Johns Hopkins Aims to Bring Science Center to Rockville

When Liz Banks sold her 138-acre Rockville farm to Johns Hopkins University to expand the Shady Grove Life Sciences Center, she asked for only $5 million, a small fraction of the property's value.

In exchange, she was allowed to live in a modest house that the university built for her on the property and won a promise that she could raise 80 head of black Angus cattle. The Baltimore-based university, one of the nation's premier research institutions, sold off 30 acres for office buildings after the deal with Banks in 1989. And officials puzzled over the future of the rest of the property.

Three years after Banks's death at age 93, Hopkins wants to use much of what was Banks's historic Belward Farm to transform the area into a thriving science research city with high-rise offices, shopping, restaurants and housing, on 600 acres. The area already includes Hopkins, Shady Grove Adventist Hospital and the Universities at Shady Grove, part of the University System of Maryland, as well as several science and tech companies.

The project, a much broader plan than county officials envisioned more than 20 years ago when they first enticed medical and academic institutions to the area, eventually could bring an additional 45,000 workers -- about triple the number now -- and an unknown number of new residents. The goal is to have expand academics and have more "applied science" companies, which take scientific findings and turn them into real-world products.

"We hope to create the largest aggregation of applied scientists in the Washington region," said David M. McDonough, senior director of development oversight for the Hopkins's real estate division. The array of properties sits along Shady Grove Road west of Interstate 270, and across the highway from the Shady Grove Metro stop. There are several landowners, as well as county planners and politicians, whom Hopkins will need to convince that adding additional density won't further clog an already busy area. McDonough says the university plans to apply "smart growth" principles to reduce dependence on cars and create an area that is hospitable to walkers, cyclists and public transportation.

The university's agreement with Banks precludes building tract housing on her former property, something she disdained. Any housing would need to be located elsewhere or linked to the university's core mission of research and education, according to the agreement.

Hopkins officials says redesigning the area to become a major, internationally competitive scientific center will help Montgomery County and the Washington-Baltimore region keep pace with similar research centers in Palo Alto, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass., as well as China, India, Malaysia and South Korea.

The idea behind the Hopkins development plan, dubbed Vision 2030, for the year it could come to fruition, is to find ways to attract and retain scientists. The goal is also to expand synergistic relationships with federal agencies in Montgomery such as the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as companies that do business with them.

But transforming the area will not be simple.

First, Hopkins must sell its vision to other businesses, neighbors and county officials.

Hopkins's property includes some historic buildings on Banks's former farm, which preservationists hope to retain and integrate into any new development. Hopkins also needs to get a zoning change to enable the project to include taller buildings and in other ways accommodate a tenfold expansion of the 1.4 million buildable square feet now allowed on Belward Farm.

"The majority of the Life Sciences Center has been built to typical suburban standards, with clusters of single-use employment, surface parking lots, and major highways," said a planning department report by Nancy Sturgeon, the planner for the area. Altering the "suburban park model," she wrote, will pose "a considerable challenge."