Rail Station at Heart of Plan To Remake New Carrollton
By Greg Gaudio
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 14, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...302595_pf.html
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.
It would then be submitted to the Prince George's County Council, which sits as the District Council on planning and zoning matters. Washburn said he expects the council to vote on the plan in March.
After that, the Park and Planning Commission would incorporate the Planning Board's recommendations and the council's amendments into a final version of the plan.
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."