West End Neigh­bors to Devel­oper: ‘Uh, You Can Leave Now’

by Ruth Samuel­son | Octo­ber 8, 2009, 9:33 am

Oh the gall! The sheer impu­dence of it all!

This is just a funny lit­tle tid­bit I read this morn­ing. As I blogged in late Sep­tem­ber, West End neigh­bors are in an uproar over the city’s selec­tion of devel­oper Equity Res­i­den­tial to trans­form the Stevens School downtown.

The locals wants the build­ing rede­vel­oped into some­thing extra spe­cial to reflect the fact that Stevens, with its amaz­ing his­tory and loca­tion, is deserv­ing of more than just the usual classrooms-to-bedrooms treatment.

Equity Res­i­den­tial has pro­posed apart­ment liv­ing. Boo! BooooOOOOoooOOOooo! say the locals, who are push­ing for a hotel.

And one West End leader, ANC com­mis­sioner Asher Corson—who also hap­pens to be Ward 3 Coun­cilmem­ber Mary Cheh’s spokesperson—took it upon him­self to essen­tially dis­miss the devel­oper, despite the fact that the com­pany had already been awarded the con­tract, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Exam­iner. I’ve never heard of any neigh­bor­hood leader offer­ing such a con­fi­dent ‘adieu!’

[Cor­son] sent a let­ter to Equity exec­u­tive Greg White Mon­day night urg­ing him to bow out gracefully.

“The deal is dead,” Cor­son told The Exam­iner. “At this point, there’s noth­ing left to talk about. Hope­fully, this will give the city and Equity an out.”

…Equity, which mar­kets its apart­ments to young sin­gles, can­vassed no sup­port because many neigh­bors saw the project as a “lux­ury dorm,” Cor­son said.

(For some rea­son, as I read this, real­ity tele­vi­sions lines—“Please pack your knives and go” and “You are the weak­est link, goodbye!”-–keep echo­ing in my brain.)

Nat­u­rally, Equity Res­i­den­tial says it con­tin­ues ” to look for­ward to meet­ing with the com­mu­nity.”

Equity Residential/Neighborhood Devel­op­ment Group’s plan