As real estate developers in Montgomery County pitch their plans to build new projects and neighborhoods, many use a similar refrain:
It’ll be like Bethesda Row.
(Jeffrey MacMillan/For Capital Business) - View of Rockville Pike, looking north, showing areas near the White Flint Mall that are about to undergo development.
(Jeffrey MacMillan/For Capital Business) - New developments close to the White Flint Metro station.
Few developments in the county have been so successful. The 534,000-square-foot development, at the corner of Arlington Road and Bethesda Avenue, blends three uses — retail, office and residential — charges high rents, and is the hub of nightlife for a community whose households within three miles take home on average more than $150,000 a year.
There isn’t going to be another Bethesda Row. But there is White Flint in Rockville. Comprised of 430 acres bisected by Rockville Pike, all within three-quarters of a mile of the White Flint Metro Station, it is a sea of parking lots, older office buildings and strip shopping centers.
Montgomery County is targeting the jumble to create a new county model for city living that could drive its commercial development for coming decades. The county’s plan — similar to Fairfax County’s vision for Tysons Corner — is to turn the traffic-riddled corridor into an urban, walkable place. But now it will largely fall to a half dozen major land owners to turn that vision into reality.
Those developers, including B.F. Saul, Federal Realty Investment Trust, the JBG Cos., LCOR, Lerner Enterprises and the Tower Cos., can take heart in the fact that Bethesda Row wasn’t built overnight. In 1994, when it was purchased by Federal Realty, the area was a collection of auto repair shops and light industrial uses. It was developed in 10 phases over 17 years, landing a succession of retail anchors, from Giant Food to Barnes & Noble to the Apple Store. Donald Wood, Federal Realty’s president and chief executive, said his company used Bethesda Row as its “laboratory” for mixed-use development.
It was a long road. In White Flint, a new plan has been in place for 18 months, and everyone is at the starting line.
Whole Foods debate
Rollin Stanley, director of planning for Montgomery County for the past three years, is a strong backer of urbanizing suburban areas that, like White Flint, enjoy access to public transit. A native of Canada, he often raves about the planning of Toronto when speaking at real estate conferences and he writes a blog on the county Web site in which he extols the way traffic is handled in place likes London, St. Louis and Portland, Ore. A favorite slogan of Stanley’s is: “No place is worth visiting that doesn’t have a parking problem.”
But he sometimes found himself at odds with residents, who were concerned that adding so much density would produce more car traffic and deplete open space.
A turning point came, he said, during debate over North Bethesda Market, a 600,000-square-foot project featuring a Whole Foods grocery store that JBG proposed across the street from the White Flint mall. The project included 400 luxury apartments in a 24-story tower, what would be the tallest building of any kind in Montgomery County.
As JBG’s plans began to take shape, Stanley said bigger buildings began to be viewed as something people could walk to, rather than something that would add more traffic; the economic argument for more density gained steam.
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