The Archstone NoMa, finishing up.
If you ask a longtime D.C. resident where NoMa is, they might not know what you're talking about. They should be forgiven: The formerly industrial district that hugs the railroad tracks behind Union Station has only really become someplace over the last ten years, with a cluster of office buildings [...]
Proving that you can't keep a good swinger down, the Crucible—a "pansexual alternate lifestyles club" that lost its lease at 1815 Half Street on Buzzard Point in April—has found a new home. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs just issued a building permit for a small warehouse garage flanked by parking lots at 16 [...]
News ain't good for the office developers among us. According to a recent report, government leasing basically hit a wall in the third quarter, allowing the vacancy rate to rise. Private sector job growth is doing better, but contraction in government contracting could be a drag in the long term.
The apartment market, though, is still [...]
Last summer, the NoMa Business Improvement District hired the Roan Group, an advertising/image consultant, to help them put together a cohesive brand for the all-new neighborhood. Yesterday, they rolled out the results: A new website and the slogan "Connected."
I'm often a branding skeptic–and had some snark when the BID announced its intentions last year–but on [...]
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 [...]
A person in the business development field told me something interesting yesterday: People in his circle were starting to worry that NoMa, with all of of its recent large governmental leases, could start feeling like an office zone akin to the barren wasteland at L'Enfant Plaza and Federal Center, if landlords weren't careful. NoMa's glassy [...]
If you’ve been following me for the last week, you know that I’m a little bit in love with my hometown. Returning there after thinking about urbanism in D.C. reminded me of all the things that make Seattle a wonderful place to live, many of which are theoretically exportable to D.C. (i.e. not a marine [...]
Via a newsletter from the NoMa BID, the group will be embarking on a branding offensive in the coming months–they've retained the Roan Group to come up with the right way to sell that overbuilt ghost town of an emerging neighborhood. And on June 11th, they'll be holding a "Community Branding Session" to lend their [...]
Constitution Square
The Noma Business Improvement District's latest newsletter came out last week. I've marveled in the past about the fast-moving changes in the area. (Some of this information has been reported before, so sorry—It won't be the first time in the history of blog production.) Here's a progress report on various construction projects:
What's done:
The [...]
DCMetrocentric found the photo first. But I figured I'd post it here as well. This image shows the artistic rendering for the new 360,000-square-foot National Public Radio building designed by Hickok Cole Architects.
