Coming Soon to NoMa: Life

Near J Street Development's project, a 292,000-square-foot office building is going up at First and M streets NE, on speculation. Stephen A. Goldberg Co. of the District, in partnership with Prudential Financial Inc., started construction last March.

"The timing was right," said Joseph Doran, vice president of development at Goldberg Co., who wanted to build before construction costs rose further. The building, called Capitol Plaza, is expected to be done this fall and there are plans for five more buildings on the site, which once held warehouses.

"It has terrific road access and it's one of the last islands of undeveloped land," Doran said of NoMa. "It's a no-brainer that it's going to develop successfully."

Others are a bit more cautious.

Sam Rose -- who has developed and managed 2 million square feet of office space in NoMa whose tenants include CNN, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, associations and other government agencies, said he is waiting for a tenant before he does anything with a parking lot he owns at K and First streets NE near Union Station.

"We've been waiting 15 years," Rose said. "I don't think the market is good enough. I take my hat off to [Goldberg] for going ahead."

Rose, who was one of the first to build offices in NoMa in the 1980s and is jokingly called the "grandfather" of the area remembers when land went for $10 per buildable square foot. Now it sells for about $50 per buildable square foot -- about the same price as in Near Southeast, but about half of the rate for land downtown.

Rose and other developers said they are worried that the recent pullback of several large-scale requests for space by the General Services Administration could be tough for developers in NoMa. The government is often the first to go into developing neighborhoods.

The area was first developed in the 1920s and 1930s, mostly with distribution centers and warehouses. Woodward & Lothrop, the department store chain, once had a distribution center at 131 M St. NE, now known as One NoMa Station, which is being turned into an office building.

In the late 1990s and early 2000, companies such as XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. began to move in. Some took warehouses like One NoMa Station, which had been retrofitted as a data center and offered proximity to the fiber-optic lines that run along the railroad tracks, according to Mark Mallus, a first vice president at CB Richard Ellis who has been making deals in the NoMa area for more than a decade. But some buildings, which had attracted telecommunications companies, were vacated after the technology bust, and developers hope to fill them with federal agencies, private companies and associations.

Now is the time to prepare a blueprint of how the area should look, said Ellen M. McCarthy, director of the D.C. Office of Planning.

"We want to get ahead of a lot of the development," she said.