Photo by Michael T. Ruhl

The complex relationships between real estate developers and the District’s elected officials are the subject of an investigative series on WAMU this week. The package, “Deals for Developers,” delves into a web of arrangements in which construction firms and other corporations donate to local leaders’ campaigns, and later receive generous subsidies for their projects.

Reporters Patrick Madden and Julie Patel spent months diving through nearly a decade’s worth of corporate registries, real estate deals, and, most importantly, campaign finance records. The series’ first segment, which aired Monday, deals directly with subsidies doled out to some of the city’s top political givers. Even in cases when the District’s own financial administrators and the mayor’s office said that projects in question didn’t need a publicly funded boost—such as the Howard Town Center development—subsidies were granted nonetheless. Howard Town Center received $11 million; its developers, Cohen Companies and RBG, donated a collective $70,600 to D.C. officials over the years, according to WAMU.

But Howard Town Center doesn’t even crack the 20 biggest subsidies offered by the D.C. government. Tom Allison, who previously analyzed Census Bureau data about government employees for DCist, looked at WAMU’s findings and mapped them. With only a few exceptions, the biggest subsidies all went to projects in wards 2 and 6. A couple are in Ward 1 while only one, Skyland Shopping Center, lies east of the Anacostia River.

The biggest project by far was The Wharf in Southwest Waterfront, which received subsidies valued at $293 million. It’s developers contributed nearly $127,000 to city politicians. But there are rare exceptions. LivingSocial, for instance, is the beneficiary of a $32.5 million tax incentive deal. However, WAMU found only $100 in political contributions from the daily deals company’s executives.