At risk? (Cultural Landscape Foundation)

The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which is dedicated to the preservation of beautiful and historically significant landscapes, has come out with its yearly crop of at-risk places and the people fighting to protect them. On the list: McMillan Sand Filtration Site, where activist Tony Norman has been fighting development for decades. Says the entry:

The site, which has been closed to the public since World War II, has deteriorated severely since operations ceased in 1987 despite more than 20 years of meetings and citizen proposals. The threat of development has intensified in the last few years as the City’s economic development office has selected a private development team and begun discussions on a potential large public subsidy for private development. Currently Mr. Norman and Committee members are engaging in pro bono consultations with engineers, preservation and environmental experts, legal experts and planners for advice on mitigating the negative effects of the proposed development and exposing the nontransparent collaboration of the District of Columbia government with the private development team. The Committee is exploring repurposing this public land and alternative stewardship arrangements such as a conservancy, public/private partnerships, or transfer of development rights.

From the perspective of keeping historically significant places just as they are—even if they've long since ceased to be productive—sure, new residences, retail, and office buildings would constitute a threat. But redevelopment that brings more people to the area who can more easily appreciate a large section of the plant that will be preserved, without requiring them to either jump a fence or schedule private tours, would seem to be more respectful of the site's history.

Also worth noting: Besides Portland's Ladd's Addition, a planned residential neighborhood that's threatened by Dutch Elm Disease rather than nefarious private developers, McMillan is the only site on the list that's in the middle of a big city. The others are in small towns or rural areas, where development perhaps doesn't make as much sense. It's the Cultural Landscape Foundation's right to fret about any place it sees as valuable, but context is important.

In the last few days, a wordless little ditty on the historic elements of the McMillan Sand Filtration Plant site hit the internet. Made by Bloomingdale resident Snorre Wik, it's part of an attempt by local leaders to press for as much historic preservation and park space on the McMillan site on North Capitol Street as possible.

Even after an extensive community engagement process last winter, some local advisory neighborhood commissioners thought those elements—along with stormwater and traffic mitigation—were inadequate. They declined to quickly give the draft concept their initial stamp of approval, which would have given the private development team strength going through the zoning and historic reviews.

In June, the city announced that it would be taking over those processes, which will include traffic and stormwater management studies. After a community meeting on the subject, commissioner Hugh Youngblood laid out his take on a local blog.

"I received the clear message that the community is ready to deploy its skills and dedication into an effort equivalent to the Manhattan Project with the mission of taking the power back and developing a plan for the historic McMillan by by the people and for the people," Youngblood wrote.

Youngblood's group is talking with an Australian landscape architect and planning a survey of residents to come up with a few points of agreement. "Things that are the major drivers of external impacts need to be addressed first rather than last," he told me a few weeks ago. "I do think we need to start over in terms of transportation and stormwater, and in terms of a park."

This project has "started over" so many times that even the closest observers can lose track.

250 M Street SE is waiting for tenants before getting started. (W.C. Smith)

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 you’re not allowed to build higher. If you make it a more attractive place to locate jobs, no additional jobs will be created because there’s noplace to put the jobs. The improved quality will show up as higher rent for landlords, and our rents are already the highest in the nation. If you relaxed the height limit, the high rents would spur new construction (=jobs) which would lead to lower rent per square foot which would make downtown, DC a more attractive employment destination.

True enough. I'm certainly on record in enough places opposing height restrictions, not least because I think developers should be able to build tall in places where it's economically advantageous to do so, and the office rent pressure is strongest downtown.

But to say that "there's noplace left to put jobs" is simplistic. Although many office projects stalled during the recession, they're starting up again in a big way around the city, from Mount Vernon Square to Anacostia. On the longer term horizon, massive office capacity is planned for McMillan, L'Enfant Plaza, and the Capitol Riverfront. Recent changes in who gets what at Walter Reed–the District may now get all of the Georgia Avenue frontage–has Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning thinking about "more ambitious uses" like a "major employment center." The list goes on. So yes, rents are high, but jobs are still coming, and there's plenty of space to put them–in places that could really use the lift.

Expect more of this. (Darrow Montgomery)

2010 was a big year for development in the District.

