Author: Christopher Richter

$5.6M Purple Line Commuter Rail Line Breaks Ground

Gov. Larry Hogan on Monday kicked off construction of the Purple Line rail to serve commuters in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

HYATTSVILLE, MD — Maryland officials on Monday held a ceremonial ground-breaking for the embattled and long-anticipated $5.6 billion Purple Line commuter rail project that will serve Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao attended the event, which came together when the federal government las week committed $900 million to the 16-mile light rail system from Bethesda to New Carrollton. The Purple Line will run east-west inside the Capital Beltway, with 21 stations connecting to: Metrorail’s Orange, Green, and Red lines; the MARC Brunswick, Camden, and Penn lines; and Amtrak at New Carrollton.

“The Purple Line project will be an important economic driver for Maryland,” said Governor Larry Hogan on Monday. “It will integrate seamlessly with our current transit systems, combining Metro and Amtrak, to provide more transit options across the region. Just the construction alone will mean thousands of new jobs for Marylanders.

Work can begin after a late May court decision rejected a lawsuit that questioned the environmental impact on birds and wildlife.

“The Purple Line is a great example of what can be achieved when federal, state, and private partners work together,” said Secretary Chao.

Coalition for Smarter Growth Executive Director Stewart Schwartz said in a statement in May that Metro ridership will make up a limited percentage of Purple Line ridership.

“The Purple Line is a badly-needed east-west transit connection for access to jobs and revitalization, and significant ridership will be driven by that demand, as well as the revitalization inside the Beltway that the project will spur,” Schwartz said. “We are also certain Metro ridership will recover as the system completes repairs and reforms. In an era of climate change, the most progressive transportation solution available is to build more transit.”

President Donald Trump’s team in January put together a list of 50 infrastructure projects, which was obtained by McClatchy, and it called for $5.6 billion to build the Purple Line. The line would provide a direct connection to Metrorail’s green, orange and red lines through 21 stations, plus MARC, Amtrak and local bus service, according to the report posted by McClatchy.

Construction of the Purple Line has a price tag of $5.6 billion and would lead to 5,000 “direct job years,” the report adds, noting that engineering is done, permitting is 95 percent complete and the funding would be a combination of public and private with a large public share.

Maryland is expected to pay about $3.3 billion of the Purple Line cost over three and a half decades, according to state officials.

To supplement state funding, more than $330 million in cash and contributions will come from Montgomery and Prince George’s counties: Montgomery pledged to pay $210 million, and Prince George’s County agreed to contribute $120 million to the project.

Ground was scheduled to be broken for the rail route by the end of 2016, state leaders said, with plans for Purple Line service to begin in 2022. The Purple Line would run through Silver Spring and College Park and would include five stops on or near the University of Maryland’s campus that would be free for students.

Stations for the Purple Line LPA would be at these locations:

  • Bethesda
  • Connecticut Avenue
  • Lyttonsville
  • Woodside/16th Street
  • Silver Spring Transit Center
  • Silver Spring Library
  • Dale Drive
  • Manchester Place
  • Long Branch
  • Piney Branch Road
  • Takoma/Langley Transit Center
  • Riggs Road
  • Adelphi Road/West Campus
  • Campus Center
  • East Campus
  • College Park Metro
  • M Square
  • Riverdale Park
  • Beacon Heights
  • Annapolis Road/Glenridge
  • New Carrollton

Photo courtesy of Governor’s office. Click here to read the original story

Gerald Halpin’s vision for Tysons transformed with the times

Gerald Halpinwho has died at the age of 94, hadn’t been through Tysons much in recent years as high-density mixed-use development began to replace the office parks he had built there a half century earlier.

But his impact can be seen in every Silver Line Metro car and tower crane as Tysons slowly morphs into a transit-oriented suburban center, said Mark Lowham, the CEO and managing partner of TTR Sotheby’s International Realty. Lowham spent more than 20 years working for Halpin’s West-Group Management, Tysons’ dominant landowner until 2011.

“Much of what we did in the last 20 years was lay the groundwork for Tysons today,” said Lowham, who served as West-Group’s executive vice president. “Jerry understood that Tysons had to be mixed-use and had to have transit infrastructure to be viable. Jerry was instrumental in the planning and construction of the the Silver Line, which he understood was a critical part of any plan to enhance economic development in the region.”

