The Goodspeed Update

There’s a couple big projects around Metro stations on my radar lately. First, after a groundbreaking in October construction is well underway at the Mosaic At Metro project at the Prince George’s Plaza station. I don’t know much about the project, but found this interesting blurb on the website of AGM Financial Services, who is underwriting the project:

Mosaic at Metro Apartments is a luxury Class A 260-unit, four and five-story apartment complex to be newly constructed in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Using HUD’s 221(d)(4) program AGM Financial Services, Inc. provided a $46,233,700 insured mortgage at 5.14% interest rate with a 40-year term after a 30-month construction period. Financing includes a ground lease with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. This is the FIRST private development at a WMATA/METRO facility in Prince George’s County and is the first HUD financing of luxury housing at a transit center in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Mosaic at Metro is part of a mixed-use development at the Prince George’s Plaza METRO Transit Center; there will also be 160,000 square feet of retail and 250,000 square feet of office. The two building complex will include six studio units, 108 1-BR units, 133 2-BR units and 13 3-BR units with 366 parking spaces.

Despite having four segments of Metro, Prince George’s county has seen little of the transit-based development seen in Arlington and Montgomery county. My intuition says it’s probably because the Metro stations in the county were built later, and also because the local governments haven’t engaged in the same type of proactive planning as D.C. or Montgomery and Arlington. Thus, I was interested to read about a new condo development at the Largo Town Center last fall and the Mosaic project.

Also, at the other end of things, the much larger and more controversial MetroWest project was approved out in Vienna, a longtime holdout against dense, transit-oriented development.