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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It strains credulity to believe that this is a way to increase financial aid.  The school will be spending $10s of millions of dollars to rebuild perfectly serviceable L/MS facilities on top of $10s of millions spent on land assembly.  Resale of the L/MS campus won't cover those costs and, at best, there's a land lease on the mixed-use building.  GDS won't own the building, and it paid twice the assessed value of the land, so it's not even clear whether the revenu will do much more than cover GDS's costs.  Meanwhile giving will focus on campus construction efforts.  If the goal were to raise $$ for FA, this is a wildly inefficient and far-fetched way of pursuing it.

And it gets even dicier if parents hold the school leadership to their claim that the revenue stream is a way to prevent tuition increases.  There's no pot of gold waiting at the end of this rainbow -- except maybe for the developers.  Martens and Safeway already got theirs (they were compensated as if the land had already been massively up-zoned).  Which means the school is left holding the (empty) bag.  [/quote]

I don't think Safeway needs to be upzoned.  I think GDS could build - by right - more on the land than they are planning to build. [/quote]

Well, even if that were true (and it isn't really), GDS has bundled the two projects so the school project is tied up with the mixed-use project -- they're both part of the same PUD.  If the projects were separate, the school project would still need a special exception from the BZA.  That would represent a lower hurdle (and involve a different decisionmaker) than the PUD, but adding 600 kids plus teachers to a private school campus is not something you get to do matter of right, even if you've acquired more land.[/quote]

[b]The school a this point could abandon plans to relocate the LS/MS and fully develop the Safeway site to a by-right configuration that would be far worse for the neighborhood. [/b]They could fully develop the Marten's site for the purported revenue stream for FA and call it a day.

The result would be a worse development scheme, a bad solution for the neighbors and a mediocre solution for Wisconsin Avenue.

Thanks DC Office of Planning for hold true to your mission.

[/quote]

But that would be cutting off their nose to spite their face, no?  [/quote]

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