Drive down Livingston Road on any given Saturday morning and you won't hit a single eighteen-wheeler. That's worth noticing, because two years ago this stretch of road was the center of the loudest fight Fort Washington had seen in a while, and the fight was supposed to be over. The county board voted. The developer won. The trucks were coming.
They still haven't.
That gap between what got approved and what actually showed up on the ground is the real story in Fort Washington this year, and it says something the generic neighborhood roundups miss entirely: a zoning win on paper and a change to your daily commute are two very different things, and the distance between them can stretch on for years while the rest of the neighborhood quietly builds something else.
What Got Approved, and What's Still Just a Listing
In September 2024, the Prince George's County planning board gave unanimous approval to a Prologis logistics warehouse proposed for 9405 Livingston Road, a 17-acre site the company calls Prologis Capital Beltway II. Fort Washington Forward, the community nonprofit that's become the neighborhood's de facto watchdog, organized residents to fight it. NBC4 covered the meeting, where Staci Hartwell of the Prince George's County NAACP told the board the area "should be a priority for relief, not more harmful development that erodes our health, quality of life and wealth." Protest signs read "We deserve better."
The objection wasn't just about trucks, though truck traffic on an already congested road was the headline concern. Fort Washington Forward's own planning notes point out that the site sits in an area the county's Master Plan recommended for a pedestrian-centric village center. The zoning allowed the warehouse anyway. The board acknowledged the conflict and approved the project regardless, calling it a matter of meeting existing zoning rights rather than resolving what the long-range plan actually envisioned for the corridor.
That was two years ago. Check Prologis's own property listings today and 9405 Livingston Road is still catalogued as a "future" build-to-suit facility, not an active or completed one. Nothing has broken ground. For residents, that means the practical reality of daily life on Livingston Road in 2026 hasn't changed, at least not yet. The approval is real and it doesn't expire on its own, so the site remains a live possibility rather than a settled outcome. If you live nearby, the empty lot behind the chain-link fence is worth checking on periodically rather than assuming the fight ended the day the vote did.
Where the Actual Change Showed Up
While that fight stalled in place, the neighborhood's food scene moved. Kings Old Forte Village, the small commercial cluster on Cady Drive, now anchors two spots that have become regular stops for people who live here.
Milk & Honey Southern Inspired Kitchen opened a full-service location in the village, serving Smothered Chicken & Biscuits and Berries & Cream French Toast alongside brunch staples like Chicken & Waffles and Shrimp & Grits. The space is small and the seating is limited, which is part of the point. It reads less like a chain outpost and more like a neighborhood kitchen that happens to have a menu.
A few doors down, MaryLou's has built a following around tacos, drawing enough regulars that its Yelp reviews read like a running conversation among people who already know each other. It's the kind of place a resident recommends to a neighbor rather than the kind a visitor finds by accident.
Neither of these openings made the news the way the warehouse vote did. Neither needed a planning board hearing or a public comment period. That's the contrast worth sitting with: the development everyone fought over is still a fenced lot, and the development nobody had to fight for is already serving Sunday brunch.
The Market That Matters More Than the Renderings
Fort Washington Forward didn't stop at protest signs. The same nonprofit that organized the Livingston Road opposition also runs the Forward Farmers Market, a seasonal Saturday market at Colin Powell Academy that's become one of the more concrete pieces of neighborhood infrastructure to actually get built in recent years.
What the market actually offers:
- Fresh produce, meats, eggs, honey, jams, and baked goods from local growers and makers
- Handmade arts, crafts, and home goods from neighbors, not vendors bused in from elsewhere
- Acceptance of Maryland Market Money Access cards, with the market matching Access dollars spent, which directly addresses food access for residents on assistance programs
- Free parking at the school lot, removing one of the small frictions that keeps people from bothering with a Saturday market at all
This is a useful contrast to the warehouse conversation. One project came with a corporate site plan, a traffic study, and a county hearing, and two years later it's still a rendering. The other came from a 501(c)3 formed in December 2021 with a two-fold mission of attracting smart investment and building social connectivity, and it's been putting local food on tables on a recurring schedule ever since. Scale isn't the same, obviously. But it's a reminder that the things that actually change a resident's week aren't always the things that generate the most headlines.
The Weekend Rhythm
Beyond the food and the fight, Fort Washington still runs on a few reliable fixtures that don't need a controversy to matter:
Fort Washington Park, the National Park Service site that gives the neighborhood its name, holds historical demonstrations and cannon firings on a recurring basis, the kind of low-key programming that works better for someone who already lives ten minutes away than for a tourist planning a special trip. Down at the marina, Proud Mary's brings in live music on weekends, giving the waterfront a reason to be a Friday-night stop rather than just a place you drive past.
None of this requires an event calendar app to find. It's the stuff that shows up because you've lived here long enough to know when to look for it.
What This Actually Means If You're Already Here
The lesson from watching Livingston Road versus Cady Drive over the same two-year stretch isn't that Fort Washington is stuck or that nothing changes. It's that approval and construction aren't the same milestone, and residents who track only the loud fights can miss the quieter build-out happening a half mile away. If you want a real read on where the neighborhood stands, check both: has anything moved on the Prologis site, and what's new at Kings Old Forte Village. Right now, the honest answer is nothing and quite a bit, in that order.
For more on how Fort Washington fits into the broader Prince George's County market, our Fort Washington neighborhood page has additional local context worth a look.
If you're weighing what a stalled project like the Livingston Road warehouse might mean for your own street, or you're just trying to make sense of how a neighborhood's zoning history affects its future, Anthony Beharry has spent more than two decades reading exactly these kinds of signals across Prince George's County and DC. Let's Connect.
