomas Cannery building.

Situated just south of the intersection of North Summit and East Diamond Avenue and opposite the Gaithersburg MARC Rail Station, the infill project will not only offer an abundance of new apartments and retail opportunities, but also includes impressive amenities like a "beach-entry lagoon-style pool" and a "re-oxygenating fitness center." Future resident dog and cat owners will be in for a special treat as plans call for an in-house pet salon. The development site will also be spruced up by three internal courtyards, one of which will have open access to the public during the daytime.

“Gaithersburg is located in the center of the Montgomery County Technology Corridor, the heart of biotechnology research in the United States,” said Neil Brown, Archstone’s chief development officer, in a press release. "We are excited to begin construction on another landmark project that we believe will create significant long-term value for the City of Gaithersburg, for our future residents and for our shareholders," he added. The commencement of construction was largely made possible by a recently finalized $89.9 million FHA insured Section 221(d)4 loan through CWCapital.

Gaithersburg, MD Real Estate Development News

Hines Affirms Spring Construction for City Center DC

Developers of downtown DC's last block of empty land are holding firm on their commitment to start building City Center DC, and confirmed in a statement released yesterday that construction could begin as early as April of next year. Colorado-based Archstone and Texas based Hines development plans for the 10 acre site were approved by the DC Council back in 2005, but have since stalled over financing and tenant prospects.

Hines representatives told DCMud in June they would begin redevelopment of the old Convention Center site in the "first quarter of 2011," but have yet to announce a major tenant to occupy any of the space. The project should reach "substantial completion between May and September 2013," said Howard Riker, Vice President at Hines Development. Despite the lack of commitment, The Washington Post reports that Hines issued a statement yesterday saying it still planned to begin construction by next spring. Plans call for several hundred thousand square feet of retail space, more than half a million square feet of office space, 458 rental apartments, 216 condos and a 400-bed “high-end” hotel with its own 100,000 square foot retail plaza, under a 99 year lease from the city.

Hines has already chosen a general contractor team of Clark Construction and Smoot Construction, and has begun subcontractor bidding. Construction will begin first along H Street, building parking first, then office, saving residential for the last component.

Foster and Partners of London and DC-based Shalom Baranes serve as co-architects on the work. Designed to achieve LEED Gold certification, "the design of the landscape, office and condominium buildings relates to the specific sun and wind patterns and the climate. The site and the buildings will also incorporate solar shading, harness rainwater and water conservation and planting" according to Foster's website.

Washington, DC real estate development news