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A Neighborhood Rises at The Yards
One of the buildings being redeveloped in The Yards was part of the Navy Yard Annex. When work is done in 2009, it will contain 170 apartments.
(Forest City Washington)
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Forest City Enterprises, the parent company of Forest City Washington, is a Cleveland firm that began as a family lumber business. It expanded into real estate and apartment construction in the 1930s, then built some of the country's first prefabricated housing and strip malls. Today its projects include the 52-story New York Times Building opening later this year and a new city at the site of the former Stapleton International Airport in Denver.
Salzberg's father, Albert B. Ratner, is co-chairman of the Forest City Enterprises board of directors. Salzberg heads the 45-person Washington office, one of six regional Forest City offices.
She has a long history in this area. She went to George Washington University and after law school at the University of San Francisco returned to the District to work as a litigator for the Justice Department's civil division. There, she said, she had the difficult and unrewarding task of fighting lawsuits by people who said they had been harmed by the government's atomic-bomb tests in the 1940s and 1950s.
"The cases were horrible," Salzberg said. "People were suing for radiation poisoning and I defended the government." After five years, she joined the family real estate business in 1985.
"My relatives said, 'If you're working this hard, you should be working for us,' " she said.
Salzberg said she was inspired to develop retail in Washington by a Forest City project in Brooklyn called Atlantic Center, which became very profitable by bringing Old Navy and similar stores to the inner city.
"I said we ought to start doing that in Washington," Salzberg said. In 1997, Forest City sought a sole-source government contract to develop a mixed-use project in Columbia Heights in the District. Though it lost out to a New York company, Forest City received enough positive attention that city leaders began approaching the firm about the possibility of building in other neighborhoods.
In January 2004, it won the right from the federal government to build The Yards.
"We tend to focus on underutilized urban areas, where we believe the demographics are poised for growth," Salzberg said. "When we looked at how close the Capitol was to this site and the fact that it was on the river, the combination made for a perfect long-term site. It is very rare in a major metropolitan area where you could control this much."
