Barbara Wishner has seen a lot of changes since she moved into Kenwood Place in Bethesda.
Her son, for example, was 3 months old when she took an apartment in what was then a new luxury rental building off Westbard Avenue near River Road. He has just celebrated his 45th birthday.
When Wishner moved in, the long, low brick building, with hallways that went on and on, and extra-spacious units, was the talk of the town.
Not only was it in the "middle of nowhere," way out two-lane River Road, she says, but it was conceived as just one piece of a new kind of community, a multi-use development. Behind Kenwood Place would be a regional shopping mall, with a Giant grocery store, a pharmacy, other mom-and-pop stores and a huge parking lot. Nearby would be gas stations, office buildings and more apartments. All the conveniences, right there.
Things have changed a lot since then for Wishner and her neighbors. Suburbia spreads miles farther out now. The strip malls of the 1950s have given way to new urbanism, where houses and apartments sit right on top of shopping. And the tenants of Kenwood Place are now condominium owners.
But one thing didn't change, until this year: The residents of Kenwood Place could never get control of the land below their homes. In April, however, they finally bought that land, for $10 million. And how that happened is a story of complex real estate law and simple persistence.
Kenwood Place and the nearby shopping center were the first major real estate developments of Laszlo Tauber, a Hungarian-born surgeon who became a billionaire real estate icon. He started investing in 1952 with $750, after surviving the Holocaust and making his way to the United States. By the time Tauber died in 2002, he was one of the Washington region's biggest property owners.
Although the 171 owners at Kenwood Place had bought the 174 units in the conversion to condos in 1981, Tauber and his management firm never gave up ownership of the three acres of ground beneath the building and the seven acres of green space and parking.
Instead, the company leased the land to the condo. Ground leases are rare for non-rental properties in the Washington area, development lawyers said. Buying them is even rarer.
So Wishner and most others at Kenwood Place are, to put it mildly, pretty darn pleased.
"We paid less to buy our condos because of the ground lease, but people never understood it," Wishner said. "People would say, 'Oh, I wouldn't live in your building because you have the highest condo fee in the city.' But it wasn't the condo fee, it was the ground rent added on."
Association leaders said the ground lease, which would have expired in 2069, had always made potential buyers skittish, kept property values under market levels and threatened some day to leave them owning nothing.
