Editor’s Note: Over the next two weeks, Bethesda Beat will be looking back at 2015 with the stories and trends that made news this year.
Here are some of the biggest local development stories of the year, most which will make an impact lasting into 2016:
Planners confront question of how to redevelop aging shopping centers with little transit access
This year’s most intense development debate was over an aging strip shopping center far from any of Montgomery County’s cherished and rapidly redeveloping downtowns. It could say a lot about how the county navigates the broader debate over urbanization in the future.
Westbard, the sector plan approved last week by the Planning Board will continue to be in the spotlight early next year when it hits the County Council for final approval. You can expect the residents who vehemently opposed allowing the redevelopment of the Westwood Shopping Center in 2015 to keep fighting.
Some of them hired Norman Knopf, a local attorney who specializes in representing residents of single-family-home neighborhoods opposed to various aspects of nearby projects. Others started an email campaign to Planning Board commissioners illustrating their opposition—a direct response to the email campaign started by the public relations agency representing developer Equity One.
Equity One has argued since 2014 that Westwood Shopping Center—a traditional suburban-style shopping center with an excess of surface parking space—is in dire need of revitalization.
But neighbors have pushed back, even as the developer maintains that its plans for a 250,000-square-foot “retail town center” with underground parking and a town home community aren’t urban in the same sense as downtown Bethesda or Silver Spring.
Among the opposition’s chief arguments: The Westbard Avenue site is far from Metro, the planned Purple Line or any other real transit infrastructure, something the county has used to rationalize allowing more housing and density in Bethesda, Silver Spring, White Flint, Chevy Chase Lake and other areas.
“It’s important as legislators to remember that this is still a very suburban county,” County Council President Nancy Floreen told Bethesda Beat earlier this month. “Sometimes, we talk a lot about transit and density and the like and not everyone is there. Montgomery County is still to its core, I think, a suburban place. We have to always keep that in mind. The challenge in some of these commercial centers is how do you balance the need for reinvestment with the need for what the neighborhood desires?”
At long last, Lot 31’s redevelopment is complete…
The back courtyard at The Flats, the apartment building on the former Lot 31 space in downtown Bethesda. Credit: Aaron Kraut
It took 11 years and plenty of stops and starts, but the project on Bethesda’s former Lot 31 finally opened in June.
Developers StonebridgeCarras and PN Hoffman partnered with the Montgomery County government to build a nine-floor, 88-unit luxury condominium building and a seven-floor, 162-unit apartment building on either side of Woodmont Avenue just south of Bethesda Row.
In the partnership with the county, the developers replaced the surface parking of Lot 31 with a new, 1,250-space parking garage below, a process that required the county to close part of Woodmont Avenue for more than two years.
At the project’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, County Executive Ike Leggett promised the delays that prolonged the Lot 31 project wouldn’t happen in future public-private partnerships.
…And White Flint’s redevelopment is at a standstill
The community waiting to see the long-planned redevelopment project at White Flint Mall hoped the conclusion of its trial against anchor store Lord & Taylor would move things along. It appears that won’t be the case.
In August, a jury ordered White Flint Mall to pay Lord & Taylor $31 million for what it deemed was a breach of the parties’ original 1975 contract that brought the department store to the mall. Lord & Taylor argued that the mall’s redevelopment plans go against a contractual agreement to maintain the property as a shopping mall.
As the mall appeals the decision, at least one of its representatives has said the planned mixed-use redevelopment is unlikely unless the verdict is reversed.
Meanwhile, almost the entire mall structure (save for Lord & Taylor’s space) was demolished over 2015 and the mall hasn’t gone back before the Planning Board since 2012 for redevelopment approvals.
Here come more assisted living communities
At least five senior living communities are now in the works for Bethesda, Potomac and Rockville, with one company proposing a downtown Bethesda facility it hopes will allow its residents to enjoy the same transit-oriented, walkable lifestyle often marketed to millennials.
Baltimore-based Brightview Senior Living is working on an eight-story assisted living facility with ground-floor retail on Rugby Avenue in downtown Bethesda and in 2015 announced plans for other facilities near the historic Grosvenor Mansion and Rockville Town Center.
Meanwhile, New Jersey-based Brandywine Senior Living got a key approval for its 120-suite, 140-bed facility planned for the site of the Potomac Tennis & Fitness Club just off Falls Road in Potomac. The McClean, Virginia-based Artis Senior Living company is pushing for a one-floor, 40,000-square-foot facility on the site of a private home on River Road.
Officials for the companies say the build-up of senior living facilities isn’t just because of the coming “Silver Tsunami”. It’s also because the Bethesda area remains a popular place to live for the sons and daughters of those who need assisted living and their residents like to remain close to their children.
City of Rockville loosens school capacity restrictions
Rockville Town Center. Credit: Aaron Kraut
Some long-delayed projects inside the city limits of Rockville finally have a chance to proceed after the city’s council narrowly voted to loosen an ordinance that had imposed a development moratorium in parts of the city with overcrowded schools.
The vote came in June, relaxing the city’s Adequate Public Facility Standards for schools and making it match the county’s standards.
Whereas before, no development project could happen in the city if any public school in the project’s area was 110 percent or more overcapacity, now projects can proceed until all public schools in a project’s area are at an average of 120 percent capacity for each schooling level.
In October, that led the approval of a 238-unit apartment project on Twinbrook Parkway. Earlier this month, the city’s Planning Commission and City Council were briefed on a 375-unit town home project from Bethesda-based developer EYA that had been held up.
