Georgetown Micro-Units Nixed, Developer Will Sell Latham Hotel Site

• July 22, 2015
• 2 Comments

by UrbanTurf Staff

Rendering of planned conversion of Latham Hotel.

The developer going big on furnished micro-units in DC will have one less project on the boards in the city.

SB-Urban has decided not to move forward with plans to redevelop the old Latham Hotel site in Georgetown into a micro-unit project with 140 furnished residences, The Georgetown Dish reported on Wednesday morning. Instead, SB-Urban will list the site for sale in the coming months.

The redevelopment of the Latham Hotel was one of three furnished micro-unit projects that SB-Urban had on the boards for DC. The plans for the Patterson Mansion in Dupont Circle and a micro-unit project in Blagden Alley are still moving ahead, according to the developer.

The intended demographic for the project at 3000 M Street NW (map) was “single professionals who want to live in a walkable neighborhood close to the central business district with urban amenities and convenient access to public transportation,” according to documents filed with the Zoning Commission by SB-Urban. UrbanTurf reached out to the developer for comment as to why they decided against moving forward with the project, but a comment from SB-Urban principal Mike Balaban to the Georgetown Dish references the good timing for a sale given the state of the hospitality market.

“At the time we acquired the site, the hospitality market in D.C. was quite depressed, and that has now long since changed,” he told The Dish. “It’s now a very strong market that’s very actively being sought by investors and operators from literally around the world.”

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/georgetown_micro-units_nixed_developer_will_sell_latham_hotel_site/10155

2 Comments

1. Alley Cat said at 6:42 pm on Thursday July 23, 2015:
   It's a shame Blagden Alley had to rely on a Historical Preservation Review Board staffed with architects and "smart-growth" advocates--builders and modernizers--to protect our heritage from their clients. While Georgetown escaped the profit-maximizing, neighborhood-killing scourge of the micro-unit, Blagden Alley will soon succumb. There aren't many who get this, but growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

1. Payton Chung said at 5:47 pm on Friday July 24, 2015:
   If a living thing is not growing, it's dying. Is that would you would prefer for our city? Cities are not like bonsai trees that are pruned every day to carefully maintain an illusion of stasis -- because <i>nothing in life is static</i>. They're like dense forests, where new things grow and old things die and everything thrives together. The forest might look the same to you, but in fact it's growing and changing all the time.