April 23, 2015
The more than 10,000 employees of the nearly 150 companies at The Navy Yard may soon have a much more convenient commute.
According to a report by PlanPhilly, negotiations to acquire and convert several historic buildings in The Navy Yard into loft apartment units are underway.
Currently, every civilian office worker at The Navy Yard -- the military-base-turned-corporate-office-park in South Philadelphia -- must leave at the end of the work day.
To change that, Philadelphia’s public-private economic
development corporation, PIDC, is working on a transaction agreement with the
Navy to hopefully acquire some of its 270-plus historic buildings to convert into mixed-use
housing.
Millennials who work at the URBN
campus, GlaxoSmithKline and other companies are the target population for the housing.
The idea is to build off of some of the existing and forthcoming restaurants and other amenities, so that when the business community leaves the site at the end of the work day, "the residential community is there to create demand at non-business hours, and to create a much more vital town-center, if you will," William Agate, PIDC’s senior vice president of Navy Yard management and development told PlanPhilly.
"… To put (housing units) right smack in the middle of all the commercial activity to create critical mass around those same amenities that we want to keep developing for the business community."
PIDC hopes to get the process started this summer with a Request for Proposals.
Read the full PlanPhilly article here.
