Anonymous wrote:I walked by the project site the other day, and agree that putting all the GDS kids and staff -- and cramming in two 90' condo buildings plus retail -- is a lot for this modest-sized site.

Yeah, it'd be a campus of 1500 (current) to 1700 (with additional students requested and a proportionate increase in staff).

Out of curiosity, how many of you chose a PK or K-12 school based on whether there was a single campus and/or which schools were co-located.

During our search, we saw the fact that one campus was PreK-8 and the other HS only as a real positive. Both because it postponed college obsession and because it put MSers in an environment where little kids looked up to them and where teachers remembered their (sometimes
more loveable) pre-adolescent selves.

I walked by the project site the other day, and agree that putting all the GDS kids and staff -- and cramming in two 90' condo buildings plus retail -- is a lot for this modest-sized site.

And shills are gonna shill.

I guess NIMBYS just gonna hate.

Anonymous wrote:The GDS mixed use towers will help to bring the dynamism of Friendship Heights to a somewhat run-down section of Wisconsin Ave. and a neighborhood in need of renewal. This is a win-win, which the community ought to embrace!

Adding hundreds of kids and teachers to the school plus 350 households where the car dealership was is not a win for the community. And anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds will realize it's not the kind of development that makes Friendship Heights Friendship Heights (FH has department stores, upscale office towers, luxury boutiques and no schools). That said, most people who live in Tenleytown aren't eager to replicate Friendship Heights. The neighborhoods are quite different and people tend to self-select based on the kind of environment they prefer (since price, location, and transit options are fairly similar).

If GDS wanted to build standalone restaurant or retail space on the Volvo site or the kind of mixed-use buildings that would be consistent with the existing zoning envelope (4-5 stories), then the school might have a project the neighborhood could embrace. The school would also better position itself for future expansion of its own campus. A 10 story residential building on 42nd Street is just going to fence GDS in for decades to come. Presumably that's the scenario GDS was trying to avoid when it bought the land in the first place.

The bottom line is that there is a potential win-win solution available here. But GDS's current plan is lose-lose, as far as the neighborhood and the school are concerned. Only the as-yet-unnamed development partner wins.

Don't f&@king tell the community what it should and should not embrace.

The GDS mixed use towers will help to bring the dynamism of Friendship Heights to a somewhat run-down section of Wisconsin Ave. and a neighborhood in need of renewal. This is a win-win, which the community ought to embrace!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not sure there is a process. At what point and to whom will someone have to quantify the revenue stream? If it's after a development partner has been chosen, then this exercise will just function as a justification for pushing the school to ask the Zoning Commission to maximize height and density at the site. And if/when the ZC doesn't give GDS all that it asks for, it'll be a rationale for decreasing the revenue stream. And remember, all we're talking about here is a land lease -- not profit-sharing.

These are assessments that need to be made prior to any decision to devote school land to commercial development, but it appears that GDS is already committing to going through the entitlement process on a developer's behalf. If that's the mindset, then it's unlikely that anyone on the school's side of the table is making well-informed, independent, and economically rational decisions about return on investment. GDS has been sold on a concept.

By some of its board members, advisers and '"benefactors" who just happen to be .... Major commercial real estate developers.

Yes indeed. Clearly there are a number of well-situated people who hope to *make* money off of this project. It'll be interesting to see how many people want to *donate* money for it. And once one development company is anointed as GDS's "partner" in this venture, how eager will donors associated with other development companies be to cough up the big bucks required to make this happen?

Anonymous wrote:Scaling back means it was an ill-conceived plan to begin with.

Not necessarily. The usual course of a major development proposal is that the applicant deliberately overreaches because it expects the Zoning Commission or the BZA to cut it back. The exception is when a developer has everything totally greased downtown (I can think of only one such project in Upper NW in the past ten years), in which case it gets everything it asks for.

Anonymous wrote:I'm not sure there is a process. At what point and to whom will someone have to quantify the revenue stream? If it's after a development partner has been chosen, then this exercise will just function as a justification for pushing the school to ask the Zoning Commission to maximize height and density at the site. And if/when the ZC doesn't give GDS all that it asks for, it'll be a rationale for decreasing the revenue stream. And remember, all we're talking about here is a land lease -- not profit-sharing.

These are assessments that need to be made prior to any decision to devote school land to commercial development, but it appears that GDS is already committing to going through the entitlement process on a developer's behalf. If that's the mindset, then it's unlikely that anyone on the school's side of the table is making well-informed, independent, and economically rational decisions about return on investment. GDS has been sold on a concept.

By some of its board members, advisers and '"benefactors" who just happen to be .... Major commercial real estate developers.

Anonymous wrote:Financial aid is just a talking point now. It will need to be a proof point later in the process by defining exactly how much financial aid this project will create. Keeping tuitions lower is not even a talking point. Tuition will never be low enough
to benefit anyone but a small section of the population. For most people, the difference btween a 40k a year tuition and 35k is irrelevant.

Speak for yourself. Every $1000 matters a lot, especially if you have more that one kid. Not everyone is. A big law partner or fund manager you know.

I'm not sure there is a process. At what point and to whom will someone have to quantify the revenue stream? If it's after a development partner has been chosen, then this exercise will just function as a justification for pushing the school to ask the Zoning Commission to maximize height and density at the site. And if/when the ZC doesn't give GDS all that it asks for, it'll be a rationale for decreasing the revenue stream. And remember, all we're talking about here is a land lease -- not profit-sharing.

These are assessments that need to be made prior to any decision to devote school land to commercial development, but it appears that GDS is already committing to going through the entitlement process on a developer's behalf. If that's the mindset, then it's unlikely that anyone on the school's side of the table is making well-informed, independent, and economically rational decisions about return on investment. GDS has been sold on a concept.

Financial aid is just a talking point now. It will need to be a proof point later in the process by defining exactly how much financial aid this project will create. Keeping tuitions lower is not even a talking point. Tuition will never be low enough to benefit anyone but a small section of the population. For most people, the difference btween a 40k a year tuition and 35k is irrelevant.

Think of it as a rough draft. The land purchases made sense. The current vision of how much of what to build where does not. It would represent a net loss for the school and a grossly out of scale project for the community. The only one who wins (and wins big) on this scenario would be an as-yet-unnamed (hopefully not-yet-chosen) commercial developer.

So GDS is at a "values clarification" moment. Whom or what are we doing this for? And the answer is not "financial aid" -- you don't waste tens of millions of dollars on new facilities to increase your financial aid budget.