To the Editor:
We’re not in 2006 anymore.
Way back in 2006 a small, very small, group of mostly non-elected men got together to devise the massive build out of the City of Alexandria’s waterfront. The only public goal was money production with the best producers being hotels, restaurants, and crowds of people arriving in droves to park on fully metered streets and taxable garages. Nice package, but that was in booming 2006.
Attempting to convert the Old and Historic waterfront, homes, and street grid to a 21st century tourist center is now taking place in the year 2015 — post-crash, post-sequester, and post-Moran Congressional earmarks. No more Federal dollars and no money in Richmond … and the best our current governor could drum up was a low-cost loan for the metro. This is not surprising. Washington D.C. is a one company town (government), and that town has been hit hard.
To compound this injury, City Hall seems not to have gotten the message that a plan devised in boom times will hit the skids in a slow down. But this small group of people are still madly rushing to produce a banal and homogenous looking wall of architecture that will severely damage the life blood of the Old and Historic District — its unique and irreplaceable ambiance. The character of the proposed development on the waterfront bears great similarity to the long-failed urban development that remains an eyesore at city center. Both old and new are out of scale, both stylistically hackneyed, and cut corners on quality by adding more density than can be supported. At least the urban renewal of the ‘60s allowed for adequate parking.
City Hall today remains locked in an operating mode that requires large amounts of Federal funding, State allowances, a rapidly expanding economy (not one still in recovery), and private investors who are willing to give more than they get because they can afford to. Today, investor cash remains tied up in low risk instruments or closely held. It is not freely flowing into the marketplace.
The cost of flood mitigation and the contingency fund for Alternative B of the Potomac Yard Metro are emblematic: a couple of years ago flooding could be stopped for $8 million – today $33 million; the Metro contingency cost has risen from 5 percent to 20 percent of construction cost. Was it under bidding, bad math, poor deal making? Or, all of the above in order to make a rosy picture to artificially boost support?
That happy swinging year of 2006 is long gone and unlikely to reappear any time soon. Perhaps the group who mapped out the destruction of the waterfront would like to meet again to revisit their strategy and their numbers? Or, perhaps, the guys’ 2006 vision will go under as the Potomac continues to rise, and the FEMA-mapped floodplain, which it is all built on, fills up like a child’s sandy hole at the beach.
Kathryn Papp
Alexandria