Lerner’s Plan For Data Centers On Landover Mall Site Advances Despite Opposition

After sitting vacant for 17 years, an 87-acre former shopping mall site in Prince George’s County passed a crucial hurdle to launching its second act. 

The county's Planning Board unanimously approved Lerner Enterprises’ proposal Thursday morning to allow 4.1M SF of industrial development on the site, which Lerner is planning for data centers. 

“The development helps in diversifying the county’s tax base, and will contribute to the economic mix in the sector plan area,” the Prince George's County Planning Board report says. 

The now-vacant mall site was one of three finalists for the new FBI headquarters. But it lost out to a WMATA-owned site at the Greenbelt Metro station, which was selected in November as the location for the new federal campus.

With that option off the table, Lerner in January filed plans for a data center redevelopment.

The property is zoned for mixed-use under the M-X-T designation and was originally intended for a mix of uses including office, education, hotel, cultural, retail, medium- and- high-density residential, and open space. But in 2021, the county changed the allowed uses for M-X-T zones to include data centers, a change Lerner’s plan hinges on.

Lerner Enterprises didn't respond to a request for comment. 

“It's pretty clear that the Planning Board knew when they recommended support for that legislation that a data center was potentially very possible on this site,” CL Hatcher LLC Managing Partner Chris Hatcher, Lerner’s attorney, said at the hearing. 

“So it's not just what the council approved, but the Planning Board was aware and provided support for this use on this site and in a few other places,” he added.

Local nonprofit Greater Capitol Heights Improvement Corp. filed a letter of opposition to the Planning Board, arguing that Lerner's proposal doesn't comply with the overall area plans, including the 2009 Landover Gateway Sector Plan. 

“The plan references a mix of uses several times — mix of uses,” GCHIC President Bradley Heard said at Thursday’s hearing. “The subject property was to function as a place to live, work and play and visit, with a variety of interrelated pieces forming a cohesive whole.

“There is no mix of uses. There's no main street, there's no housing. There is no compact, connected street grid.” 

Heard argued that just because data centers are allowed doesn’t mean they should be the only use for the site, pointing out the need for high-density housing within the Beltway. 

GCHIC designed an alternative plan with a mix of uses, including data centers, that it asked to share with the applicant, according to Heard, who said the applicant was unwilling to meet.

Lerner’s plan also includes two public amenity spaces with greenery and seating and on-site preservation and reforestation efforts, and it provides pedestrian and bike-friendly infrastructure and bus shelters.

Local economic development organization Coalition for Smarter Growth filed a letter with the planning committee in support of the plan. 

“We wish to express our support for the proposed project, to convert this long-vacant grayfield into a data center,” the letter says. “We recognize that this is an economic benefit ... and also reuses a space that most view as an eyesore.”

The letter recommends adding retail, designing the roads and intersections around the development to reduce traffic speeds and increase safety, and making the data centers use more sustainable sources of energy. 

Prince George’s County Council Member Jolene Ivey, whose district includes Landover, told Bisnow last month she was initially “deflated” when she initially heard that data centers were the Plan B for the site after it lost the FBI competition, rather than some type of mixed-use community. But she said it will be a huge win for the county’s tax revenues. 

“We get money. We just don’t get the use that we may have been looking for,” she said.

The Landover property is one of several large development sites that Lerner Enterprises owns across the region, including the former White Flint Mall site in Montgomery County, but it has been slow to advance new projects in recent years. Lerner also owns the MLB's Washington Nationals and had been exploring a potential sale of the team until last month when Mark Lerner said the family decided not to sell.