Lowham said he was working on tax increment financing for the Metro line under Halpin’s direction in the mid-1990s.

The Silver Line opened to passengers in 2014, the same year Halpin sold his Mount Vernon estate for $18.6 million, clearing the way for his full relocation to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He was inducted into the Greater Washington Business Hall of Fame in 2010. Watch the video from that honor below.

“Jerry was one of the true ‘founding fathers’ of the real estate development community in Northern Virginia, joining the likes of Milt Peterson, Ted Lerner and Til Hazel in transforming the sleepy country crossroads of Tysons Corner into the international economic powerhouse that it is today,” said Ray Ritchey, senior executive vice president with Boston Properties Inc.

To prepare for rail, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 2010 approved the Tysons Comprehensive Plan Amendment to boost density around the four planned Metro stations with the goal of increasing Tysons’ population to 100,000 by 2050 and its workforce to 250,000. Since 2014, 4.2 million square feet of transit-oriented development has been built in Tysons, with more than 40 million square feet in the pipeline.

Halpin’s transit-oriented outlook was itself an evolution. It was he and his partners who purchased the 125 acres of dairy farms that would eventually be developed into Tysons’ trademark sprawling office parks in the 1960s and ’70s.

It was a sign of the times, said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. The coalition recognized Halpin in 2013 for his determined leadership in the transformation of Tysons.

“He was proof that an old dog could lead the way in learning new tricks,” Schwartz said Tuesday. “Tysons was created during the time when people had a big love affair with the auto. It was the height of suburban planning at the time. That’s why it is important to note that he recognized the problem he created, then led the way of thinking about how the new Tysons should work.”

Schwartz said West-Group’s commitment to change is “an important part of the story” for the new Tysons. He remembers seeing a wooden model of Tysons as a walkable, urban place in Halpin’s office well before government officials came to the same realization.

His vision is being carried out, in part, by Cityline Partners, which was formed in 2010 by an entity of Credit Suisse Group AG after it paid $222 million to buy more than 15 buildings and 115 acres from West-Group. A number of West-Group workers joined Cityline to manage the portfolio.

Donna Shafer, managing director at Cityline Partners and former West-Group executive vice president, said Halpin was a big proponent of placing Tysons’ rail stations underground, even paying out-of-pocket for tunnel engineering drawings.

“He was lobbying for mass transit as far back as the 1960s,” said Shafer. “He knew right away that it was the next wave.”

Ultimately, the lobbying for the underground tunnel was not successful. The price tag proved too much.

“For the Silver Line to be viable, Jerry believed it needed to be underground,” said Lowham. “He thought it would lead to a much more integrated, walkable community. He used the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor as an example. He thought it was an opportunity for Tysons. He was at least pleased the Silver Line moved forward, though.”

According to his online biography, Halpin was responsible for the development, redevelopment or construction of more than 12 million square feet of office, retail, residential, resort, and industrial space for West-Group and its affiliates. A World War II veteran, the Syracuse University graduate had national reach and influence dating to the early 1950s.

His projects were as diverse as an 85-acre office park in Springfield, office parks in suburban Maryland, a missile launching site in Utah, manufacturing plants from Gainesville to Los Angeles, the 1,500-acre Bellevue Estates in Warrenton, Virginia, and the Cottonwoods resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. He owned and operated hotels in the Mid-Atlantic as part of the Alexandria Management Corp., built Alexandria’s Landmark Center, the predecessor to the Landmark Mall, founded the World Resources Co., and developed the 1,200-acre Indian Springs Ranch in Jackson, Wyoming.

But nowhere is his influence felt more than in Tysons. Developers working there today certainly recognize Halpin’s more than 50 years of involvement there — and the framework he set for the current wave of development.

“We would not have the opportunity unless Jerry did what he did from the beginning,” said Meridian Group President and Co-Founder David Cheek. The Meridian Group and Kettler are teaming on The Boro, a 4.2-million-square-foot mixed-use development that is expected to serve as Tysons’ new “downtown.”

“The West-Group did get the benefit of pioneering Tysons and turning it into what it is today — an urban place,” Cheek said.

Photo courtesy of Joanne S. Lawton. Click here to read the original story.

