It took more than 20 years and had more plot twists than a Shakespearean tragedy, but a team led by McLean-based Rappaport followed through on its long-standing pledge to deliver community supporting retail to the site of the former Skyland Shopping Center in Ward 7’s Good Hope neighborhood.
On Sept. 27, Lidl became the first full-service grocery store to open east of the Anacostia River in 15 years. And it marked the biggest turning point in a development that’s been on the books for its two builders for 20 years, in a long underserved part of town.
The German discount market chain was just one of several new merchants in Skyland Town Center’s second phase. In addition to the 29,436-square-foot Lidl, the $17 million development included the District’s first drive-through Starbucks, a PNC Bank, Tropical Smoothie Café, Mezeh, Maizal and &pizza. That’s in addition to the project’s first phase, which brought to the community The Crest at Skyland Town Center, a 263-unit multifamily building with such ground-floor retailers as CVS Pharmacy, Roaming Rooster and a Trek bicycle shop.
An eminent domain battle, the loss of its first anchor retailer and multiple starts and stops were among the trials and tribulations that earned Skyland Town Center, with a new anchor tenant in tow, the Washington Business Journal’s Perseverance Award in 2020. Then again, as Walmart’s 2016 decision to pull out of the project showed, nothing’s for certain until the punch list is completed and the ribbons are cut, especially amid a prolonged pandemic.
All in, including acquisition, relocation, site work and construction, the city and development team have spent north of $130 million, with a third phase still to come.
To appreciate the new mix of tenants, it’s important to consider what they replaced, says Henry Fonvielle, president at Rappaport. Previously anchored by Safeway, which moved across the street to East River Plaza, the former, 170,000-square-foot retail center at Alabama Avenue, Naylor Road and Good Hope Road SE was a “ramshackle collection of retail,” including an auto parts store, pharmacy and post office, he says. The neighborhood deserved more.
“When we are part of the community like this, this is such a pride,” Fonvielle says. “It affects everybody. If you look in the apartments, if you look in the Starbucks, you look in Lidl, it’s going to be people from this community. It’s not moving out a certain group and moving in another group. This is serving the community.”
A different basket of goods
After D.C. seized Skyland Shopping Center in 2005, it would spend the next seven years unraveling various legal challenges — the city spent a total $30 million to acquire Skyland through eminent domain and $9.5 million to relocate its tenants.
But that was only the beginning of Skyland’s hurdles.
Walmart backed out of two stores east of the Anacostia, one at Skyland and a second at Ward 7’s Capitol Gateway. Yet, setting aside that exit, which alone could have killed the project, the team also needed to overcome: a Safeway-related covenant that D.C. had to buy out, a Housing and Urban Development investigation into the District’s use of Community Development Block Grants to purchase the center, multiple negotiations over D.C. subsidies, multiple trips to the D.C. Zoning Commission, structural and technical challenges, and neighbors’ protests over construction dangers. The list goes on.
When it came to a replacement anchor retailer for Walmart, Rappaport courted multiple. Among them was Whole Foods, which came close to signing a deal before its stock plummeted and the chain was acquired by Amazon.com Inc. in 2017. The rebound came about two years later, on the sidelines of the International Council of Shopping Center’s big Las Vegas Recon meeting in May 2019. A series of closed-door meetings led to a momentous announcement from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser: Lidl had stepped up to fill the void.
“For us, serving the community begins with being part of the community,” Lars-Oliver Hamann, Lidl U.S. regional vice president, said the day of the store’s grand opening.
Rappaport, along with D.C. multifamily developer WC Smith, had already recalibrated the project to lead with The Crest, which opened in April 2021 and is now substantially leased. They broke ground that June on the project’s second phase.
Meanwhile, the Skyland team had held dozens of meetings over the course of two decades with stakeholders and groups, including the Marshall Heights Community Development Organization Inc., Washington East Foundation and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, to identify the right mix of tenants and uses that would not just be successful but also support the surrounding community.
