President Obama signed a measure that allows a District developer to begin work on a massive mixed-use project along the city’s Southwest Waterfront, the White House said Monday.
Although the city has technically controlled the land near the Maine Avenue Fish Market since the 1960s, the Home Rule Act imposes strict limits on what the District could do with it.
“Restrictions on the District’s own land have long prevented the city from putting the Southwest Waterfront to its best use,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said last month. She described the Southwest Waterfront as the District’s “most valuable under-used asset.”
Hoffman-Madison Waterfront has proposed a 3.2 million-square-foot development that would include hotels, restaurants, parks and hundreds of apartments. Obama’s action clears the way for that development, to be known as the Wharf, and officials expect to break ground on the project in early 2013. Hoffman-Madison expects to open the Wharf in 2016.
City leaders expect the development to produce a multimillion dollar tax haul for the District’s coffers while creating thousands of jobs.
