The District has chosen a partnership of MRP Realty and Ellis Development Group to develop a valuable city-owned parcel at 965 Florida Ave. NW. The winning proposal features a 370,000-square-foot building with residential units atop a large ground-floor market at the site just north of the U Street corridor.

The Washington Business Journal first reported the city’s decision. Ellis President and CEO Chip Ellis confirms that he just learned that his team had won the bid. “I just got the news,” he says. “I’m very pleased.”

The MPR-Ellis team, which also includes partner Fundrise, beat out a proposal from a team led by the JBG Companies that included a Harris Teeter supermarket. The JBG proposal was thought to have a leg up because of the popularity of Harris Teeter and the fact that JBG could incorporate an adjacent vacant parcel it owns—-something the city said it was looking for in its solicitation.

Chanda Washington, spokeswoman for the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, says MRP-Ellis won out because the proposal included more affordable housing, offered more money to the city to purchase the land, and involved a planned unit development (PUD) process, which would include the participation of the Office of Planning, the Department of Transportation, and the community in planning changes to the street grid. “MRP proposed twice the number of subsidized affordable housing units,” Washington says, though she declines to give the exact number of affordable units.

Here are more renderings of the MRP-Ellis proposal:

Renderings courtesy of Ellis Development

This post has been updated with a comment from Chanda Washington.