From food trucks to flower marts, how Prince George’s will kick-start New Carrollton

New Carrollton is Prince George’s busiest Metro station, among its most active development areas, and a source of wealth — 71 percent of commuters there earn more than $50,000 a year.

Yet, it is largely a dead zone.

On Friday, Victor Hoskins, the county’s deputy chief administrative officer for economic development, led the third and final brainstorming session for activating New Carrollton, to get the area within one mile of Metro “off the ground.” Flower markets? Food trucks? Concerts? All on the table.

“New Carrollton has been around for 30-plus years, but it really has not met the promise anyone hoped,” Hoskins told an audience of roughly 50 county, Metro and private sector leaders. “What we’re really trying to do is create a sense of place and draw a market to New Carrollton.”

Already home to the Internal Revenue Service, New Carrollton will soon welcome the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development to a new, 97,000-square-foot headquarters. Berman Enterprises LP, which is developing the DHCD building, also will construct 750 residential units there and 120,000 square feet of retail. Forest City and Urban Atlantic, meanwhile, have a deal with Metro to develop a mixed-use, transit-oriented project on 39 acres at New Carrollton.

The Metro station sees roughly 9,000 weekday passenger boardings, including nearly 5,000 park-and-riders. Another 300,000 vehicles pass through the area daily, many on the Beltway.

Despite the growth, New Carrollton is largely utilitarian, a place that commuters quickly walk or drive through to get to their destination. The goal, Hoskins said, is to lure them in, to “capture them” like a bear captures salmon from the side of a river.

“It feels unsafe to me,” Hoskins said. “I’d like it to be a safe place, bright. It’s necessary. I’d like it to be fun. It’s worn out. I’d like it to be new.”

The ideas from the audience ranged from a tech center, pop-up pet adoption fairs and a monthlong winter wonderland (“with alcohol”), to Internet cafes, summer camps, food trucks, concerts and even Artomatic. Prince George’s is in talks with Artomatic, officials said Friday, and county leaders recently toured the vacated 12-story CSC building in New Carrollton as a possible venue.

Hoskins and his team will build the ideas into a matrix, to determine what is most “implementable,” that is, what can be done the fastest and for the least amount of money. A 1-acre park, said Victoria Davis, Urban Atlantic president, would could $5 million to $7 million to plan and build, plus $400,000 a year to operate. Bringing in a busker? That’s free.

“Where low cost and ease of implementation meet,” Hoskins said, “these will probably be our first activities.”

The situation in New Carrollton bears some similarities (and many differences) to the District’s trial-and-error activation of St. Elizabeths east, which is still a work in progress. Hoskins invited Catherine Buell, executive director of the St. Elizabeths east project in D.C., to speak on the initiatives underway on the 183-acre Congress Heights campus.

The District initially hired a private manager, Brown & Fried LLC, to manage the St. E’s Gateway Pavilion at a cost of $50,000 a month. After spending $288,316 getting very little in return, D.C. fired Brown & Fried and took on the initiative itself, hosting the occasional Whole Foods pop-up, concerts, workshops, and other activities meant to lure the community — including employees of the new U.S. Coast Guard headquarters across the street — to the campus. Today, D.C. is installing public art, building a temporary walkway, incorporating a permanent cafe into the pavilion and generally drawing attention to a site that was long cut off from the public, but is slated for massive future redevelopment.

Unlike St. E’s, New Carrollton is not fenced off from the surrounding community. It is a busy place, even if most people are just passing through. The largest issue to jump starting it may be jurisdictional, in that much of the area Prince George’s would like to see activated is controlled not by the county, but by Metro and other entities.

“First and foremost, we’re a transit agency,” said Stan Wall, Metro’s director of real estate and station planning and a participant in the brainstorming session. “It’s not impossible; we just have to make sure we work through the impacts.”

To which Hoskins responded, “Rules, regulations, that’s just something to overcome on the way to your opportunity.”

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