Posted by Aaron Wiener on Nov. 12, 2014 at 6:08 pm

Among the many complications of the deal to build a new D.C. United soccer stadium, one has received virtually no notice. It involves a parcel of land far from Buzzard Point, where the stadium is set to be constructed, on a site currently occupied by, of all things, a farm.

Until recently, the District planned to redevelop the Farm at Walker Jones, an urban garden on city-owned land at First and K streets NW, into a mix of residences and retail. But with the stadium deal came a change in plans: As part of the complex web of land swaps that comprised the deal, the farm site would be traded to Pepco for land the utility owns near the stadium, to become a substation.

That’s an unpleasant enough transition for a space currently occupied by squash, greens, and beehives. But it’s all the more problematic in the context of what the site was previously slated to become.

The First and K parcel is part of Northwest One, one of four projects that comprise New Communities, the city’s ambitious affordable-housing redevelopment initiative. Under the Northwest One development plan, the site was to become 232 apartments and townhouses, including 82 deeply subsidized units for low-income residents. Ground-floor retail there would anchor a new K Street “main street” connecting nearby Mount Vernon Triangle and NoMA, with “neighborhood retail services such as restaurants, dry cleaners, bookstores and drugstores.”

Now, instead of residences and shops, the neighborhood will get a street-deadening electrical facility

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