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Prince George's County Development News

363K views 1K replies 67 participants last post by  adelphi_sky 
#1 ·
With so much going on in Prince Georges County, I've decided to create a thread on developments going on there. Current developments include National Harbor, East Campus, Konterra, Greenbelt Station, Hyattsville Arts District, M Square, University Town Center, Metro Shops at Prince Georges Plaza Metro, and others. I believe this warrants a sticky thread. I contacted one of teh administrators. We'll see.
 
#106 ·
I'm not so sure about that. Is there a ban on high rises in central business districts in the county? I think it would be a welcome site east of the district. WEll, northeast. AS far as being close to the district, two areas come to mind. Rosslyn and Arlington. And they are right next to the airport. Downtown Silver Spring is no slouch to tall buildings either and they are just as close to the D.C. line. On the other hand, 30 stories is kinda high. You'd be able to see it from miles around. Although, that would be kinda cool. It'd put Hyattsville on the map visually. :)

I do recall some complaints about the Landy Property planned across the street and their proposed 16 story high rises. Talked about the shadow falling over the high school and neighborhoods behind it. We'll probably see a 20 - 25 story version. It will be interesting to watch it all play out.
 
#114 · (Edited)
Some U of MD/ RT.1 Projects Soon To Break Ground

Mosaic at Turtle Creek (Luxury)

Detailed site plan was approved last year. Not sure when they are breaking ground.

http://mosaicatturtlecreek.com/index.html





Starview Plaza (Students/Retail)


The developers have started prepping the construction site. I imagine construction will begin late summer or early fall.





Parkview Student Housing/Retail (Formerly The Varsity at College Park)

I tried to find a drawing, but no luck. The only one I found was on the following website:

http://www.ellergrp.com/

To see it, click on "Our Portfoilio", then "Special Use Facilities", then click the right arrow under "View Projects" in the picture frame.

Developers expect to break ground in August.
 
#115 ·
Mosaic at Turtle Creek (Luxury)

Detailed site plan was approved last year. Not sure when they are breaking ground.

http://mosaicatturtlecreek.com/index.html





Starview Plaza (Students/Retail)


The developers have started prepping the construction site. I imagine construction will begin late summer or early fall.





Parkview Student Housing/Retail (Formerly The Varsity at College Park)

I tried to find a drawing, but no luck. The only one I found was on the following website:

http://www.ellergrp.com/

To see it, click on "Our Portfoilio", then "Special Use Facilities", then click the right arrow under "View Projects" in the picture frame.

Developers expect to break ground in August.
I can't wait to see the transformation of rt 1.
 
#117 ·
Brick Yard welcomes its first tenants

Businesses have started to occupy the newly constructed office buildings in the mixed-use Brick Yard development, located off Route 1 between Contee and Muirkirk roads.

Of the seven completed office buildings in the complex, three were bought by area businesses and one is being leased.

A 44,000-square-foot building, which sits near the entrance, was bought by Freestate Electric, which designs, installs and maintains electrical systems.

The other two sold buildings were bought by American Mechanical Services, AMS, which provides energy and plumbing services, and Floor Max (formerly Carpet and Things), a supplier and installer of flooring and carpeting.

A portion of the fourth office building, 82,000 square feet, was leased by Party Rental, a supplier of a wide-range of party materials.

"It's turning into a nice corporate headquarters park with a mixture of light industrial businesses," said Thomas Aylward, vice president of Jackson-Shaw, the Brick Yard's developer. "Other office parks like Konterra are filled up, so we feel we have a first-class project that doesn't exist in the market with the openness and quality that we offer."

Colleen Clayton, marketing director for Floor Max, a five-store chain that has had offices in Laurel for more than 20 years, said they saw moving to the Brick Yard as a way to keep a presence in Laurel at a time when company officials needed a facility that would allow them to expand.

