Trouble brewing for 14th Street office project?

Back in October, DC Mud reported that the Historic Preservation Review Board gave a thumbs-up to developer Giorgio Furioso's plans to contruct a six story, 55,000 sf office building along 14th Street, in the vacant lot between Posto and the Great Wall restaurant. According to the poposal the building, which will extend across part of the building which houses Posto and the art galleries Curator's Office and Hemphill Fine Arts.



However, at the February ANC2F meeting, Furioso encountered some pushback from residents of Kingman Place, whose homes run behind the proposed site.

As noted in the Dupont Current, Furioso was at the ANC meeting to seek support for several zoning variances that he is requesting. Among them is a request to have cars who wish to park in a 12 unit garage underneath the building enter through an alley entrance. Kingman Place residents appeared to have two complaints about this proposal:

The first issue is that the volume is spaces is too low, and that office tenants ill instead park on nearby residential streets, taking up valuable parking spaces. Due to the daytime residential parking restrictions in place, this does not appear to be a matter of significant concern. After all, one cannot park for more than two hours without an appropriate residential parking permit.

The second issue is that the volume of spaces, and the cars it would attract, is too great, leading to additional congestion in the alley behind the building. I might be inclined to be more sympathetic to this argument if the projected volume of the parking garage was higher--say, 30 or 40 spaces, rather than 12. After all, it can't be ignored that people who purchased homes on Kingman did so knowing that the rear of their property abutted a commercial corridor.

These complaints may be viewed as being in opposition to each other (too many spaces vs. not enough), but I don't necessarily think that they are. Ultimately, I think the resdient's parking concerns can be summed up as being opposed to anything that would bring additional cars to the alley or to their street.

However, what is apparent is that certain residents of Kingman Place aren't particularly amenable to seeing this project built, particularly if it involves adding more of the dreaded "t" word to the neighborhood. (t = traffic) And thus, we find ourselves basically where every proposed project ends up at some point: opposed by a small group of residents who simply don't want to see the project go up, for varying reasons.

The ANC decided to take no action at the February meeting, meaning that action will be postponed until at least the March meeting. There is no requirement in place that the Board of Zoning Adjustment follow the advice of the ANC, but by District law ANC opinions must be given "great weight"--meaning that a vote by the ANC to not support the proposed parking plan could be a potential setback for Furioso's plans.

There's no anticipated groundbreaking date yet for the project, which requires BZA approval before it can go forward.