Higher-ups in the District government love to brag about their city’s environmental credentials: D.C., they’ll tell you, has more certifiably green buildings and more acreage of green roofs than any place besides Chicago, not to mention more Energy Star-approved buildings than anywhere besides Los Angeles.
“We’re a city that has nearly 30 acres of green roofs [...]

 
The Walmart-centric development planned for the triangle of land between New York Avenue, Montana, and Bladensburg–newly christened "The Point at Arboretum"–is not the best of the four planned D.C. stores, due in large part to the fact that fully half the land is taken up by parking lots totaling 1,339 spaces, including a three-level garage [...]

Temporary Urbanism is all the rage these days for languishing developments, but interim uses haven't made their way east of the river in the same way as Rosslyn or Georgia Avenue or the waterfront. That may finally change soon, as the Office of Planning is looking at ways to activate the giant parking lot and [...]

So, all that visioning and planning and approving that went on over the last months of 2010 to figure out what to do with the District's portion of Walter Reed? Take a deep breath, kids, because we're starting the clock over again. With the new footprint that's finally been hashed out with the State Department, [...]

We're continuing our introductions of new agency directors today with Mayor Vince Gray's nominee for Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, Victor Hoskins. He's a charismatic guy who'll both laugh uproariously and cry in public–but this city will depend more on how well he can push slow-moving projects through the pipeline than how well [...]

Over the last year and a half, a narrow, two-story building at 227 Pennsylvania Ave. SE—built as a grocery store in 1887 and boarded up since a fire in 2007—has undergone a dramatic transformation. Original brickwork has been restored. The doors are painted French blue, with the name of the occupant in bronze above them. [...]

Matt Yglesias responds to David Alpert's analysis of the Gray transition's weirdly non-transit-oriented economic development report by saying that we can't start thinking about how to move people in and out of the city until there's more space for them to work:
Downtown DC is full. There’s basically no land left to build on, and [...]

Count another one who thinks Walmart won't be all bad: Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning. At a D.C. Building Industry Association event at the National Press Club last night, she pointed out that the city still has food deserts, and that the super-retailer was going into several of them with smaller-format stores that will [...]

In a whale of a Friday afternoon news dump, Michael Neibauer reports from the press conference announcing Victor Hoskins' nomination as Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development that mayor Vince Gray is planning to bring back a development authority:
He also plans to reestablish quasi-public entities, like the disbanded Anacostia Waterfront Corp. and the National [...]

After I passed on Office of Planning Director Harriet Tregoning's thoughts about the possibility of bringing back some kind of redevelopment authority yesterday, Mike DeBonis predicted I'd be getting a call from Councilmember Jack Evans. Sure enough, Evans rang today to set the record straight on how the last redevelopment authority died–and warn against establishing [...]