Today the
Capitol Riverfront BID held its first annual meeting luncheon, on the seventh floor of the all-but-completed
100 M Street, showcasing great views of
Nationals Park and of
M Street (though the gray skies didn't make for good picture-taking). I didn't take copious notes, but here are a few items of note that I
Twittered in between bites of chicken and a key lime tart for dessert:
* It's confirmed that
Artomatic will be held in Near Southeast in May and June of 2009.
* The opening date for
Diamond Teague Park continues to be set at March of '09. However, the BID's executive director said that
Canal Park would be coming "in late 2010."
* The Capitol Riverfront area (which is a bit larger than my Near Southeast domain, since it also includes Buzzard Point) now has 1,100 residents.
Hopefully they'll be posting the spiffy Annual Report online, since it gives a lot of detail about development in the Capitol Riverfront area and the work that the BID does to promote and "brand" the neighborhood. (Though JDLand readers will be familiar with most of it already.) Best stat? The BID's Clean and Safe team members collected 3,600 bags of trash this year.
The keynote address was given by Greg Leisch of
Delta Associates, and provided a flurry of statistics about the residential and commercial office space markets in DC compared to the rest of the country (in short: It Could Be Worse). Leisch said that he felt that the Capitol Riverfront area is well-positioned to benefit from the recovery that's expected to begin in late 2009/early 2010, in much the same way that the East End did after the 1990-91 recession and the Capitol Hill submarket did after the 2001-2002 recession. He also said that only about 1,600 new condos will have been sold across
the Metro area in 2008. Ouch. You can see some of the stats from this presentation on the
Delta web site.