825 Residential Units Planned for Contentious Mount Vernon Square Site

• April 14th 2015

by UrbanTurf Staff

One of the largest residential projects in recent memory is on the boards for Mount Vernon Triangle, UrbanTurf has learned. Whether or not it comes to fruition is the question.

A two-building, 825-unit development from The Bush Companies has been planned for the Museum Square site at 401 K Street NW (map). Andy Viola of The Bush Companies told UrbanTurf that the project would consist of a 14-story building fronting K Street NW with 450 rental apartments and a 13-story, 375-unit condo building fronting on L Street NW. Below the buildings will be a four-story parking garage, and there will be approximately 17,000 square feet of retail space. The architect on the project is WDG Architecture.

Construction is estimated to start in the second quarter of 2016. The estimated initial delivery date for units in the apartment building would be late 2018 and initial deliveries in the condominium building are expected in the summer of 2018.

While the project described is a huge one by city standards, it is far from a done deal.

The current address is home to the Museum Square apartments, a Section 8 apartment project home to many senior citizen tenants. Last May, the Bush Companies told the tenants that they would not be renewing the Section 8 contract when it expired that fall, and then in June, provided the tenants with an offer to purchase the building for $250 million or otherwise it would be demolished to make way for the massive development mentioned above.

This offer set off a series of lawsuits — between the tenants and the developer — and city involvement that halted the development from moving forward and brought the issue of tenant rights front and center. (The drama has been comprehensively chronicled by the City Paper’s Aaron Wiener.) In the latest chapter, the Bush Companies has filed suit against the city, claiming that “the City Council has specifically targeted Museum Square and injected itself seemingly retroactively to halt Parcel One’s (the name the developer used to file the suit) plans to redevelop the Property.”

We will continue to follow the path of this project as it moves forward.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/825_residential_units_planned_for_contentious_mount_vernon_square_site/9763.