The apartments at Carlyle Square, a $95 million mixed-used development in Alexandria, welcomed its first tenants last week, marking the beginning of an influx of new residents to the developing neighborhood.
The project, jointly developed by Post Properties and PN Hoffman, is just one of several residential projects kick-started by the arrival of the U.S. Patent & Trademark office.
Since the Patent office and its 7,000 employees moved from Crystal City to Alexandria, developers have been building out the Carlyle neighborhood, a 70-acre swath of land in the east end of the city that was once home to a rail yard.
Carlyle Square officially opened its 205 luxury apartments in December and is scheduled to deliver 145 condos and more than 20,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space in 2007. Post Properties plans to break ground later this year on a similar sized project in the neighborhood. In addition to those developments, JBG opened 114 condo units in 2006 and 79 more are scheduled to open in 2007 as part of a Regent Partners development that will also include a Westin Hotel. Several commercial office projects arealso schedule for a 2007 delivery.
Critics, however, are upset with the retail offerings moving into the neighborhood and said not enough has been done to develop the region beyond an office park. The slower-than-expected pace of development triggered a lawsuit challenging the city’s 2004 real estate assessments of the Patent complex.
The neighborhood has been hot among developers in recent years, not only as a result of the PTO and the spin-off businesses and services it’s attracted, but because it’s one of the remaining areas in the Washington region that isn’t built out.
“Alexandria is obviously a great historic community in the Washington, D.C., metro area,” said Dave Stockert, chief executive of Post Properties. “The entire region is entirely built out. But Carlyle, given its industrial roots [wasn’t] … having a large site like that represented an opportunity to create a mixed-used environment that doesn’t come along very often.”
Atlanta-based Regent chose Alexandria, and Carlyle specifically, as its first entry into the Washington market because the city is just beginning to develop its full potential, said Reid Freeman, executive vice president of Regent Partners, in an interview last year with The Examiner.
Carlyle “is clearly the hottest part within the Alexandria submarket,” he said. “We wanted to jump on it.”