In addition to the market and restaurants, that resulted in businesses like a barbershop, a nail salon and Edenbridge Health, a health care provider for seniors.
More to come
Those businesses meant new job opportunities for the community, but area residents would need the right skills to fill them.
Enter the Skyland Workforce Center, which launched in December 2014 as an extension of the Ward 8 nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River.
The center has supported more than 4,000 area residents to gain job skills and employment, some with businesses at the town center, some outside of it. Lidl hired more than 60 employees, the majority of them residents of wards 7 and 8. Starbucks hired another 25, and most of them live in Southeast D.C.
“It’s a testament to both Rappaport and WC Smith. They really have made some sacrifices to get it done,” says Babatunde Oloyede, president and CEO of the Marshall Heights CDO, which has worked closely with the development team since it was selected in May 2002 by the National Capital Revitalization Corp. to redevelop the property. “Eminent domain, Walmart — there’s just a lot of things that have transpired over the years that, I would say, a lot of developers would say, ‘This may not be the project for me anymore. It’s time to move on.’”
And the story isn’t over. Rappaport and WC Smith have proposed to develop 126 for-sale townhomes on the northern part of the site, where the Walmart was to be developed, and have brought on NVR Homes to develop the new units. There’s also a 75-unit senior center, with 10,000 square feet of retail and a 1-acre park, planned for that block.
It was a long and winding road, one that neither Rappaport nor WC Smith could have predicted from the starting line two decades ago. Still, the result so far is a development that has lived up to expectations, says Chris Smith, chairman and CEO of WC Smith.
“I think the team over here, although a little exhausted, is pretty excited about the final product that has been delivered,” Smith says. “Projects like Skyland Town Center end up being like legacy projects. You have to have a strong fortitude and a long-term commitment when you take on something like this.”
Behind the deal
- Developers and partners: Rappaport and WC Smith, with Skyland Workforce Center, Washington East Foundation, Marshall Heights Community Development Organization Inc., D.C. Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development
- Architects: RVA Architecture, L2M Architects
- Contractor: LF Jennings
- Size: 42,390 square feet
- Value: $17 million, including $4.1 million in New Market Tax Credits
- Certificate of occupancy (phase 2): Feb. 1, 2022
After nearly a decade, the Skyland Town Center redevelopment near the Hillcrest Neighborhood has its final phase in sight.
Why it matters: The 18-acre project off of Good Hope Road and Alabama Ave. SE was slated for an upgrade in 2013 as part of neighborhood revitalization but saw extensive delays until 2018 when developers Rappaport and WC Smith began construction.
Flashback: The site was initially meant to be anchored by a Walmart, but the retail giant pulled out in 2016.
Yes, but: A Lidl that opened in the space last September was the first full-service grocery store in more than a decade to open east of the Anacostia River, DCist reported at the time.
What’s happening: The retail side of the development is about 85% leased and 62% occupied, says WC Smith chief operating officer Brad Fennell.
D.C. isn’t the same city as it was 10 years ago, and it won’t be the same in the coming years either.
Along with the rest of the nation, the District has made and continues to make substantial changes to its cityscape. WTOP has compiled this list of 10 massive or otherwise notable projects that will have a major impact on the city and those who live and work here.
The research for this overview was supported by the D.C. Development Report created by the Washington, D.C. Economic Partnership, a nonprofit public-private organization whose purpose is to promote and support economic development and business opportunities in D.C.
It only took ten seconds to cut the ribbon on a project that was more than 10 years in the making.
To great fanfare and excitement, D.C. officials and residents gathered Tuesday afternoon in Ward 7 to welcome the city’s first Lidl grocery store, which officially opens its doors to the public on Wednesday morning.
