The National Harbor, a perplexing development scheme rising from the Prince George’s County river flats just outside the Capital Beltway, has attracted additional hotel investments, giving the complex a planned total of 3,000 available rooms.
The development will be anchored by the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, which will house 2,000 hotel rooms and a massive convention area and is scheduled to open in 2008. Yesterday, officials revealed that five more hotels will be joining a site that will also include a wide variety of dining and entertainment options, office space, and residential structures. Broadly speaking, it seems like it’s going to be a combination of Crystal City, Mount Vernon Square, and Branson, Missouri.
The project is a major development for Prince George’s County, and officials there are understandably elated, but it’s a little hard to determine how the Harbor fits into the city as a whole. At present, transit options are limited to automobile traffic. WMATA has identified National Harbor as a terminus for a proposed transportation corridor to be traversed by streetcar or rapid bus running from Mount Vernon Square. It also seems likely that a proposed water transport system will include a Harbor Station stop, but neither of those options seem fit to handle the task of ferrying thousands of conventioners to and from the city and its airports. In 2004, we noted that project organizers were hinting at incorporation into the Metro system, but nothing appears to have come of that idea. At a time when attention is focused on bringing centers of population into the Metro system, such an auto-centric project seems anachronistic.
It also remains to be seen how the convention and hotel space at the development will affect regional demand for such capacity. Washington’s massive Convention Center is practically brand new, and high-end hotel rooms are in the works for the Mount Vernon Square area and the land around the planned Nationals stadium, potentially adding an additional 2,000 rooms to the local market. Stories on the new National Harbor hotels do not mention concerns about over-capacity, but the potential for over-investment in hotel space seems to be there.
Washington’s growth has continued to surprise skeptical planners, and it could be that we, too, are underestimating the area’s ability to digest such a large, peripheral project. With a price tag of about $2 billion, we hope National Harbor proves our concerns unfounded.
Picture used is from NationalHarbor.com.
