Radio One moving HQ to Silver Spring, MD

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DC-based Radio One is moving its corporate headquarters from suburban Lanham, MD to cross-town Silver Spring, MD ending a years-long effort by the company to return to the District, where it was founded by Catherine Hughes in 1980. Radio One was looking to move to the District before the economy went sour. It would have anchored a new mixed-use project atop a Metro subway  station in the Shaw neighborhood of DC at Seventh and S streets NW.


Hughes had made a plea to the D.C. Council to support the Shaw project in 2007. The council and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) obliged, providing a package of subsidies with an estimated value of $30 million. The project was to be named Broadcast Center One and have a ground-floor recording studio. The company has five stations in the DC market.

But Radio One’s stock price dove during the recession and early last year it pulled out of the Shaw project. According to a Washington Post story, Radio One has now chosen office space where its company’s TV One unit is located, just across the border from the District, on the top floor of a Silver Spring office building called the Atrium at Station Square.

The story said TV One extended its lease and Radio will relocate to 23,000 square feet of space in September. To keep Radio One, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) provided the firm with a $400,000 grant that requires the company to invest at least $1.25 million in the move by the end of 2012 and maintain at least 210 employees there throughout the six-year lease. The DC office space has been replaced with the United Negro College Fund as anchor. The building has since been renamed Progression Place and is under construction.