Pet Worth: This Month's Highly Adoptable Animals
New Whole Foods to Open Up Exactly Where it is Needed Least
Jack Evans Hops Aboard a SmartBike at Bike Lane Unveiling
The Weekly Feed: Experimentation Edition
Morning Roundup: Change Edition
The D.C. Council has gone ahead and approved $206 million in public financing for a Marriott Marquis hotel adjacent to the Washington Convention Center, the Washington Business Journal reports. The key approval makes way for construction on the long-stalled development to finally begin, after the financing fell apart amid the current economic crisis. Construction could begin as early as next fall, says the BizJo. “We went from a 100 percent publicly financed hotel to a deal that requires the developer to fund the majority of the costs," said At-large Council member Kwame Brown in a statement. "While it’s not the ideal result, in these tough economic times we can now look forward to revitalizing the Shaw neighborhood and putting District residents to work.” Brown, Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), and CFO Natwar Gandhi were all involved in negotiating the arrangement with the Convention Center.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebookTips
YAY! Finally the 7th and 9th Street corridors will begin to see life and yet another neighborhood will start to move in the right direction!!!
Excellent. I do hope they open an American Apparel store in the complex.
Meanwhile, the Convention Center is still too small to attract the big money trade shows, and the entire convention business is in the toilet and will likely never get back to the highs it enjoyed in in the early part of this decade.
Brilliant development!
Sigh. That A+ credit rating, not unlike all three seasons of Arrested Development, sure was fun while it lasted.
Yup. Goodbye A+ credit rating, hellow junk bond status. Not a big deal, actually, since all it means is that DC will have to pay more in interest to finance big ticket projects. And when you have half-a-million suckers with wallets attached...I mean "residents"...you can afford to wallow in your crapulence.
Nice to see DC has learned absolutely nothing from the original convention center, which was obsolete the day it opened and which taxpayers are still paying off long after it's been demolished. But now you get a hotel where visiting conventioneers can woo their hot tranny mess hookers and where they can strangle the finest hobos DC has to offer. The kind that wear monocles and spats covered in pee. That's the sort of classiness you'll never find at National Harbor.
After deciding that the existing Convention Center is inadequate to support the new hotel, the entire Chinatown area will be razed to building the galaxy's largest convention center.