Legendary developer Gerald Halpin, creator of Tysons, dies at 94

West-Group Management CEO Gerald Halpin, who saw the potential for what Tysons could become long before it emerged as one of the busiest submarkets for development in Greater Washington, died Monday in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He was 94 and moved to Wyoming in 2013.

Halpin launched West-Group in 1962 with co-founders Charles EwingThomas Nicholson and Rudolph Seeley. That same year, West-Group acquired 125 acres of farmland that would become, in combination with other rural land nearby, Tysons Corner.

“Jerry Halpin was a real giant in the Tysons development community and a visionary,” Fairfax Board Chairman Sharon Bulova said in a statement. “He was a true community-based developer and will be missed.”

The legend of Greater Washington real estate oversaw more than 12 million square feet of commercial and residential development across the D.C. region, including the West-Gate and West-Park office parks in Tysons.

Those office parks were modern for the time, though they did create the auto-centric, pedestrian-unfriendly Tysons that Fairfax County and West-Group’s successors, sparked by the expansion of Metro through Tysons and beyond, are currently working to undo. Millions of square feet of new residential and commercial construction are planned, much of it on the site of both West-Gate and West-Park.

Halpin recognized at least a decade ago that change was necessary in Tysons. The Coalition for Smarter Growth recognized him in 2013 “for his determined leadership in the transformation of Tysons, one of the nation’s most important redevelopment projects.”

“Without Jerry Halpin’s leadership, the new vision for Tysons might never have been realized. Tysons is the most important redevelopment initiative on the East Coast and Jerry Halpin is the most important private sector figure behind that initiative,” Coalition for Smarter Growth Executive Director Stewart Schwartz said at the time.

West-Group sold its Tysons portfolio, including 115 acres of land, to DLJ Real Estate Capital Partners in 2010 for $222 million in what the WBJ recognized as one of the best deals of the year. Halpin continued to keep his hands in the real estate business after that in varying capacities, including serving as chairman of D.C. developer Four Points LLC and hotel management firm Alexandria Management Corp.

Among those reflecting on his passing was Mark Lowham, CEO and managing partner at TTR Sotheby’s International Realty, who served as executive vice president of West-Group under Halpin before making the leap from commercial real estate to residential.

In a Facebook post, Lowham noted: “Northern Virginia lost one of its great, visionary leaders this morning with the passing at age 94 of my former partner and close friend, Jerry Halpin.”

Photo courtesy of Washington Business Journal. Click here to read the original story.

New YIMBY group hopes to increase housing in D.C.

It’s that time again, time to rewrite Washington, D.C.’s Comprehensive Plan. This plan influences every decision done by the city’s agencies, including the Zoning Commission who is in charge of what can be built where in the District. Curbed sister site Vox reported that because of this time of change a new, diverse political coalition has been formed to “defeat the blocking power of change-averse incumbent homeowners.”

This coalition is a mixture of affordable housing proprietors, real estate developers, urbanists, and poverty advocates. Groups include developer EYA, anti-poverty group Bread for the City, and organizations like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and local blog Greater Greater Washington. To put it simply, the group is composed of YIMBY groups, the opposite of NIMBY (which stands for Not in My Back Yard).

According to Vox, the most “conceptually significant” proposed change to the Comprehensive Plan is to increase the overall amount of homebuilding, while “reprioritizing the creation and preservation of affordable housing, and strengthening protections of lower-income tenants,” as stated by David Whitehead, Greater Greater Washington’s top housing organizer.

After over eight months of input from housing and development stakeholders, the amendments proposed include focusing on housing with at least three bedrooms in order to accommodate families and adding housing for all income levels in every part of the city with an emphasis on transit and commercial corridors.

For a full overview of this new group’s plans, be sure to check out this document, uploaded by Greater Greater Washington. Below, see the full list of members that have given input to the amendment proposals:

  • All Souls Housing Corporation
  • Bread for the City
  • Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development
  • Coalition for Smarter Growth
  • D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute
  • Enterprise Community Partners
  • EYA
  • Greater Greater Washington
  • Latino Economic Development Center
  • Local Initiatives Support Corporation
  • The Menkiti Group
  • MidAtlantic Realty Partners
  • Neighborhood Legal Services Program
  • Trammell Crow Company
  • United Planning Organization
  • Ward3Vision

The Office of Planning will release their official amendments in the fall with reviews and votes on a final version held in early 2018.

