Given the current stormy economic climate, Scott Levitan and The Forest City Science + Technology Group are more than pleased with the progress they’ve made filling the John G. Rangos Sr. Building in East Baltimore’s Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins.
“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything — funding is difficult for everyone,” Levitan, Forest City’s senior vice president and development director, said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s a very challenging financial market.”
The group recently announced the Brain Sciences Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine will occupy 25,000 square feet of laboratory space on the second floor of the Rangos Building. BSI will share space used by the Johns Hopkins Neurology Department.
With BSI’s arrival, the 278,000-square-foot Rangos Building, which opened in April 2008, is 52 percent leased, Levitan said.
The building’s first tenants included other biotech firms like BioMarker Strategies, Cangen Biotechnologies, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Johns Hopkins Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.
Forest City is also in talks with several other “major” groups that plan to take space in the building, and Levitan expects the property will be completely leased by the end of 2009 or early 2010.
“It looked like it was going to be a very difficult market in 2009, so to be where we’re at is something to be really excited about and proud of,” Levitan said.
The Science + Technology Park at Johns Hopkins, which is being developed by The Forest City-New East Baltimore Partnership, is part of a $1.8 billion, multiyear, mixed-use development program across 88 acres of land in East Baltimore immediately north of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. The project, called the New East Side, is expected to bring as many as 6,000 new jobs to East Baltimore.
The first phase of the development includes the 1.1 million-square-foot Science + Technology Park, more than 850 housing units for mixed-income buyers and renters, and a variety of retail services.
Levitan said progress was being made on bringing another 200,000-square-foot lab to the tech park. Additional plans are in the works to bring a 200-room hotel to the project and several hundred for-sale town houses to the area by the end of 2009 or beginning of 2010.
“We’ve always been committed to really restoring this community and bringing an economic base to East Baltimore,” Levitan said.