"In addition to our flooring business, we're going to start doing bathroom remodeling and countertops for kitchens and bathrooms," Clayton said. "We have a much larger facility here where we have a 6,000-square-foot showroom, 30,000-square-foot warehouse and our administrative offices are upstairs."

Floor Max will have a formal ribbon cutting on Sept. 23 and a grand opening the following weekend. Freestate and AMS are currently open for business.

When it is eventually completed, the $500 million Brick Yard complex, which sits on 125 acres of land at the site of a former brick manufacturing plant, will consist of 11 office buildings and 1,300 residences.

Last year, Jackson-Shaw officials predicted the project would be further along at this point, but just like most real estate development projects, construction at the Brick Yard has slowed down due to the recession.

"We're 60 percent occupied, but we need more tenants before we start any new buildings," Aylward said.

In addition to office building starts being stalled, construction has not started on any of the 380 townhouses, 51 single-family homes and 860 multi-level apartments slated to be built at the Brick Yard. With the glut of unsold homes nationwide, many builders have put new construction on hold until the housing market bounces back.

"We believe that the market will come back, but you probably won't see any construction on the housing here until 2010," Aylward said. "We're still getting inquiries, so we know it's definitely coming back. Right now, it's not pleasant, but we didn't get started (on housing construction), so we don't have infrastructure that's unoccupied, which puts us in a good position."

Other work around the Brick Yard has been completed, such as the extension of Mid Atlantic Boulevard to Contee Road, and a path leading to an area referred to as dinosaur park because of shark and dinosaur bones unearthed there.

"We've done landscaping around it and fenced it (dinosaur park) in and have an entrance and parking," Aylward said. "That area has significant scientific value and it won't be developed, but protected. We built a walking path where people will be able to walk up to the fence or sit around the area but not go in."

The seating along the landscaped ground surrounding the park is made of slabs of flooring taken from buildings in the old brick yard facility.

The project is LEEDS-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and much of the material from the old Washington Brick Company, which operated at the site from the early 1900s until 1992, is being used in the new development or recycled.

According to Aylward, several thousand tons of steel from the demolished brick company's buildings was shipped to Bethlehem Steel in Baltimore for reuse, and crushed brick from the former facility's kiln was used on the complex's parking surfaces.

Additionally, Aylward said they still plan to turn the old brick company's office building into a coffee or sandwich shop in the residential section of the development, once the economy improves and that construction gets going.

Alyward said, "We've slowed a bit now, but we're still making deals and getting calls of interest."


http://www.explorehoward.com/promotions/63640/brick-yard-welcomes-its-first-tenants/



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#130 ·
Has anyone heard of this project in New Carrollton?




http://pfarc.com/on-the-boards/government-center/

Government Center
New Carrollton, Maryland
Government Center is composed of a single ‘L’ shaped 25-story office building less than 1,000 feet from the entrance to the New Carrollton MetroRail Station. The design offers an expansive amenities base housing convenience shops, a dry cleaner, full service cafeteria, on-site daycare center, fitness center and a credit union. The building also houses 1 million square feet of office space and 3,765 structured parking spaces.

The single building facility allows direct access to every employee by elevator without stepping outside. The personnel working at Government Center will benefit from a level of access to amenities that will positively impact their quality of life. Every amenity from necessity to convenience to luxury will be within their immediate reach.

CLIENT: GSA
PROJECT TYPE: Mixed Use, Office, Retail
YEAR OF COMPLETION: TBD
SCOPE OF SERVICES: Schematic Design & Planning
 
#133 ·
From the DC Post

The train station is the nucleus. Around it, high-rise buildings with a mix of apartments, offices and shops form a bustling urban center. People use public transportation more and their cars less. They stroll on wide sidewalks past storefronts, greenery and public art.

This is the vision for the area around New Carrollton Station, circa 2030, outlined in a new transit district development plan and zoning overlay that received preliminary approval July 30 from the Prince George's County Planning Board.

