The Purple Line is Already Changing College Park

Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

It’s no secret: Developers love mass transit. And they’re already loving the Purple Line.

The light rail project isn’t expected to be operational until 2020, but already College Park is seeing new interest from builders and corporate tenants.

Already, the Purple Line seems to have convinced WeWork to put its first location in Maryland in a repurposed building next to the Hotel at the University of Maryland.

“The first conversation we had with them was that they wanted closer proximity to Metro, so, frankly, explaining to them the Purple Line is coming and the stop is a block from the WeWork site … was very helpful in sealing the deal,” Ken Ulman, the University of Maryland’s chief economic development strategy officer, told Bis Now.

The Purple Line is also partly to credit for a new 75,000-square-foot office building in the university’s Discovery District, which also has a stop.

Evan Weisman works for Donohoe Companies, which owns a three-story, 160,000-square-foot office building in College Park, said that the Purple Line has changed how they look at even existing buildings.

“We view that (property) very differently than we did before the Purple Line and the development in College Park started,” he told Bis Now. “Before anything was announced, this property was a typical office building on a surface-parked parcel of land, and now all of a sudden, all along the Purple Line, this site included, there’s more potential for better utilization of land.”

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