A once-polluted piece of land on Capitol Hill will be the site of a 12-story office building after D.C. officials expedited efforts to get special financing for the project.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) will move into its new headquarters at 500 New Jersey Ave. NW later this year, after being granted $30 million in financing under the federal Enterprise Zone Tax Exempt Bond Program days before it was set to expire.
The program, also known as EZ Bonds, encourages developers to build in special “enterprise zones” in need of redevelopment. In exchange, the developers receive low-interest financing. The NAR’s new 93,000-square-foot headquarters, which is under construction, sits on land once occupied by a gas station, across the street from the Georgetown University Law Center.
D.C. officials, including Council member Harold Brazil and Michael Hodge, director of the District’s revenue bond program, worked quickly to process the NAR’s application for financing the $45 million project.
“If [the District] had not done that and been helpful in that regard, the [NAR] would have not gotten the EZ Bond financing,” said Olivia Shay-Byrne, a lawyer with Reed Smith, who led the negotiations on behalf of NAR. “This will do a lot to revitalize that area.”
EZ Bonds are exempt from federal and some state taxation. Because of this, investors will accept lower interest-rate returns, and the lower rates enable the borrower to save money over the bond’s life. To qualify as an enterprise zone, an area must have poverty rates of 20 percent or more based on 1990 Census data.
“We were very pleased that this organization was willing to buy a piece of the rock here and put together an attractive addition to the area,” Mr. Hodge said.
In addition to transforming the dilapidated site, the new NAR headquarters will be the first “green” building in the District, meeting a series of strict criteria for environmental friendliness.
The new headquarters will devote space to several retailers and restaurants on the ground floor, and have a 66-car underground parking garage.
In other news …
• The Chesapeake Innovation Center, a homeland-security-focused business incubator based in Annapolis, said it will add 12,290 square feet of space to its facility at 175 Admiral Cochrane Drive, nearly doubling its size.
• The Century Technology Campus, a seven-building, 362,790-square-foot complex in Germantown, was sold by MGp Real Estate Partners to developer Trammell Crow. An additional 156,000 square feet of space has been approved for the site. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.
• Tim Lemke can be reached at tlemke@washingtontimes.com or 202/636-4836.
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