The moment was as heavy with history and symbolism as it was with celebration: the Lidl is the first full-service grocery story to be built east of the Anacostia River in more than a decade, and only the fourth grocery store that will now serve the almost 160,000 residents of wards 7 and 8. It was built at the 18.5-acre Skyland Town Center, a mixed-use development that had for years bedeviled city officials looking to land anchor tenants.
D.C. residents on Tuesday celebrated the opening of a new supermarket east of the Anacostia River for the first time in 15 years — offering a much-needed grocer in a sector of the city that contains the highest concentration of food deserts.
The District’s first-ever Lidl food market opens this week at Skyland Town Center, an 18.5-acre mixed-use development that city officials broke ground on in 2014, though they are quick to note that plans to redevelop the site have been in the works for 30 years because of a litany of obstacles and legal delays — so long that five D.C. mayors have touched the project.
D.C.’s first Lidl grocery store opens in Southeast, D.C. on Wednesday. Mayor Muriel Bowser and District officials celebrated its soft opening with a ribbon cutting on Tuesday.
The grocery store has been in the works for a decade and is located at the Skyland Town Center. It will join three other full-service grocery stores in the area as well as bring fresh food options and jobs to Wards 7 and 8.
WASHINGTON (7News) — D.C.’s first Lidl Food Market will be celebrated Tuesday by Mayor Muriel Bowser and other District leaders.
Lidl Food Market is located at 2224 Town Center Dr SE in Skyland Town Center.
WASHINGTON – Lidl U.S. opened the doors to its first store in Washington, D.C. this week, with a grand opening ribbon-cutting on September 28th in Southeast D.C.
The Arlington, Virginia-based division of the German discount grocer’s newest location will anchor Skyland Town Center, a new mixed-use development from developer Rappaport that will include residences, retail and restaurants.
By year’s end, local retail developer Rappaport will have delivered a grocery store, sit-down restaurants, residences and more to Washington, D.C.’s underserved Skyland neighborhood — two decades after CEO Gary Rappaport won a bid for a collective 40 parcels and set about to build a high-end suburban center. The project, now known as Skyland Town Center, took vision — from a singular retail developer who imagined what 40 separate parcels could do together but also from a developer that dug in to see what the community itself envisioned.
In May 2002, Gary Rappaport won a bid from the District of Columbia to acquire 17 acres occupying four square blocks in the district’s 7th and 8th wards. Individual landowners had been operating stores on each of the 40-some plots independently. Despite Rappaport’s winning bid, the project still faced an eminent domain battle that reached the Supreme Court as the district sought to declare the area condemned so it could be sold it to a private developer. That case was settled in 2014, and the site sold to Rappaport a year later.
Gary Rappaport estimates about 100 in-person meetings with local residents that solidified the development’s primary objective: the first new grocery story for Southeast D.C. in more than 10 years. Walmart would have filled that need but pulled out of plans to anchor Skyland in 2016. Three years later, Lidl stepped up to fill the gap with its first District of Columbia store. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced the lease in May 2019 at the annual ICSC conference in Las Vegas. The store broke ground in January and will open Sept. 28.
The Crest at Skyland Town Center opened last year as the first apartment building at Skyland Town Center, a project by WC Smith and Rappaport that represents one of the largest mixed-use developments east of the Anacostia River in Southeast Washington.
The Takeaway: A 263-unit, three-story complex, The Crest is emblematic of the push by Mayor Muriel Bowser to bring more commercial development and higher-end apartments east of the Anacostia in historically overlooked and underserved Wards 7 and 8.
Why it Matters: A development more than three decades in the making, the Skyland Town Center is a story of perseverance and the commitment necessary to develop high-end commercial projects in a poorer part of the city that has failed to see the same type of engagement evident in almost every other part of Washington. In 2002, the D.C. government selected Rappaport to build Skyland Town Center, but the challenge of luring retailers to the area, including the loss of Walmart as its anchor tenant in 2016, coupled with a recession delayed the project for more than 15 years before development plans began in earnest.