“We are anxious to get this thing going,” Tim Warner, pastor of Emory Grove United Baptist Church, told Bethesda Today on Thursday while referring to plans to redevelop 8.5 acres across from the Gaithersburg church by building 82 townhomes and 80 multifamily units.
“In 18 months or so, there’s going to be an awful lot of construction in our neighborhood, and it will signal to the neighborhood that the blight of urban renewal is over, and that new life is coming to this community,” Warner said of the proposed Emory Grove Village project at 17825 Washington Grove Lane.
On Thursday, the county’s Planning Board unanimously approved a pre-preliminary plan for the project. According to the planning documents, 30% of the units will be moderately priced, and a mix of rental and for-sale units will be available.
A pre-preliminary plan, according to Montgomery Planning, is an optional step in the subdivision process that allows an applicant to submit a conceptual plan to the planning staff and the board for their advice on the project. Next, the project’s developers, the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County and Haley Development of Burtonsville, will submit a preliminary plan in the next six months.
The proposed project would be built in the area known as Emory Grove, a historically Black community that was founded by freed slaves in 1864. At its peak, the community had about 500 people living on about 300 acres of land, according to the Heritage Emory Grove website. However, due to Montgomery County’s urban renewal practices in the 1960s and ‘70s, the community was largely eliminated, leaving just the Emory Grove church, according to Warner.
Urban renewal “separated people from the history, disrupted a very strong community connection and it served to really erase or obfuscate the history of Emory Grove,” Warner said.
In recent years, the those of the former Emory Grove community, in collaboration with the Emory Grove United Methodist Church, the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County and the county, created a concept redevelopment master plan, called the Heritage Emory Grove Community Plan, that aims to honor Emory Grove’s history and breathe new life into the east Gaithersburg community.
It also proposes the addition of several housing developments, including senior housing, in the hope of allowing formerly displaced residents to return and providing opportunities for home ownership, according to Warner.
Thursday’s planning board approval comes nearly three years after county leaders, the Housing Opportunities Commission and the Emory Grove community unveiled the redevelopment master plan. The Emory Grove Village project is just one portion of the master plan.
“We wanted to reconstruct that so that the generations that have been locked out of home ownership for so long might have an opportunity to come back and literally live back in Emery Grove,” Warner told Bethesda Today.
“We’re doing some community restoration,” he added. “We think that what we’re doing will help everybody – and there’s so many people who are locked out of the homeowners market – get into a position where they could begin to build generational wealth through housing.”
Warner said he was excited about the approval of the pre-preliminary plan and said more plans related to the Heritage Emory Grove redevelopment master plan will soon be submitted to be reviewed by the planning board.
After a pre-preliminary plan is approved, applicants are required to submit a preliminary plan for the project within 90 days. However, developers for the Emory Grove Village project were granted 180 days to submit the preliminary plan to have more time to coordinate with Habitat for Humanity on construction of the project’s affordable units.
Before the board’s vote, board Chair Artie Harris said he supported the project.
“The community definitely wants this … and I think it could be a great project,” Harris said.
Rich Thometz, a principal with Haley Development – one of the project’s development partners along with the Housing Opportunities Commission — told Bethesda Today after the board meeting that the developers will now shift to “more formal planning” for the project, such as engineering and partnering with Habitat for Humanity on construction of the moderately priced dwelling units.
Thometz said the timeline for project completion is unknown and “dependent on market forces.” But he hoped that construction would begin in about 18 months.
“Emory Grove is the first piece of the Heritage Emory Grove [Community Plan] envisioning of bringing that community back to life again, fixing the past devastation that occurred through redevelopment and devastated the historic community that had been there before,” Thometz said.