Capital markets unfroze, allowing a slew of stalled projects to break ground. Large empty spaces in the architecturally uninspired NoMa and Capitol Riverfront business improvement districts finally started to fill out. A Web-savvy smart growth constituency became a force in planning and politics, and car-centric suburbs awoke to the need for walkability, density, and transit. Meanwhile, a once-popular mayor went down in part because of a sense that he was building too fast and consulting too little with the people affected.

D.C. might have lost its chance at a future World Cup in 2010, but it won the undisputed title of the nation’s fastest growing, most dynamic urban center. We’re No. 1 in job creation and real estate values. All of that has sent cranes rising around the city, and sets D.C. up for a crackerjack 2011—even if a slowdown in city-subsidized building projects takes the edge off a bit.

So what’s on deck for the District this year? Let’s break it down.

For flying dirt, look to Ward 7:

Mayor Vince Gray’s home base will get going in a big way in 2011. Skyland Town Center, a massive mall and condo development at the corner of Good Hope Road SE and Alabama Avenue, made it through the zoning process last summer. If ongoing legal challenges get resolved, demolition could begin by the end of the year. Meanwhile, senior housing and townhouses will kick off the 15.5-acre Parkside development. And Donatelli Development and Blue Skye construction are expected to start work on a 473-unit residential and retail complex at Minnesota Avenue SE and Benning Road SE this spring.

Getting District real estate off the books:

The pace of construction of city facilities like recreation centers, schools, and libraries will probably let up, both because there’s just barely enough money to keep the lights on these days, and because Gray’s priorities are more centered around getting D.C. residents employed than getting concrete in the ground. Nonetheless, there are still a slew of District properties that will likely either be sold to developers or move forward as public-private partnerships.

• In the last weeks of his administration, Adrian Fenty recommended that the landmarked Franklin School on 13th and K streets NW be sold to a private developer. Though a number of advocacy groups want the deteriorating building to be redeveloped for low-income housing, a social services facility, or educational use—on the campaign trail, Gray expressed a preference for the University of the District of Columbia Law School—it’s unclear where 20-odd million dollars would come from to do that. Selling the building to a boutique hotelier might be the only way to finance its renovation (although with the number of hotels already in the works around the city, the business case for another one seems shaky).

• The historic white-brick Stevens School on 21st Street NW between K and L streets, is back in play after community groups got the Fenty administration to yank the building from a private developer that had previously been cleared to renovate it as multifamily housing. Some preferred Don Peebles’s proposal to turn it into yet another luxury hotel, but the latest buzz favors a charter school, a case that will be strengthened by the D.C. Council’s recent vote to give charters the first crack at all school buildings the District decides to unload.

• Speaking of charter schools: The council will also have to decide whether to follow through with a Fenty-backed plan to lease the J.F. Cook School on P Street NW near North Capitol Street to a partnership of the alternative education non-profit YouthBuild and the Latin American Youth Center, which plans to put 47 apartments on the top floor for at-risk youth. Some community members have protested, but with the group’s financing nearly in place and a clear need for transitional youth facilities in the city, the council may plug its ears and let the plan move forward anyway.

• The city will offer a request for proposals for St. Elizabeths East Campus, which is supposed to be transformed into offices and housing for middle-income folks. The proposal will be crafted to help a developer get a chunk of federal funds for sustainable community development, but considering they’re already plowing $3.4 billion into the Department of Homeland Security across the street, there may not be much cash left.

• Plans for the McMillan Sand Filtration Site will hit the Zoning Commission and Historic Preservation Review Board, but the big question remains whether the city will come up with enough money—estimated at $60 million, likely doled out in chunks—to help keep the project moving.

• There will be some re-jiggering of the map at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where the federal General Services Administration has decided it doesn’t need to keep a full 30 acres after all. That could free up more valuable Georgia Avenue frontage for the District to play with, but also make for more meetings and votes to decide what to do with the Walter Reed site.

• The D.C. Housing Authority is set to finish a number of renovations at housing projects in LeDroit Park and Washington Highlands, and is hoping for another HOPE VI award at Highland Additions. That would mean more mixed-income housing there, along the lines of the Capper/Carrollsburg buildings near the ballpark.

• The Fenty administration ran out the clock on Hill East, where neighbors have been waiting for the contract on the 67-acre development to go to a team led by Gray buddy William C. Smith. The developer plans a heavily residential mix on the site. Gray may decide to break the logjam, or he may let it lie until more funds become available.

