Reply to DC government vs Georgetown

Forum Index » Political Discussion

Reply to "DC government vs Georgetown"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] I site my own neighborhood and its barren strip that has only a Starbucks left open. Pharmacy closed, toy store closed, yoga studio and offices on second floor closed. While we fight this more development goes on in the burbs and these people flood our streets and the NIMBys complain about suburban traffic. The new fight is against the Babes development and the Safeway development. I'm so sick and tired of it.[/quote]

You are partly referring to Giant's real estate holdings on Wisconisn Avenue.  Their development group is the Keystone Kops of real estate.  As you point out, they evicted all of the tenants on a fully-leased block with a lot of neighborhood patronage -- Sullivan's Toys, the yoga studio, barber shop, etc., leaving only the two large, corporate-backed tenants, Starbucks and a bank and a slew of empty storefronts.  The reason is that they are trying to get financing/attract an equity partner for their development project.  Only the deep-pocketed chain leases are valuable to prospective purchasers -- Giant needed to clear all of the small businesses out so they wouldn't have various month-to-month tenant issues clouding their sale.  Yet Giant apparently still has not been able to attract financing for its project.  Unfortunately, they've also made clear that when the site is finally redeveloped (a bit of an "if" given the financiing difficulty and the murky legal status of the project) it's the chain leases that they want -- Starbucks, Pottery Barn, banks, etc.  At one point they made noises about having favorable rents for the smaller shops to stay, but in the end never committed to that.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics