Rendering courtesy of Property Group Partners.

Rendering courtesy of Property Group Partners.

Mayor Muriel Bowser joined Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and executives from the imaginatively named Property Group Partners to ceremonially break ground on the Capitol Crossing development this morning.

Given the number of cranes up around the city, if the mayor attended each and every groundbreaking, she’d never get any work done. But this is a $1.3 billion project, nine years in the making, that is going to create three new city blocks. “Residents have never seen anything like the Capitol Crossing construction project,” Norton said. At the very least, it is the largest private development in D.C. underway at the moment. Here are some other things to know.

It is going to be huge. Really huge.

In case you didn’t get that from the “largest private development in D.C. underway at the moment” bit, this project is going to transform seven acres of land above I-395 into a 2.2 million-square-foot complex of five mixed-use buildings (they will be mostly offices, though). There will be almost 70,000 square feet of new retail space and over 1,100 parking spaces. The mayor expects that it will generate about $40 million in property tax revenue every year, once it is completed.

Yes, this is where Eataly is supposed to go.

It seems like most people know Capitol Crossing as the potential location for Mario Batali’s Italian mega market/restaurant. Property Group Partners founder and president Jeff Sussman said last year that Eataly will in fact be one of the retailers at the 200 Massachusetts Avenue NW building, the Washington City Paper reported, though the deal hasn’t been confirmed.

So where is this massive thing going, exactly?

It will bridge the east end of downtown with Capitol Hill—basically around the corner from the Judiciary Square Metro stop.

Via Property Group Partners.

Sounds like a traffic nightmare.

In fact, that is the case. There will be temporary lane closures and detours for years to come. On the bright side, at least they didn’t move forward with the developers’ request to shut down a portion of I-395 for more than a year. Construction on the platform will begin in August. followed by a new Massachusetts Avenue ramp to I-395, and then the building at 200 Massachusetts Avenue, which is expected to be completed in 2017. The other four buildings and the reconnection of F Street and G Street Northwest aren’t slated to be done until 2019.

But at least we’ll get some badly needed affordable housing out of it?

Some. According to a release, the “development is expected to provide a minimum of 50 affordable housing units at 80 percent Area Median Income (AMI).” For a four person household in 2015, that would be around $87,000.

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