Shakeup at the Historic Preservation Review Board:

Five of the nine seats on the board that reviews historically significant projects are set to expire this year, giving the new mayor the chance to reward staunch supporters from more traditionalist groups like the Committee of 100, Capitol Hill Restoration Society, and Dupont Circle Conservancy. Meanwhile, the office–now with a Facebook page!–will formulate a new five-year plan that will focus more on outreach, reflecting chairwoman Catherine Buell’s push to get neighborhoods not so far concerned with historic preservation more involved.

In the Wilson Building:

• Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr., newly elevated to the chairmanship of the Committee on Economic Development, won’t fight particularly hard for conscientious neighborhood planning over big box development.

• It’s going to be a lot harder to land public incentives for development projects, after the backlash against a wave of reluctantly-approved tax abatements at the end of the 2010 D.C. Council session—particularly a $46 million deal for a luxury hotel in Adams Morgan. In the new age of fiscal austerity, At-Large Councilmember Michael A. Brown’s proposal to develop a way to comprehensively and systematically vet all those giveaways may gain some traction.

• Closing a $400 million budget hole will be tremendously painful, since there’s not room in many public agencies to cut: Building inspectors? Police officers? Trash pickup? Emergency rental assistance? Basic city services spared this time around could face reductions come fall, if Gray and the council don’t pass some significant tax increases.

• Gray could set up a redevelopment authority like those in Baltimore and Pittsburgh, consolidating real estate functions at several agencies to bring land into productive use.

In your houses:

• Inventory of homes for sale is really low in popular D.C. neighborhoods like Brookland, Shaw, and Columbia Heights, while most condo and townhouse projects in the works won’t deliver until 2012 or later. That means continued high prices—and pressure on the rental market, as people defer buying and stick to apartments.

• This could be the year the District’s most long-running listings, like the $29.5 million Evermay Estate on 28th Street NW in Georgetown, finally sell—although if they do, I’m betting on some Middle Eastern oil magnate, rather than the kinds of American businessmen and diplomats who’ve owned it historically.

• Sales of multifamily buildings will likely continue at a quick clip, but since city money isn’t available to help assist tenant purchases, more of them could be the kind of creative financing arrangements where a third-party buyer agrees with tenants to buy the building and promises certain protections or improvements.

• Foreclosures of single-family homes will slow down, since recent legislation mandating mediation gives owners every chance in the world to hang on to their houses. At the same time, foreclosures on multifamily buildings—which already started in 2010—could increase, meaning banks become landlords until they manage to sell off the units. Turnover of vacant and blighted properties will also increase, since a new 10 percent tax rate makes it more expensive to hang on to them for long periods of time.

In your neighborhood:

• A few sparks have already flown in neighborhoods targeted for one of the District’s five allowed medical marijuana dispensaries. Expect flare-ups to continue. No community will likely welcome pot shops with open arms, but after the first is established somewhere—perhaps even a high-income, low-crime area like Georgetown, which also has a pawnshop—fear of the unknown will wear off.

• After MidCity’s successful effort to change elements of its zoning overlay—which restricted the number of bars and restaurants that could operate along 14th and U streets NW—the Office of Planning will likely entertain requests from other neighborhoods, like Barracks Row and Cleveland Park, to revisit outdated regulations that have stifled their growth.

• Walmart’s march will continue apace. The Ward 6 store will probably be the first to break ground, since it won’t have to go through extensive city review and hasn’t encountered significant resistance from the neighbors. The three others may take longer to get their approvals, but barring unforeseen changes of heart by developers or councilmembers, they’ll get there eventually.

Developer Jair Lynch looks on at a community presentation. (Darrow Montgomery)

There have been so many plans for development of the McMillan Sand Filtration Site that if you put them together in a slideshow, it might make for a dramatic film—except with no clear heroes or villains, and no happy ending. Yet, at least.

The most recent main characters are trying to provide one. In their first attempt nearly three years ago, Jair Lynch Development Partners and Bethesda-based townhouse builder EYA failed spectacularly to gain community buy-in for their plan to develop a whole new neighborhood—complete with housing, retail, and office space—on the fenced, 25-acre site that lies just south of the Veterans Administration hospital, along North Capitol Street and Michigan Avenue.

