A rendering of what Benning Market could look like. (Via Small Change)

Benning Road in Northeast may soon be home to an eclectic dining and retail market, one of a number of new bustling food halls cropping up around the region.

The Neighborhood Development Company is raising funds to build a 13,700 square-foot Benning Market.

“We saw an opportunity to bring something that would be a benefit to the neighborhood and draw people from other areas of the city,” says developer Adrian Washington.

Benning Market will be located at 3451 Benning Road NE at the edge of a largely residential neighborhood, just across the Anacostia River. River Terrace is a tight-knit community with a rich history of activism, but it currently has few restaurant options. The site is currently home to an abandoned building that once housed a fast food restaurant.

“We think River Terrace is a great neighborhood. It’s got a very great base of homeowners, some who have been there for decades and some who are newcomers,” Washington says. “It is a very solid, active community. There’s a lot going on, but really it’s suffering from a lack of retail opportunities.”

The Washington Business Journal first reported on Benning Market.

The Neighborhood Development Company, whose previous projects include a handful of apartment buildings in Petworth and Brightwood, is raising funds on the crowd investment site Small Change. “This project aims to entice tenants that will appeal to hipsters, foodies, and more with an array of diverse retail offerings,” it says in a description of the project.

While NDC also has its sights on including retail establishments and perhaps even co-working space, it largely aims to be a food hall. Washington describes it as cross between Union Market and Portland, Oregon’s The Zipper.

“We do see the primary branding of it as an experimental foodie kind of place where you might have the person with the really hot food truck and loyal customer base,” Washington says. “It is a way for food entrepreneurs who are daring and who want a fixed location but aren’t ready or willing to invest a million or two into buildout to have a place.”

While Eastern Market and Union Market once pretty much had the, well, market cornered, food halls have been cropping up in D.C. and around the region at about the same rate as poké places and raw cookie dough shops.

Brookland’s Tastemakers opened in April and Annandale’s Asian-inspired The Block is already looking to expand. And there there’s even more to come: Ballston’s Quarter Market will have nearly two dozen vendors in a massive indoor/outdoor space when it opens this fall; the Neighborhood Restaurant Group is slated to open a “multi-unit dining concept” in Southeast next year, and Events DC is planning a 61,000 square-foot Market Hall on the former RFK site.

NDC, meanwhile, aims to open Benning Market by October of 2019.

This story has been updated with comment from Adrian Washington.