The Six Flags Site Doesn't Have a Plan Yet. It Already Has a Scoreboard.

The coasters at the old Six Flags America went quiet for good after the 2025 season, closing out a run that started in 1974 and carried the Six Flags name since 1999. Since then the 515 acres in Woodmore, just outside Bowie, have sat mostly still, waiting on an investment group led by Prince George's County native Kevin Durant and his firm 35V, alongside Atlanta-based TPA Group, to decide what replaces a half century of rollercoasters.

Nobody has released a site plan. What the county has released is a number, and it says more about what's coming than any rendering would.

The Number That's Actually Running the Show

County Executive Aisha Braveboy has been direct about how she'll judge whether the redevelopment works: not by job counts or unit totals, but by whether the site eventually sends more tax revenue to the county than National Harbor does. That's a specific bar. National Harbor sits on 350 acres along the Potomac and generates roughly $80 million a year for the county. Six Flags, even at its peak, brought in up to $3.5 million annually, and it did that while closing during the cooler months and using only about a fifth of its acreage for rides and parking.

That gap is the whole story. A quiet residential build-out on 515 acres does not close a gap that size. Whatever gets approved here has to behave more like a commercial destination than a neighborhood, because a neighborhood was never going to clear the number the county set for itself.

What Over a Thousand Residents Actually Asked For

At the June 25 town hall inside the Wayne K. Curry Building, county officials read aloud responses from a 14-question survey that had already drawn more than 1,000 submissions. The requests clustered hard around a few themes:

• Recreational facilities and open gathering space
• Restaurants and shopping, with Mitchellville Plaza shopper Natalie Reaves describing her wish list as "another shopping plaza with a higher-quality grocery store"
• Family-oriented entertainment, with fellow shopper Jackie Steele-McCall telling a reporter, "I would be very happy for family entertainment"

TPA Group's Adam Rashid told the room that the idea scoring among the survey's highest marks was a "chef-driven food hall and dining destination," a specific concept, not a category. That detail matters more than it looks. Residents weren't asking for generic mixed-use density. They were asking for the kind of anchor tenant that shows up in a leasing brochure, the sort of thing that reads as a destination rather than infill.

At-large council member Wala Blegay has framed the ambition in similar terms, comparing the opportunity to what National Harbor did for Fort Washington and arguing the site should function as a regional draw rather than a housing project. The community's own preference, as one WTOP headline summarized it, ran toward "more family fun, less housing."

The Boundary Nobody Gets to Vote On

There is one constraint on this site that doesn't move no matter what the survey says. The former park's northern edge borders Belt Woods Natural Environment Area, a 624-acre state-owned preserve that holds one of the last stands of old-growth forest left on the Atlantic Coastal Plain, part of it carrying National Natural Landmark status for more than fifty years.

Developers have made no public statements about building into Belt Woods. Conservationists are watching the edge of that boundary anyway. Janet Gingold of the Prince George's Sierra Club put the concern plainly:

"There needs to be a substantial buffer between any new development and the old-growth forest area."

That buffer requirement doesn't show up in a zoning fee or a traffic study. It shows up as acreage that never gets built on, which means the commercial density the county needs to hit its revenue target has to get concentrated on less land than 515 acres implies. Anyone trying to picture the eventual footprint should start by carving out the northern edge before drawing anything else.

Why This Reads as a Commercial Play, Not a Housing Story

It's worth sitting with how unusual this framing is for a 500-plus acre parcel in the middle of established Prince George's County neighborhoods. Most sites this size eventually get pitched as a mix of residential product with retail stitched in around the edges. This one is being pitched, by the county's own executive, as something judged primarily on commercial tax revenue, with residents actively pushing back against a heavy housing component.

Braveboy has said she expects zoning approvals and the start of construction within 12 to 18 months of the April 2026 sale announcement, which puts the earliest ground-up work sometime between spring and fall of 2027. The 14-question community survey remains open, and county officials have said more public meetings are planned before anything gets formalized.

For anyone who shops at Mitchellville Plaza two miles west of the site, or who lives across the line in Bowie or Woodmore, this is worth tracking regardless of what happens next with the property itself. A commercial destination judged against National Harbor's revenue numbers pulls a different kind of traffic, a different retail mix, and a different evening crowd than a housing development would. The food desert complaint that came up more than once at the town hall, the specific ask for a grocery-anchored plaza, suggests residents already understand that whatever gets built here will shape daily errands more than it shapes the housing stock next door.

What's Actually Worth Watching From Here

The survey stays open. The next round of public meetings hasn't been scheduled publicly yet. And the Belt Woods buffer question has not been resolved on paper, even though no one involved has proposed crossing it.

None of that adds up to a plan. It adds up to a set of guardrails, an unusually specific financial target, and a resident base that has already told the developers, in writing and out loud, what it wants to see instead of empty rides. Whether that translates into a food hall, a family entertainment complex, or something closer to a scaled-down National Harbor won't be clear for at least another year. What's already clear is that the shape of the answer has to fit inside that $80 million line, and that alone rules out a lot of what usually gets built on land this size.

If you're trying to figure out how this folds into the value or feel of your part of the county, the team at The Dapo Group is watching the same filings and survey updates. Book a Discovery Call if you want to talk through what a project like this typically means for the neighborhoods sitting closest to it.