A leasing office has opened for The Edge apartments at 4885 Edgemoor Lane in a temporary space next door in the The Edgemont apartment complex. Pricing for the apartments has also been announced: 1-bedrooms from $2510, 2-bedrooms from $3960, and 3-bedrooms from $5325.
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| "You just passed us!" |
As you can see, the promise of Montgomery County politicians that a flood of new apartments would result in lower rents still has yet to materialize. The upsides are luxury amenities, premium appliances, a 96 walk score, and being directly at the Bethesda Metro station. See their updated website for full details and to schedule a leasing appointment.
Damn. That isn't cheap.
ReplyDeleteYou'd figure that at some point supply would catch up with demand. I guess they'll have to keep building.
New apartments lower rent because people who rent these out would have rented out older apartments possibly gentrifying another part of the DC region. Now those apartments get freed up and go down in cost cause there is less demand for them. New construction always costs more than old.
ReplyDelete1:20: We were told the prices would go down here in Bethesda due to market forces if we increased supply. It hasn't happened. The buildings go up...and so do the rents.
ReplyDeleteVery similar to the idea of $2 million duplexes solving the affordable housing "crisis," which won't happen either, and there isn't a crisis because HOC has a surplus of empty units and places like Halpine View report they're having trouble leasing their vacant units. That wouldn't be possible in a real housing crisis.
Median 1br rent in Bethesda is $1710 which is down 4.5% year over year.
DeleteGreat points Robert. The only way rents will go down is that enough residential properties get built so that supply is plentiful enough to force them to compete for renters. Bethesda isn't there yet. There simply isn't enough capacity or competition in Bethesda, which is what's keeping prices high.
ReplyDeleteAside from Downtown Bethesda, there's so much available land to build up near White Flint that's just sitting there empty.
If anything, COVID's taught us that you really just need the basics to have a comfortable life.
The market will solve this problem in time, if the corrupt MoCo Cartel lets it happen.
5:08: Is this covering the period of the pandemic? Apartment living lost some of its luster during that time, to say the least. Long term, most of the lower price properties are going to be demolished along Battery and Bradley in the coming 10-20 years.
ReplyDelete3:32: All that un-redeveloped land in downtown Bethesda and White Flint alone has me wondering why the County and developers are so frantic to flip SFH neighborhoods to multifamily zoning - they haven't even developed the urban centers at transit yet!
You can get new construction townhomes in Fairfax for 650k, little more expensive in MoCo but housing stock is based on the entire region. 650k is significantly cheaper than a new construction single family home and offers an option to a lot of families starting out. No one told you prices would go down in Bethesda, they said if the entire region builds enough supply to keep up with demand then prices would stabilize. Didn't realize Rob Dyer was such a butthurt NIMBY.
ReplyDelete7:59: The Montgomery County officials who have been saying this for over a decade specifically said increasing supply in the county would lower prices in the county. This factually has not happened.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, you could get new construction townhomes in Damascus for $250,000 a little over a decade ago. Significantly cheaper than $650K - but good luck finding that price today in Damascus. Growth has only jacked up prices.
If you like urban living, choose it. The MoCo cartel is trying to remove the choice of suburban living for its residents. Soviet central planning is not the route to healthy communities.
You're just proving that supply still hasn't met demand, Robert, not that supply has no effect on prices. Or do you not believe in basic tenets of capitalism?
Delete@7:19 PM Spot on Robert. The MoCo Cartel has squandered and mismanaged development opportunities for years and so here we are now.
ReplyDeleteHow many more years will White Flint Mall be pushing up weeds? Imagine how much development could have occurred there and how much it would have reduced rents in the area.
Maybe once it's renamed North Bethesda they'll actually build something there. What a waste.
Even the strip mall property over by Moti's Market is an industrial/commercial wasteland that could be redeveloped. It's right across from CESJDS. Put in a town center with the basics people need: Home, Market, Gym, etc. Make it affordable. People will move there. Not everyone rides the Metro and many people work from home now.
Robert Dyer: It strikes me that an objective reporter would have also included the more affordable apartment homes in the Edge that are priced from $1200-1600/month for up to 2-bedroom apartments. If you honestly missed these, they are shown at the bottom of the page that you provided a link to. I'm personally not a big fan of MoCo's affordable rent program, because I think it favors development and doesn't provide enough to communities in return, but I still think it provides some reasonably-priced homes and these should be recognized. This may be my last attempt to post a comment, since my last several have not been posted and no reason was provided. Inquisitor.
ReplyDelete7:33: There must have been something that violated the comment policies if they were not posted. The rents you are citing are for MPDUs, which are few in number and people who can't afford the market rate apartments often make too much to qualify for those.
ReplyDeleteThe other problem is that, as we tear down the affordable buildings (which was not the case with the The Edge), we end up with a net loss of affordable housing. A whole building of affordable units is replaced with a new one that has 12.5% or 15% MPDUs. This is not any one developer's fault, but the result of poor planning policies by the Planning Board and County Council.
All the effort to brand the White Flint area as The Pike District and our council and executive want to call the area "North Bethesda"? I don't get it.
ReplyDelete"North Bethesda" is something people laugh about. The only people who seem to push it are apartment buildings and realtors trying to justify higher rents and house prices. Which is unnecessary since the area has always been nice with having to refer to Bethesda.
That's a good point about old, naturally affordable buildings being removed from the rental pool, but the Planning Board correctly takes a longer term view than simply the next few years. Ultimately the new builds will become Class C and naturally affordable, as well.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention it's not the role of government to force land owners to keep 1960s buildings around simply because they are naturally affordable. Land owners should be able to redevelop when they want, not when the government or Robert Dyer says they can.
3:09: They have been free to redevelop when they want, but they wanted more than the zoning would allow at that moment. That's when planning authorities are tasked with securing community benefits in exchange for higher profits for developers, and the costs those larger buildings will place on the backs of taxpayers in schools and services. Our Planning Board and County Council have abdicated that responsibility at every juncture.
ReplyDeleteIt's not the role of government to juice developer profits at taxpayer expense - but that's the role our county government (and many other equally-corrupt jurisdictions around the world) has taken on for its own political benefit.
That's a surprising take. Both because MoCo is a notoriously expensive place to build new construction (15% of units must be MPDU, 10% of land area must be public space, millions of $$ in park payments, stringent LEED environmental requirements, some of the highest school and transportation impact payments in the region, etc.) and because Republicans usually aren't in favor of increasing expensive government/public requirements. What else should developers be paying for? Why are profitable projects inherently bad?
ReplyDelete5:21: You have to take into account the cost that these projects burden the taxpayer with. The "notoriously expensive" costs also become a shell game, with a $72 million tax cut here, and a quiet "subdivision staging" shift of tax burden from powerful development corporations building luxury apartments to Mom and Pop taxpayer's single family home there.
ReplyDeleteAs the Westbard developer admitted, it could make a profit with just a new strip center. But it wants more. For that bonus profit, and the cost in schools and services, we need something in return.