This kind of thing is usually Jair Lynch’s jam. The former Olympian (gymnastics, silver medalist, 1996 Atlanta games) has built a powerhouse firm over the last 12 years by working on what he calls “neighborhood assets”: Libraries, affordable housing, hospitals, schools, non-profit headquarters. Operating out of a rowhouse office on U Street, he’s become known for navigating sensitive projects like the redevelopment of subsidized housing into mixed-use buildings at Northwest One adjacent to NoMa and Mount Vernon Triangle.

This time, the process went awry, dealing Lynch a setback on the biggest project of his career. But instead of abandoning it, this fall, Lynch, EYA’s Aakash Thakkar, and office developer Adam Weers of Trammell Crow came back with a trio of eminent planners and community engagement professionals—paid a total of $79,000 by the city, which is fronting predevelopment costs and taking on a greater role in management decisions—who could start a new conversation about what neighbors wanted, and turn around a plan they could understand.

That concluded Saturday morning in the basement of All Nations Church on North Capitol Street. The latest plan is prettier and more detailed, with more thought behind its park space and preservation of the site’s bizarre-looking structures that sit both aboveground and below. Even longtime McMillan watchers admit it’s an improvement.

Lynch, et al., should hope so. Now, they need neighborhood support more than ever; the city has less and less money for more and more projects ($60 million was pledged for McMillan, but Vince Gray’s administration will decide how fast it gets doled out). Meanwhile, key retailers like grocery stores are popping up all over the city, making McMillan even less competitive as a destination than its relatively low-income demographics would indicate. Public enthusiasm could help put them over the edge—and at this point, it all depends on whether Lynch, Thakkar, and Weers can gain their trust.

—

A view of the new park, looking northeast.

The community member who’s arguably been the most influential in McMillan’s development—or non-development—is already a lost cause. “The bottom line is, we and the community are still disappointed,” says Tony Norman, who helped get the McMillan site designated as a D.C. landmark, and still chairs sits on the citizen group set up to advise the project in 2007. “The plan that they came out with is the same one that we rejected the last time.”

The irony of Norman’s opposition: Reassured by the participation of historic preservation experts with the Alexander Company, he originally backed Lynch’s bid for the project. But when the team came back in 2008 with a dense development program that didn’t make particularly imaginative use of the site’s historic elements, activists felt betrayed, and sued the city twice for documents detailing discussions with the developers.

To a large extent, the process got bogged down in details and ratios of parks to built space, while the developers failed to offer a compelling enough vision to people who might have been won over.

“I think jumping to technical reports, and jumping to very, very specific things, like is it two units or is it four units, it skipped over the healing process,” Lynch says. “People weren’t ready to give their ideas. They were ready to say ‘no.’”

In some ways, though, the aborted process and ongoing tension reflects the neighborhood’s unfamiliarity with how development usually works—residents further downtown, for example, just have a lot more experience with what happens where in the regulatory alphabet soup. Even though the city funded preliminary traffic and stormwater management studies for McMillan a year earlier than required, some neighbors want final reports before signing off on a project that will bring thousands of new residents, cars, and jobs.

The result is a lingering cloud of wariness.

“There should be nothing that y’all can’t produce,” says Bloomingdale Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner John Salatti. “Nothing. As long as you’re withholding documents, there’s always going to be that sense of, well, what is it that you’re trying to hide?”

—

Closeup of the north gardens.

To re-start the process, the developers knew they’d have to get out of the spotlight. That part was easy.

A new team included Maurice Cox, who preaches "democratic design” from a professorship at the University of Virginia, and lent the four community meetings an air of dignity and legitimacy that effectively neutralized some of the most disruptive neighborhood regulars. While the developers relaxed in jeans and sneakers, working on laptops and greeting newcomers, Matt Bell of master planning firm Ehrenkrantz Eckstut and Kuhn and landscape architect Warren Byrd Jr. of Nelson Byrd Woltz ran small group sessions, and even sat down later with interested neighbors for one-on-one evening “salons” at the Big Bear Café in Bloomingdale.

The process won over Alain Joseph, who lives a few blocks south of McMillan. When participants in one meeting were given stickers to place on different elements of the design they liked, he put all of his on an amphitheater, which he’d spoken with Byrd about incorporating. When he saw the final design, Joseph was thrilled.

“I thought, ‘Wow, that’s better than I could have imagined!” he says. “I felt like a king! If you could see how long, how spacious it was—all I wanted was a little corner, and they gave me half a football field!”

