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Articles
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| Residents pursue change to developer agreement |
VOICE writes, "By Julia O’Donoghue
Voice Correspondent
Representatives from the Near Northeast Capitol Hill advisory neighborhood commission will sit down with the D.C. Office of Zoning and Broadway Capitol LLC over the next two weeks to discuss whether the Senate Square project’s condo-to-apartment conversion impacts the building’s amenity package for the neighborhood.
The commission raised concerns with zoning officials last month after learning that the 432-unit project at 3rd and H streets NE would be mostly rental apartments, not condominiums.
Some commissioners believed the change required an amendment to the developer’s agreement with the city, in which the developer gives amenities to the neighborhood in exchange for higher and bigger building. Commissioners also worried whether some of those amenities, particularly the affordable housing and parking, might be in jeopardy because of the change."
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Neighborhood commissioner Alan Kimbel also said the developers had always presented the building’s resident-owned component as an amenity to the community and a reason to support the increased density.
If residents had known the building would be made up of mostly of rental units, they might have negotiated a different amenities package with the builder, he said.
Broadway has maintained that it did not violate the zoning agreement and sees no reason to revisit it or introduce an amendment. Rehashing the agreement might also stall the project, according to company representatives.
They had tried to sell the Senate Square units as condominiums but converted them to luxury rentals because of low sales and pressures in the real-estate market. They did not inform the commission or people who already bought units in the building of the conversion, said commissioners.
“There was no information and then suddenly it was an apartment building. … A few people called me asking if I knew what was going to happen to their deposits [on units in the building],” said Kimbel, whose district includes the building.
About 25 percent of the building’s units had actually been sold and of those, about 50 percent of the buyers were trying to get out of their contracts, he said. Due to the cost of construction, they cannot lower the prices of the units, Broadway representatives told Kimbel earlier this month.
The company said that they planned to include the same number of affordable-housing units in the building — just as rentals instead of condominiums. The change would not affect the square footage or placement of the affordable units, they told residents.
The neighborhood commission has filed a formal complaint but Kimbel said he feels as if the community needs to request an opinion from the city on the issue.
“My concern is that [the affordable housing] just won’t get all worked out,” he said.
Ultimately, the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and the Zoning Commission would decide if the condominium-to-rental conversion warranted a change in the agreement, according to the Office of Zoning Web site.
In order to keep the project on track, Kimbel said he would favor working out an arrangement in which the developer would not be asked to stop marketing during negotiations with the city over a possible new agreement.
“Ultimately, we want to see the building occupied,” he said.
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Posted on Dec 24, 2007 14:06pm.
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