Published on: Thursday, September 29, 2011

By Carl Straumsheim

Gov. Martin O’Malley and Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown announced last Tuesday that New Carrollton will become the new home to the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development.

The new site is expected to generate around 350 jobs and $11 million in net public benefit, and it is the first state agency ever to headquarter in Prince George’s County.

The decision to move the agency concludes an 18-month-long planning process, said Michael Gaines, assistant secretary for real estate at the Department of General Services. After the request for proposals went out last summer, the department received responses from 16 developers expressing their interest in the project. The submissions, which were scored based on a variety of factors, proposed locations across Prince George’s County.

“We were looking for a location associated with transit,” Gaines said.

The winning proposal, submitted by Grand Central Development, capitalized on New Carrollton’s location at the terminus of the Metrorail Orange Line. According to joint statement issued by the offices of the governor and the lieutenant governor, the site, called “Metroview,” will consist of nearly 700,000 square feet of office, residential and retail space when it opens in the second half of 2013.

The project also addresses a problem Prince George’s County has struggled with for decades: development around its Metro stations, said Raquel Guillory, a spokesperson for the governor.

“Gov. O’Malley said years ago that he wanted to move a state agency to Prince George’s County,” Guillory said. “We made it one of our priorities.”

Should the proposed Purple Line light rail transit be constructed according to current plans, the line would link New Carrollton to cities such as Bethesda, College Park and Silver Spring.

“That would be the cherry on top of the sundae,” Guillory said. 

The Coalition for Smarter Growth, an organization that, according to its website, is dedicated to revitalizing communities in the Washington, D.C. region, praised the decision to move the state agency to New Carrollton.

“The governor and the state should be given a lot of credit. This is an exciting project that could help New Carrollton blossom into a great transit center,” said policy director Cheryl Cort, calling Metroview a new approach for development in Prince George’s County.

The project shows the lessons learned from other transit-oriented development projects in Prince George’s County, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Census Bureau — federal facilities that have not spun off any development, despite being located close to Metrorail stations, said Cort, who claimed that the prospect of more retail services at street level is already generating excitement among workers in New Carrollton.

“Prince George’s County has stepped up and realized that the way we have developed in the past hasn’t been as successful. As we move forward, it’s important that we make sure that this project has a great presence at street level. This could catalyze further private sector growth,” Cort said.