For two nights, Weers, Thakkar, and Lynch also did small group sessions at the Big Bear. The three of them at the head of a big table—none of them white, all smiling, all D.C. born and raised—did their best to convey sincerity, and make the case that density is essential to making it all work. At one point, a woman asked about their long-term commitment to the project. Thakkar took on the question as if he’d been waiting for someone to pose it.

“A lot of companies will get an entitlement and sell the land to somebody else,” he told her. “I can guarantee that these folks you see here, barring something unforeseen, will be with this project five years from now, seven years from now.”

They don’t mention the fact that, despite the re-started process and promises of a blank slate, certain elements were predetermined. At first glance, Tony Norman is right: There are 7.33 acres of green space, compared to eight last time, and 1.75 million square feet of building space, almost exactly the same amount as before. There’s still the same basic layout of tall office buildings on the north end, multifamily apartment buildings in the middle, and townhouses to the south.

Still, some elements are better. All the aboveground historic structures will be preserved for potential reuse, several different parks are planned in detail, and office buildings have been pushed away from the northeast corner to make room for more green space.

The funny thing is, the two-year delay itself may have made for a different project, because conceptions of how urban development should be done—and how it can be financed—have evolved, even in a relatively short time. Lynch points out that successful densified grocery stores have recently disproven the need for vast surface parking lots, and also, more residents want to stay and have families in formerly-marginal areas now rather than automatically bolting for the suburbs.

“Could this same team have worked out three years ago?” Lynch muses. “I don’t know, because people may have been thinking ‘I’m going to cash out with another home equity loan, and I don’t really have to worry about this.’ Or ‘I may not be worried about schools at all,’ because schools may not have been part of the lexicon of what we’re thinking about.”

What’s next? The team will make its case to Gray’s administration, and hurdle its way through two Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, the Zoning Commission, the Historic Preservation Review Board, and National Capital Planning Commission. They will beg retailers to lease space, put their best foot forward with investors, and plead with residents to help them advocate at every step of the way.

Some of the people who have been waiting the longest are the ones who haven’t come out to every meeting, and who wonder whether anything will ever come of it. Like Clara Luter, 72, who moved to North Capitol Street nearly 40 years ago. She’d like to be able to walk around in the park, instead of around the fence, as she does on sunny days. Looking out across the grassy expanse on Sunday evening, lots of buildings and many more people are hard to contemplate.

“I still can’t put my head around it,” she says, in her doorway. “But I do think it needs to be developed, because we need to use everything we have.”

The old design from 2008.

The new layout.

An unsolicited proposal from Greenvest in 2004, which the city never considered.

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2010/12/16/the-great-reset-mcmillan-has-bedeviled-developers-for-decades-can-the-latest-try-be-the-last/feed/ 5 http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2010/12/09/at-mcmillan-developers-need-a-little-help-from-the-neighbors/ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/2010/12/09/at-mcmillan-developers-need-a-little-help-from-the-neighbors/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 18:27:22 +0000 Lydia DePillis http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex/?p=16871

The consolidated comments from public workshops.

With a budget gap yawning into the next few years, Mayor-elect Vince Gray has put developers on notice that not all of their big projects—Hill East, Walter Reed, the Southwest Waterfront, to name a few—will get the public funding they were expecting.

That puts them all in competition with each other to move to the front of the line. Community backing is one factor that could push them ahead, and developers on one of those projects—the McMillan sand filtration site—are working overtime to get neighbors on board.

On Saturday morning, the master planner and landscape architect on the 25-acre project will present a concept plan, after several meetings to gather community feedback. And this week, developers Jair Lynch, Aakash Thakkar of EYA, and Adam Weers of Trammell Crow have been meeting in small groups with interested residents to explain what they want to do, and ask for “advocacy” to make it happen.

In Monday’s evening session at the Big Bear Café, the developers made the case for their plan: It’ll be a world-class medical center to rival Johns Hopkins, complemented by a variety of types of housing, and neighborhood-serving retail—just the kind of project that should appeal to a Mayor who just ran on a platform of getting people back to work.

“We have the ability to be the superstar in the portfolio the District has,” said Weers, who will be developing the three medical office buildings (two will be occupied by Medstar and the Childrens National Medical Center, with one left over for smaller offices). “When you really get into the job creation of this project, it’s very, very unique.”

