H Street Getting Its Giant

• November 10th 2010

by Joe Marhamati

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After months of speculation about which grocery store would be coming to H Street NE, the wait is finally over.

After Trader Joe’s, Harris Teeter and Yes! Organic all passed on the opportunity, DCist reports that a 41,200 square-foot Giant Food has signed on to open at 3rd and H Street NE (map). Construction is expected to begin this coming spring and the store will open in 2013. The grocery store will anchor what is now being called 360 (degrees) H Street, a 286,500 square-foot project from Steuart Investment Co. that will eventually include 212 rental units and 279 parking spaces as well as additional retail.

It will be interesting to see what type of effect this news has on the H Street Corridor, a neighborhood that lay dormant for years, but is now one of the hippest areas in the city for the under-35 set.

In April, we wrote about the “explosive effect” that the opening of a grocery store can have on a neighborhood. Examples throughout the city are numerous: the “urban lifestyle” Safeway on the ground floor of CityVista at 5th and L Street NW is always one of the first amenities cited by residents of Mount Vernon Triangle; the rapidly changing but oft-overlooked Southwest neighborhood now has a newly renovated Safeway that was long derided as sloppy and understocked; and the Jenkins Row Harris Teeter on Pennsylvania Avenue in Capitol Hill helped sell the 250+ units in that condo project.

As David Mayhood, president of real estate marketing firm the Mayhood Company, noted in a Housing Complex post a few months ago “…the consumer really follows the shopping cart. When the grocery store happens, it just explodes.” It will be interesting to see if this adage holds true on H Street.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/h_street_getting_its_giant/2662.