The Downtown Of A Mini-City 40 Years In The Making Breaks Ground
Work is underway on the first structures in downtown Konterra, a planned mixed-use district in Prince George’s County that has been decades in the making.
The Gould Property Co. has started in on the townhome portion of the 400-acre downtown district, which falls in the center of its 2,000-acre census-designated region between Beltsville and Laurel, Maryland.
Gould executives on Thursday held a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the beginning of that first phase, which includes more than 200 townhomes being built by Caruso Homes.
“This is a beginning. It's exciting. It’s a continuum, and it will remain like that for many years,” Gould Property Chairman Caleb Gould said at the groundbreaking. “We're starting with the residential program so we can have rooftops in place and all of that to attract the very best retail and corporate tenants.”
The townhomes are set to start delivering in the fall. At full build-out, the 400-acre Konterra Town Center East is slated to have 1.5M SF of retail, 3.8M SF of office, 600 hotel rooms, and 4,500 homes and apartments. The full region is planned to have 8.5 miles of parks, trails and public plazas.
Purchased by the Gould Property Co. in the early 1980s, the 2,000-acre Konterra site was a sand and gravel mining site beginning in the 1930s.
Since the acquisition, Gould has been working on creating the infrastructure from scratch, from the sewer systems to the roads. It developed and sold off 600 of those acres for single-family homes and has produced about 1M SF of flex office and distribution centers on the site. A 20-megawatt data center is also in the works.
“We're very deliberate,” Gould CEO Giacomo Barbieri, the grandson of Kingdon Gould Jr. who took over as head of the 75-year-old company last summer, told Bisnow in an interview.
“We are going to own the properties that we build. We're not going to sell them. So we're only going to build when we think we're going to build to the highest quality,” Barbieri said.
“So that's a little bit of the journey we went through, making sure that we start and we build what's right, when is right, as opposed to building for building's sake,” he added.
CORRECTION, MAY 15, 5 P.M. ET: A previous version of this story incorrectly spelled Kingdon Gould Jr.'s name. The story has been updated.
