(Washington, DC) Mayor Adrian M. Fenty on Wednesday announced that National Public Radio (NPR) will build a new 400,000 square foot headquarters along North Capitol Street in NoMA, a District neighborhood in the midst of a massive revitalization.
“NPR is a Washington icon,” Mayor Fenty said. “Their decision to not only stay in the District, but to build a new headquarters in one of our most important emerging neighborhoods says a lot about how far we’ve come in transforming our city.”
NPR started here in the District about 38 years ago and it has become the international gold standard for radio. It was one of the first companies to move into the Penn Quarter neighborhood when it bought its current building in 1992.
“The ability to play a role once again in revitalizing an emerging neighborhood was important to NPR staff,” said Ken Stern, NPR’s CEO. “The proximity of the site to key institutions of government is critical to our journalists; the accessibility to transportation hubs will enable us to welcome not just the community, but our colleagues from public radio stations around the country and many of our 26 million listeners.”
NPR will build its new headquarters at 1111 North Capitol Street – the historic former C&P Telephone warehouse. The organization will convert the building into a 10-story office building in excess of 400,000 square feet.
NPR was aggressively courted by economic development officials in the surrounding jurisdictions with lower land values. To help level the playing field, the District has agreed to a 20-year tax abatement and new streetscape improvements around the nearby New York Avenue Metrorail station.
On March 3, 2008, Mayor Fenty unveiled the Center City Action Agenda, which calls for using incentives to promote private sector investment in emerging neighborhoods like NoMA, the Ballpark district, our waterfronts and East of the River in Anacostia.
NPR’s new building will be located next to the District’s $700 million Northwest One New Communities project, which calls for rebuilding hundreds of nearby public housing units and replacing them three-for-one with a mix of affordable, workforce and market rate units as well as a new school, library and community center. The entire NoMA neighborhood is slated for more than 20 million square feet of new development, including thousands of new condos and apartments, hotels, retail and a new high-end grocery store.