I’m at the New Partners for Smart Growth conference, a major annual conference on Smart Growth. I’ll be liveblogging the conference today. The first panel I’m attending is about the development called The Yards in Near Southeast and how partnerships between GSA and Forest City are revitalizing this area.

Katherine Aguilar Perez, VP of Forest City: “Smart growth is so much more than just maps. It’s about people.” It’s the two ends of the barbell: 74 million boomers, who are empty nesters and are ready to move out of the suburban subdivision, and Gen Y, 74 million young people of whom 41% come back home after college. It’s not just about building livable communities, it’s about building enough livable communities. Smart Growth is about designing for the human experience, sustainably, for the next generation.

Pat Daniels, GSA: Her primary job is to bring the SE Federal Center up to today’s standards. It’s adjacent to the Navy Yard in Near Southeast in an area that has been economically depressed for the last 40-50 years, which mostly contained low-income housing, a depressed elementary school, a few nightclubs, and was considered a very undesirable, underutilized district. The parcel now owned by GSA is between the Navy Yard and the largest pumping station for the Washington Sewer Authority. The Navy occupied the area until the mid-80s until they started moving people to Virginia and elsewhere. GSA had a hard time attracting federal agencies to move there; Anacostia had a bad reputation.

Now thanks to the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative and others, there is renewed interest in the area. The Navy took some land back and is moving people back to DC. GSA is saving six historic structures, removing the non-historical buildings and abating the pollution on the site, and building a new seawall. And a bill sponsored by Eleanor Holmes Norton allows GSA to think more broadly about the site instead of just creating a “federal enclave”.

They worked for two years with a cadre of architects to create the GSA Plan, which involves mixed-use development for office, residential, retail, cultural and park uses. The area hadn’t ever been zoned, and it wouldn’t work to just evaluate different proposals between one developer suggesting townhouses and another wanting ten-story buildings. So they zoned the area for 1.8 million square feet commercial, 2,000 to 3,000 residential units, plus cultural and retail and a waterfront park. Developers were chosen only 50% based on how much they would pay, and the other 50% based on how their plan would contribute to the area, and also gave developers an opportunity to explain if the government’s plan wasn’t the best one. They selected Forest City.

Harriet Tregoning, Director of DC Office of Planning: The Anacostia is the forgotten river. Everyone knows about the Potomac, but not the Anacostia. The neighborhoods along the river had received little investment, the transportation infrastructure did not connect, and the parks were under-maintained. Ownership was an issue: most of the riverfront was federally owned, including the Navy Yard and Fort McNair.

The Anacostia Waterfront Initiative was started to turn the area into a great district in the heart of the city like it should be. They’ve lowered bridges to create more at-grade crossings, improved connectivity between east and west, and created the Anacostia Riverwalk so people can travel along the river.

For the Southeast Federal Center, the area already had historic buildings that gave a sense for what the area could be, even though it was far from that. They hired consultants to create a vision for the vibrant, mixed-use district that it could be.

Along M Street, there was already some tall building development occurring, but these buildings had no street-level presence. The Navy Yard did not have the potential to “activate” its part of M Street, making it even more important to ensure that the new development did so. They zoned the area along M Street for high density mixed-use, high-density residential in the center and lower-density residential as a transition at the edges. The buildings step down from 130 feet at M and New Jersey down to 40 feet at the waterfront. They also enabled developers to create open spaces at the waterfront by transfering development rights to other parcels. Finally, they ensured the Zoning Commission can review the height and bulk of buildings, limited parking, the facades, and other design aspects.

Downtown DC and Midtown Manhattan are the only two central city districts growing in office market share. But because of the height limit, downtown will be fully built out in five years. Therefore, it’s very important to encourage office development elsewhere in the city. At the same time, the success of downtown has a lot to do with the completeness of the neighborhood - retail, cultural and entertainment venues that would have struggled to just compete 9 to 5 but work well today, and now many people do live downtown. [My comment: it depends on your definition of downtown, I guess. Gallery Place is downtown and it is certainly not a 9 to 5 district, but just nearby at Metro Center the area is dead outside business hours and even in the middle of the afternoon.] Right now the market right now favors office space over housing, but you need to ensure you get housing to get that complete neighborhood.

This has been in the works in some form since 1992, but now the promise of this development has made the entire area pop, and the ballpark wasn’t even in the cards then.

Ramsey Meiser, Senior VP of Development, Forest City: This is the largest development project in the city now, and a unique opportunity to establish a neighborhood and a place, including a five-acre waterfront park. They signed the deal before the stadium was announced, and that was a very lucky day for Forest City.

There are challenges. The land is federal, and land records are not particularly complete about what the site contains, like “paper streets” that run through existing buildings that were never closed yet obstruct the permiting process. It’s in a 100-year floodplain and the Green Line tunnel runs under the site to cross the river.

Forest City had to agree to maintain the streetscape to get DDOT approval, which means an ongoing levy on the buildings in the district, though it’s the right thing to do. It’ll take 15-20 years to build out the project, and who knows how many business cycles will happen (rentals vs. condos?)

The initial buildings are on the verge of starting: an adaptive reuse of a historic building that will be rental residential and open in Fall of 2009. There’s also a condo building that’s another adaptive reuse and 250 condos which will complete in late 2010. The first offfice building, 10 stories with a ground level grocery store, will open in early 2011, and a final retail building, the Boilermaker Shop, another historic adaptive reuse that will be the retail hub and open in 2009.

Question: What was done with TDM? Tregoning: There’s the Navy Yard Metro which is (at the moment) one of the most underutilized stations in the system; there’s potential for a streetcar line; and it’s within walking distance of Capitol Hill. Meiser: The circulator bus is also adding a line that will go through this area.

Question: What would be one thing you would change? Daniels: I wish I’d not had to be the first person in the Federal government to do this.

Question: Was there a concern about gentrification in the surrounding neighborhood? Also, between the Navy, GSA, and developer, how did you work out responsibilities for cleanup? Daniels: We’ve been working a long time. GSA will pay for anything that’s remedial, but FC will do the actual work.

Tregoning: on the gentrification issue, this area wasn’t residential, but in the broader Southeast neighborhood there was public housing that was pretty distressed and is a HOPE VI redevelopment. There are little rowhouse blocks that remain there; the desire with these parcels is to have inclusionary zoning to keep a percentage of affordable. The apartments will have 20% affordable housing at 50% of AMI. It’s very important that we get affordable housing since we have too little of it in DC. Transportation is the second largest expense for most households, so by providing low-cost transportation we make living more affordable, and so DC is very focused on transportation.

Question: Energy efficiency is very much at the forefront now. Tregoning: This is going to be one of the largest collections of green buildings in the US, since DC has very strict green building laws. Being walkable, bikeable, etc. contributes a great deal. We want to let people make choices that reduce their carbon footprint, and one of those major choices is travel. We’re not too far from a world where our decisions will be denominated in pounds of carbon. These communities will give people the choice to live a low-carbon lifestyle.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.