The plan, which proposes zoning changes and new standards for developers, is intended to transform the area into a walkable community. At present, the area is a combination of expansive parking lots, monolithic office buildings, single-family homes and garden apartments. The main retail offerings are in shopping centers along Annapolis Road, a six-lane highway.

"The season for mega-malls and sprawl development, it's basically over," said William Washburn, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission coordinator who is managing the New Carrollton project. "The Washington metro area, like the rest of the nation, is facing real challenges in terms of fiscal ability to maintain services. . . . Sprawl development is becoming harder and harder to service."

The plan envisions five distinct "neighborhoods" in the 640-acre site, with as many as 5,500 housing units and as much as 6.1 million square feet of office and retail space.


A renovated train station would anchor the urban Metro Core neighborhood, where mixed-use high-rises would sprout around the existing Internal Revenue Service and Computer Sciences Corp. buildings. The surrounding neighborhoods would consist of smaller mixed-use structures and existing homes.

Extensive redevelopment is also planned for neighborhoods designated in the plan as the Annapolis Road Corridor and Garden City.

In the existing North Hillside residential neighborhood, the plan shows infill development replacing some buildings in the 187-unit Carrollon Manor apartment complex. The nearby Carrollan Gardens Condominiums would remain intact.

About 330 single-family homes in the West Lanham Hills-Hanson Oaks area, secluded neighborhoods at the western edge of the site, would also be left untouched.

"We think that this is in keeping with the trend that more and more jurisdictions are doing anyway," Washburn said. "Everybody in the region is looking at Arlington County," where development has flourished around Metro stops.

The five members of the county Planning Board voted unanimously to grant preliminary approval to the plan, a sign that they are likely to adopt it when they return from recess Sept. 10.

The area around New Carrollton Station has long been considered an ideal candidate for redevelopment because it serves as a commuter hub and a gateway to Washington for travelers coming from the north and east. The station is the eastern terminus of Metro's Orange Line and a stop for MARC and Amtrak trains and a variety of bus lines. In the region, only Union Station offers more transportation options, Washburn said.

Maryland also proposes to make the station the eastern terminus for a light-rail Purple Line between Prince George's and Montgomery counties.

Plans to redevelop the area were in place as early as the 1980s but failed to materialize. Al Dobbins, deputy planning director for the Park and Planning Commission, attributed the delay mostly to the county's historically soft commercial real estate market.

"The county as a whole just hasn't been successful in attracting transit-oriented or mixed-use development," he said. Developers might also have been deterred by the area's uneven topography, Dobbins said.

The recession helped stall several projects that were on the table.


One was a $350 million venture between Metro and Federal Development, a company that specializes in developing public property, that would have placed mixed-use high-rises on Metro land between the station and the IRS building. "Basically, it timed out," said Nat Bottigheimer, Metro's assistant general manger of planning and joint development. "Neither one of us exercised the option to continue it."

Another was Metroview, 10 mixed-use 20-story buildings planned by the Carl Williams Group and UrbanAmerica, owners of the Computer Sciences building. "It's been on hold since the real estate crash a year and a half ago," said John Lally, an attorney for Carl Williams.

Lally said Carl Williams is positioning itself to build when the economy rebounds.

If the New Carrollton plan is approved, "the council makes it clear that developers don't have to walk around in the dark," Lally said. "They say: 'Here are your guidelines, aim for this, keep the bar high, and you're likely to get our approval.' "

People who live near the station are optimistic about redevelopment, but they are also skeptical, said Kate Tsubata, a member of the West Lanham Hills Citizens' Association. "Everything that was promised to us in the past never materialized," she said. "In the early '90s, we were told that the [transit-oriented development] zone would create mixed-use development that would bring in new businesses, people interested in buying houses and creating jobs. And none of that happened. We got the IRS, which is basically a little island fortress."

Tsubata said she hopes that the final version of the plan focuses more on residents, allowing them to "be the contractors on jobs [or] have the first crack at the contracts for renting a store."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302595_2.html?sid=ST2009081400123
 
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