National Harbor to Get Big Apartment Project

• December 10, 2010
• 0 Comments

by Will Smith

National Harbor in the afternoon. Courtesy Waterfront Street.

National Harbor is set to get a large 350-unit apartment building, reports the Washington Business Journal. Construction is scheduled to begin next fall on the as-yet-unnamed project, which will be the first rental option in National Harbor.

Housing in the area currently includes three condo buildings — Fleet Street, One National Harbor, and the high-end Waterfront Street — and an under-construction town house community called Potomac Overlook.

Developers of the new apartment project are no doubt encouraged by the very tight rental market in the DC area, but we do wonder about its prospects. The condos in National Harbor have been slow to sell, and many of the buyers were probably enticed by a decidedly long-term vision of the fledgling area, where the lack of retail, population, and transit is a current complaint. Renters, with a more immediate desire for such amenities, may not be as willing to live without them.

That said, by the time the project delivers, National Harbor will be considerably more mature than it is now. The WBJ recaps a few other developments in the pipeline, including a tentative groundbreaking of the Children’s Museum in 2011 and a return of Cirque du Soleil in 2012.

Current National Harbor residents are sure to be pleased by the addition of 350 apartments. With about 500 full-time residents right now, that amount of new rental units could come close to doubling the area’s population.

For more about National Harbor, check out our recent profile, A Development Rises Next to the Potomac.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/national_harbor_to_get_big_apartment_project/2755

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