Click here to read the original story.

It’s Back

Study of second bridge recommended.

The National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board voted July 19 to study the feasibility of an Upper Potomac River bridge as an option in the area’s long-range transportation plan.

Yet the discussion on even getting that far was “very intense,” said Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth.

Marc Elrich, Montgomery County councilmember who represents the county on the Transportation Planning Board, made a motion to pull discussion of the bridge from study but the vote was 17-12 to reject the amendment and leave it in, Schwartz said.

Schwartz’s group is opposed to the idea of the bridge, preferring area governments spend resources on improving the current Metro system and encouraging transit oriented development.

“There is a $6.2 billion shortfall for building and improving the Metro system,” he said. “And I hear various people say the American Legion Bridge will need major reconstruction [in the time it takes to study a second bridge],” he said.

“[The bridge] would be totally at odds with the region’s vision in the Region Forward Plan and would undermine the network of transit-oriented development which is so much in demand today. It would worsen auto-dependent sprawl and traffic, worsen the east-west economic divide, and undermine efforts to fight climate change,” Schwartz wrote in a press release.

In a phone interview he explained that a new bridge would not relieve traffic congestion on the American Legion Bridge, rather it would increase development leading to more commuters.

“Because of induced driving demand, it would add new traffic without reducing traffic at the American Legion Bridge,” he wrote in the press release. “The upstream bridge would also represent a threat to the region’s drinking water supplies — creating a risk of toxic spills upstream from drinking water intakes during bridge construction and from tanker truck spills.”

Schwartz said the largest opposition his group faces is the 2030 Group, the group urges the study of an outer Potomac River bridge, according to its website.

Neither the idea of a bridge study nor the controversy of the idea are new. Other efforts to move the idea of an outer bridge took place in 1980, 1988, 1997, 2000 and 2003, according to Schwartz.

Click here to read the original story

Urban Turf profile on Van Ness: Redevelopment with a community-oriented focus

Van Ness isn’t going to “become the city’s next hip commercial strip,” concludes Urban Turf in its new profile of the Van Ness commercial strip. “[W]hile the last decade has seen the blooming of popular business corridors along 14th Street and other thoroughfares further east, the redevelopment happening here has a different, more community-oriented focus.”

Reporter Zak Salih spoke to Van Ness Main Street’s Theresa Cameron and Forest Hills Connection’s Marlene Berlin about the community-led efforts to revitalize Van Ness. And like so many projects Marlene is part of, it begins with a walk.

Read the neighborhood profile at dc.UrbanTurf.com.

Photo courtesy of Forest Hills Connection. Click here to read the original article.

A promising new coalition looks to rewrite the politics of urban housing

An innovative new political coalition in Washington, DC, is trying to remap the contours of the urban housing debate by uniting poverty advocates, real estate developers, affordable housing proprietors, and urbanists under the banner of more construction. The idea is that by banding together, such a diverse coalition can defeat the blocking power of change-averse incumbent homeowners. This would free them up to stop fighting among themselves for scraps and start sharing the wealth that DC and other coastal cities can easily create by changing their approach to land use.

The specific occasion for the coalition is a scheduled rewrite of the city’s comprehensive plan, a guiding document that influences the decisions of city agencies — and most of all the Zoning Commission — in deciding what should be built and where.

But the underlying principle is applicable to a wide range of cities and political decisions. DC, like most expensive central cities and their suburbs, currently takes a fundamentally defensive approach to land use aiming to “protect” the most affluent and expensive areas from change. That leaves for-profit developers of market rate housing and builders and custodians of subsidized affordable housing locked in a zero-sum struggle for scarce buildable land, while leaving city governments straining under the budgetary cost of providing subsidies for those in need.

An alternative approach emphasizes the benefits of market-rate construction and the reality that allowing more of it in the places where land price is highest can reduce displacement, create new funding streams for subsidized housing, and ultimately provide the fuel for a more inclusive city.

