Residents who attended a community meeting about a multifamily apartment building proposed for the corner of Route 1 and Cherokee Street said on June 25 the project will bring too little retail and too much traffic to the area.
More than 40 residents, city officials and community leaders attended the meeting at Davis Hall in North College Park, mostly to object to plans for The Boulevard at 9091, a 243-unit apartment complex 20 years in the making on a long-vacant lot facing Route 1.
“To put it in the crassest way possible, it’s just packing in more bodies,” said Brian Roan, who lives in the College Park neighborhood of Daniels Park. “But if we’re about to lose a giant chunk of frontage on a major state highway, it would be nice to have something that makes us look a little more appealing, like nice retail.”
Prince George’s County initially approved a site plan for the property, which has changed owners three times in two decades, in 2006. In that plan, the developer had proposed to include 41,540 square feet of street-level retail and commercial space, which some recall might have included plans for a fitness center.
The current owner, Metropolitan Development Group, bought the tract in 2013 and is proposing to build retail space totaling 3,739 square feet on the building’s first floor.
College Park City Councilmember Alan Hew (District 1) aggressively opposed the project during two council meetings this spring, criticizing its lack of ground-floor retail space. He argued that North College Park lacks walkable retail options.
“There’s no community benefit here,” Hew argued at the June 25 community meeting. “They want to be full-on professional housing, $2,000 a month per unit, and you come out of that building and you look around, what is there to do?”
The lack of retail within walking distance of the new building, Hew said, will cause tenants to get in their cars and “go through the Beltway and go elsewhere to spend their dollars.”
Hew said he plans to circulate a petition among College Park residents to send to the county planning department requesting that planners re-evaluate the site plan.
“We already negotiated once before, and affordable housing wasn’t even a term back then,” Hew told College Park Here & Now after the meeting. “Now it is. Now it’s an issue. Twenty years can do that. So they either need to build what the original [detailed site plan] was agreed to, or they need to come back to redesign.”
Residents who attended the community meeting said they are concerned about pedestrian safety. Tim McDonald, senior construction and development consultant for Metropolitan, said the developer plans to build a roundabout on Cherokee Street to help alleviate traffic.
The city council in May agreed to support Metropolitan’s request to the county for a massive tax break through a program called Payment In Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT. The council ultimately agreed to send the letter, with a laundry list of conditions, including a set-aside for affordable apartments, reserved parking spaces and stormwater runoff control.
Construction on the site is tentatively scheduled for the second quarter of 2027.tentatively scheduled for the second quarter of 2027.