Washington has been trying to solve two problems with one building type for four years: too much empty office and not enough housing. The Geneva is the biggest single swing anyone has taken at it.
Post Brothers is converting the two mid-century Universal Buildings on Connecticut Avenue NW into a single 15-story residential complex of 532 homes. It’s the largest office-to-residential conversion in D.C. history and the largest under way anywhere outside New York City. Total project cost runs $750 million.
Project Scope
Handel Architects designed the conversion of Universal North and Universal South into one complex. The unit mix is 472 market-rate and 60 permanently affordable, with 57,000 sq ft of ground-floor commercial.
Mayor Muriel Bowser broke ground on January 22, 2026. Three tower cranes are on site. Scope includes adding floors to the existing structures as well as removing existing elements, so this isn’t a fit-out inside a preserved shell.
The financing is the headline. A $465 million Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy loan from Nuveen Green Capital is the largest C-PACE loan ever placed, paired with a $110 million senior loan from Mavik Capital for a $575 million stack.
Why It Matters
C-PACE at this scale changes what’s possible on conversions. The structure lets energy-efficiency and building-systems work be financed as a long-dated assessment against the property rather than as senior debt, which matters enormously on a project where the entire mechanical, envelope and electrical infrastructure has to be replaced anyway. Conversions are capital-intensive in exactly the categories C-PACE covers. Nobody had pushed it to $465 million before.
The public side is doing work too. The District’s Housing in Downtown program is a $41 million investment projected to deliver 6.7 million sq ft of residential conversion and 8,400 units citywide, and The Geneva carries a 20-year tax abatement under it. At the same groundbreaking the city announced two more HID awards: 2121 Virginia Ave NW to Carr Properties for 300 homes, and 899 Maine Ave SW to Jair Lynch for 511.
Worth noting a discrepancy in the record: the mayor’s release describes 604,000 sq ft of office being converted, while the HID program table in the same release lists 1,100,000 sq ft total for the site.
Related coverage & projects
Project Team & Details
| Developer | Post Brothers |
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| Owner / Client | Post Brothers |
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| Architect | Handel Architects |
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| Status | Under Construction |
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| Sustainability Certification | LEED (target) |
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| Funding Source | Mixed |
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