Between the Southeast Federal Center, the U.S. Department of Transportation headquarters, the Washington Nationals ballpark, the Waterside Mall, the Southwest Waterfront and the Randall School, development soon will radically alter Southwest D.C. with roughly 12,000 new employees and another 10,000 new residents.
And community leaders fear the District isn’t ready for the inevitable traffic, human or vehicular.
“We’re going to have a huge traffic issue down there, even when the construction is done,” Ward 6 D.C. Council Member Tommy Wells said. “Even when there’s not a baseball game. We’re going to have to come up with a new traffic plan to begin with.”
Next up for consideration is the redevelopment of the Randall School at 65 I St. SW, a property the District sold last year to the Corcoran Gallery for $6.2 million. Under the proposal, which will have an initial hearing Thursday before the D.C. Zoning Commission, two-thirds of the original school building would be preserved and renovated to house new classroom, exhibition and studio space for the Corcoran College of Art and Design.
As many as 500 new condominium units will replace the remaining buildings. Twenty percent of those new units must be set aside for low- and moderate-income households.
“Even with the size of the project, it’s still relatively small compared [with] the other huge projects … that are going to come down on the neighborhood in the next few years,” Southwest Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner David Sobelsohn said.
The ANC is thrilled that the Corcoran will join the community, Sobelsohn said, but that doesn’t offset “grave concerns” about the size of the project, which is six blocks from both the Navy Yard and Southwest Waterfront Metro stations.
“We’re talking about possibly 1,000 new people who would be living in this neighborhood,” he said.
And many more are just around the corner.
The Waterside Mall, renamed “Waterfront,” will be redesigned as a 2.5 million-square-foot mixed-use town center. The redeveloped Southwest Waterfront will include roughly 800 residential units, a hotel, retail, offices and cultural space. The stadium, U.S. Department of Transportation and the Southeast Federal Center are just to the east of South Capitol Street, but will no doubt impact Southwest.
Wells is pushing a variety of investments, from light rail and linked Metro lines to redesigned road patterns.
The D.C. Department of Transportation, meanwhile, is working to implement streetscape and road improvements — lowering the South Capitol Street Bridge, for example — before the development comes in, DDOT spokeswoman Karyn LeBlanc said.
– Examiner Staff Writer Courtney Mabeus contributed to this article.