Though other projects are further along in the planning stages, the McMillan team is banking on winning over the long-skeptical community ahead of time, to make the multiple layers of development review go more smoothly.

“They might be two months ahead of us in the regulatory process,” said Lynch, of the Southwest Waterfront. “But if they have a protracted community process in the middle of it, they might be a 2014 groundbreaking.”

In addition to convincing city regulators that the funding is needed, the developers need the community’s help to land the kind of retail that will make the project work. Numbers-wise, McMillan isn’t a shoo-in: A survey done by North Capitol Main Streets found that there are 12,000 people within a half mile radius of the site, with a median income of $39,000, who collectively spend about $16 million a year in groceries, or $25 per person per week. In Georgetown, while there are fewer residents, that number is closer to $100.

McMillan isn’t just competing with District sites for that kind of retail—it’s also competing with locations in Virginia and Maryland that have caught on to the urbanist ethos (Lynch just recently started branching out himself).

Getting a grocery store to come under those conditions, Lynch warned the group, might take an effort on the level of the community mobilization to woo Whole Foods on P Street.

“It’s going to take advocacy,” he said. “Not just us going to Las Vegas.”

It quickly clicked in some peoples’ heads why Lynch, Thakkar, and Weers were spending so much time up front to interface with residents, making the case for density, creating a park that fit their expectations. They can’t make it happen without substantial community support.

“The value of you being here is getting us on your team,” one woman observed.

“That’s right,” Lynch answered.

Hey, I'm finally writing about this for the print issue! If you've got particular knowledge or insight into how the developers have functioned through this whole process, drop me a line: ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com.

Perhaps to highlight the difference between the upper limit of how much they could build and what they were actually looking at building, the planners contrasted sketches of the maximum floor area ratio and the more likely amount of density. Of course, preserving views factored in strongly to the conceptual design, so low buildings will cover approximately two thirds of the site. I'm not sure how much those who advocate simultaneously for low buildings, lots of open space, and major retail–like a Whole Foods–realize that they're fundamentally incompatible goals.

Then there are the three basic configurations of buildings and open space. As far as retail, Jair Lynch said he would work on getting a grocery store, but considering the area income demographics, tried to damper hopes for anything too high-end.

This is how the "service court structures" could be incorporated into a streetscape:

It sounds like the development team is open to the idea of retaining a few of the large underground cells for use as a cafe or museum. It would create a cool open-air arcade:

A few things still appear definite: The buildings will step up towards the northwest corner of the site, with office space fronting upon Michigan Avenue, and also screening the views of the angular black glass medical center. A transit center for buses and a potential streetcar could be located at the northwest corner as well. The southern end will include about 150 rowhouses built by EYA, which just won a big-deal award for a similar development at Capitol Quarter.

This is what a belt-like park across the rectangle's midsection could feel like:

Matt Bell puts words on paper. (Lydia DePillis)

Three weeks ago, the design and development teams tasked with the redevelopment of the McMillan Sand Filtration Site started over on the long, painstaking process of doing something with the area that neighbors could accept. After another couple of salons with interested residents, the planners came back to St. Martin's Church on Saturday morning with some general ideas of what pieces might go where–but pretty much all of the details remain to be ironed out.

Based on the surrounding geography, master planner Matt Bell of EEK and landscape architect Warren Byrd of Nelson Byrd Woltz outlined a rough sketch of how the site's 25 acres might be apportioned: Office buildings would go on the north end, across Michigan Avenue from the medical center; townhouses would go on the south end, along Channing Street; with multifamily residential buildings and park space somewhere in between. They also proposed building higher towards the west side of the site, so as not to crowd the short townhouses on North Capitol Street, though that corridor was identified as the most viable location for retail (a representative from Councilmember Harry Thomas' office relayed North Capitol residents' strong desire not to have tall buildings across the street).

A few ideas seemed to have been removed from the table: Byrd said he had heard no requests for formal sports fields, but rather a few smaller green spaces for casual recreation. He also downplayed the possibility of "daylighting" Tiber Creek, which some community members have supported, saying it was buried too far underground to easily unearth.

Other than that, much of the development is to-be-determined before the next community meeting on November 20. The major issues raised include:

Traffic: A new traffic study will be done based on the draft development program, but there's no doubt that handling the new car trips generated by so much housing and new office space–with no metro stop and a potential light rail line certainly many years away–will be challenging. Bell mentioned the possibility of a transit center towards the north end of the site to handle increased bus traffic.