A new coalition beyond YIMBY

Around the country, various YIMBY groups — a play on the old acronym NIMBY for Not in My Back Yard — have sprung up to advocate for more density and more market-rate housing development in expensive cities, backing candidates for local office and having some influence over state-level initiatives in California. YIMBYism has even gone mainstream enough to have its own conferences.

But even as YIMBYs are, in their way, obsessed with the price of housing, they’ve had relatively little success engaging the longstanding “affordable housing” communities that exist in American cities. Affordable housing advocates and especially those who build and maintain “affordable” developments are dealing with a population that is simply too poor to afford anything that would get built under anything resembling current market prices. Changing land use rules to allow for more construction would, in some sense, increase affordability in almost any expensive city. But it wouldn’t necessarily do anything to address the specific needs of the affordable housing population.

That’s what’s different about the new coalition, which united YIMBY urbanists like the Coalition for Smarter Growth and Greater Greater Washington with affordable housing groups like the All Souls Housing Corporation and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development. Cementing the deal are several of the city’s big real estate development groups (EYA, Midatlantic Realty Partners), broad anti-poverty groups (Bread for the City), and the wonks at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

The basic glue holding it together is that what affordable housing groups really need is resources — land, money, and buildings that can accommodate a population in need of subsidy. And rather than fight with the market rate developers for a small amount of resources in a handful of greenfield or ex-industrial locations, they could team up to push for an expansion in the overall amount of building allowed.

A comprehensive plan that says yes

Perhaps the single most conceptually significant proposed change to the comprehensive plan concerns the drab-sounding Framework Element 218.3, which serves as an overall thesis statement for how the city looks at the relationship between development and affordability. It currently states that “the recent housing boom has triggered a crisis of affordability in the city, creating a hardship for many District residents and changing the character of neighborhoods.”

This perfectly captures the mentality of a defensive planning process and the kind of political coalition that dominates most coastal cities. The basic framework is that residents in affluent neighborhoods get to say no to new development (thus preventing the dread changing of neighborhood character), and in exchange, residents of poorer neighborhoods get to hope that blocking new market rate development will stop gentrifiers from moving in.

The proposed change inverts cause and effect, arguing that “[t]he recent housing boom is the consequence of rising demand. That demand has contributed to a crisis of affordability in the city, creating a hardship for many District residents and changing the character of neighborhoods.”

Prices rise, in other words, because of demand. And the question for a planning document is not how to prevent that demand from changing the city, but how to channel that demand in a constructive way that builds an inclusive city.

As David Whitehead, Greater Greater Washington’s top housing organizer, puts it, their vision for a new plan entails “reprioritizing the creation and preservation of affordable housing, and strengthening protections of lower-income tenants,” but doing so in the context of increasing the overall amount of homebuilding. The proposals go line by line through the existing comprehensive plan, attempting to strike defensive or exclusionary language in favor of welcoming new construction conditional on a degree of inclusiveness.

Big gains if someone wants them

The political impediments to persuading entrenched upper-middle-class homeowners to embrace any kind of change are large.

But the key to the emergence of new coalitions for change is the recognition that the possible gains from change are also very large. An eye-popping 2015 study by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti concludes that constraints on construction in expensive metropolitan areas “lowered aggregate US growth by more than 50% from 1964 to 2009.” A separate paper of theirs concludes that getting the most constrained metro areas to relax their regulations not all the way, but simply to be as tight as the average American metro area, could grow the overall size of the economy by about 9.5 percent.

What’s particularly striking is that though these possible national gains are large, the economic gains to the specific high-demand metropolitan areas themselves would be even higher, since much of the increase in economic activity would be localized there.

Some of the extra economic potential generated would, naturally, need to go to expanding infrastructure and basic utilities to accommodate the additional people. But broadly speaking, increased development for high demand cities should open up vast new fiscal and economic horizons that can be used to finance subsidized housing or just about anything else the local community needs.

Decades ago, sociologists John Logan and Harvey Molotch theorized that for this reason, urban politics would be dominated by “growth machine” coalitions that united developers who wanted to build with politicians, who wanted to hand out goodies to their constituents. In practice, that hasn’t happened, and many cities greatly strangle growth, finding themselves locked in a politics of housing scarcity and budget austerity. But the logic of the growth machine is strong and in many ways compelling — if organizers can do the practical work needed to put the coalition in place.

Click here to read the original story.