Park space: Where to put it, exactly? In the center, diagonally, or in a big belt from 1st Street to North Capitol? Byrd reported hearing a strong desire for culturally-focused programming, with spaces designed to accommodate art and public performance.

Historic assets: The old sand filtration plant has a number of concrete cells underground that some residents would like to see turned into usable space, so as to leave more room for parkland on the surface.

Developer Jair Lynch, who will be building the multifamily housing component, tapped away at his laptop in between greeting latecomers and chatting with attendees. His architects are waiting for all the community input to be digested before drawing up plans, he said. Asked whether he'd ever attempted a community planning process this contentious and drawn out–the development team first presented its plans in 2008–Lynch thought back to his days at Stanford 20 years ago, when he participated in the redevelopment of parts of San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Seeing the residents' difficulty reimagining those gaping holes, he said, was the closest comparison to what he's gone through with McMillan. And he seemed happy with how the restarted process was going.

What Warren Byrd drew.

"To me, this is what democratic design is about," he said, before offering a thought on why it hadn't worked the first time. "People weren't quite ready to give their ideas. They were ready to say no."

Meanwhile, the project's wiki site–complete with voice intros from Bell and ANC 5C chairwoman Anita Bonds–is now live. Log in with your e-mail and zip code to access all the relevant studies and information about the development and design teams, sound off on message boards, post photos, etc.

EEK's Matt Bell puts words into lines on paper. (Lydia DePillis)

Brainstorm. (Lydia DePillis)

There has been plan after plan after plan for the redevelopment of the McMillan sand filtration plant east of First Street NW. Yesterday, project leaders got community members to begin yet again.

In the first of three public meetings, several dozen community members hunkered down in St. Martin's Church on Saturday morning with principals from the architecture and landscaping firms that had been brought on to do the master planning of the site. Developers Jair Lynch, Aakash Thakkar of EYA, and Adam Weers of Trammell Crow hovered quietly, observing. The event's august facilitator, University of Virginia architecture professor Maurice Cox, insisted that the point was to start afresh.

“This is the ground floor," Cox said. "Nothing has been drawn. They’re waiting for your input before putting pens to paper.”

Considering the history of the development, for many of those invested in the process, that's both a good and a bad thing to hear.

“There’s concern about communicating to residents that we’re starting over. Because it means that we’re starting over," said the city's project manager, Clint Jackson. "Many residents are a little exhausted by the site planning process.”

There will be some amount of learning from previous iterations of the plan. The last one proposed by Vision McMillan partners was scrapped in part because of community objections to the lack of public green space. And indeed, when the workshop attendees were invited to vote on the top three topics they most wanted to discuss, green space came out on top, well ahead of the topics of retail and architecture. EEK project lead Matt Bell reported back that he had heard no desire for large sports fields, but rather paths for walking and jogging. Predictably, there was also little enthusiasm for big-box stores; everybody wants smaller-scale local retail.

The area is far from a blank slate, however. Jair Lynch, EYA, and Trammell Crow are counting on a certain amount of multi-family apartment buildings, townhouses, and medical office space respectively. The fiscal impact statement is based on rough square footage numbers. And the District used tax revenue projections from those numbers to come up with the amount it was willing to kick in for predevelopment costs, just to get the project off the ground: A cool $60 million.

If you want to weigh in on this plan, you're going to have to move fast. At yesterdays session, in a far cry from the scientific audience preference measurement techniques employed by AmericaSpeaks in the process of planning new development at Walter Reed, workshop participants scribbled priorities on big sheets of paper. Tomorrow–Monday the 18th–Matt Bell of master planner EEK will hold a "salon" to gather input from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at an undisclosed location (email mcmsalon@gmail.com or call 202-355-8998 to RSVP). Landscape architect Warren Byrd will hold another on the 25th.

The next meeting, where planners will present some initial thoughts, was scheduled to happen on the 30th–but that date will probably change, after it was pointed out that the combined forces of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Howard University homecoming would prevent most from attending. Stay tuned.

UPDATE, Monday, 6:20 a.m. – Apparently the October 30th meeting is still on. 9:00 – noon, St. Martin's Church, North Capitol and T. Also, tonight's salon with Matt Bell will be held at the Big Bear Cafe.