The hits just keep on coming in Montgomery County's moribund economy and hostile business environment. Streetsense has cleared out its Bethesda studio at 3 Bethesda Metro Center. The real estate and design firm no longer shows a Bethesda office on its website; there is a D.C. office listed for this region now.
Streetsense vacating is particularly embarrassing for the Montgomery County Council, as the local media once cast the firm as an unofficial partner in the Council's quixotic - and ultimately doomed - 2012 quest to make the county "hip." That effort imploded with the twin failures of the Council's "Nighttime Economy" initiative, which ended with the closure of 19 nightspots in Bethesda, and the 2017 Bethesda Downtown Plan.
Streetsense memorably hosted an "untapped perspectives" happy hour for the plan, which local media promised would bring a long-missing millennial voice to the planning process. The Bethesda Downtown Plan is now reaching the end of its lifespan, with the County approving 25 years' worth of permitted density in only 4 years, and it has utterly failed to deliver the parks, amenities, business boom and millennial "hipness" promised. Several breweries have opened in Fredericksburg, Virginia since 2017; zero have opened in Bethesda.
County officials have quietly given up on "smart growth," transit-oriented urban development and nightlife, and are now turning their attention to bulldozing residential neighborhoods with "Thrive 2050." Dispensing with the pretense of promising beer gardens and live music venues that thrill listeners of Tiny Desk Concert, Thrive 2050 instead posits a dystopian future of concrete and steel luxury apartments displacing the lawns and mature trees of suburban, single-family-home neighborhoods. Your hip transportation through this low-tech Blade Runner-without-the-cool-signage? Self-driving car? Hyperloop? Air Taxi? Streetcar? Nope: The bus. Spending 2 hours to travel the distance a car can in 20 minutes? Now that's "thriving!"
It's not surprising, then, that Streetsense would pull up stakes and seek out greener pastures more in line with its branding as "arbiters of what's cool." Since its beginnings in Bethesda, the firm has found tremendous success in the region, and now has expanded to other major cities. Closer to home, it has had a hand in bringing some big national names to vacant spaces, such as Not Your Average Joe's at Georgetown Square, and partnered with Donald and Ivanka Trump on marketing the retail space at the new Trump International Hotel in the District.
Nearly a million dollars was spent transforming the food court building into a showplace studio for Streetsense. As of Wednesday, it was largely just an empty shell, another monument to the epic failure of Montgomery County's elected officials to understand how the business world and economy work. Bring back Burger King!
Betrayed by the corrupt MoCo Cartel again. MORIBUND!
ReplyDeleteSad to see Streetsense move out, but of course you know that a 30 story high, mixed use tower, with apartments, ground level retail, surrounded by several new urban plazas, is proposed for that site. Bethesda Metro 4 is not fully approved yet, but I suspect that Streetsense decided to downsize their lease spaces in the DC area, with so much work-from-home still continuing. Brookfield was probably unwilling to sign a long lease on that site, which would tie up their future near-term development options.
ReplyDeleteI am curious whether Washington Properties will actually follow through with the large speculative office portion of their recently approved mixed-use Hampden East caper. Seems like a very long game to build spec office in this new era. I haven’t heard whether the Avocet Center has signed any office tenants to their nearly completed high-rise office tower.
This is a big deal. But also a sign of the times. The huge open floorplan office with all the "hip" touches that Streetsense offered are relics of the past.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine Streetsense employees commuting from DC to a now desolate metro Center plaza.
Here is one interesting mention of Streetsense:
ReplyDelete"As the clock ticked on the one-year deadline [in 2013] to finalize a deal with GSA, The Trump Organization hired Streetsense, a real estate and retail design firm, to select restaurants and retailers for the Old Post Office Pavilion. Trump chose the company over local real estate developer Douglas Jemal and retail design firm Ashkenazy Acquisition. Tiffany & Co. was among the retailers the company talked to."
Street Sense's office space was horrible. They had to move out. The only failures were they didn't foresee the large open office concept was outdated, and now people who do the jobs required by Street Sense work from home which saves on rent. Considering they were so hip and cool they should have seen this coming.
ReplyDeleteThe brokerage arm of Streetsense sold years ago of course they were moving when their lease ran out. Bethesda has a significant net positive in terms of tenants moving here vs leaving.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that rather recently, in June of 2021, the developer of 4 Bethesda Metro Center submitted certified site plans for their new tower, so it looks like that project is moving forward, and we might soon see a very tall, terraced, parallelogram shaped high-rise apartment building, a large amount of ground floor retail, a revised and refurbished bus bay, new escalators up and down from the plaza to the bus bay covered with a glass roof, new stair access to the plaza from the west, and revised plazas and a central green space. Brookfield Arts has proposed a curated and programmed event space, with a large component of art. The architect is SOM, which has created some world-class projects, so perhaps a striking, kinetic new project will be built at the epicenter of downtown Bethesda.
ReplyDeleteNot likely, but it wouldn’t it be great if they could include a publicly accessible rooftop bar, nightclub or restaurant with panoramic views of downtown from 300’ above the city. Expensive dedicated express passenger elevators, and a service elevator, would be required from the plaza to to roof, so not very likely, but it sure would be cool.
7:51: Looking forward to it, despite my disappointment that it won't be a Fortune 500 corporate headquarters tower, and that the county never made an effort to restore the plaza's use as a community gathering place. We definitely need more nightclubs and rooftops. The Wharf got a rooftop nightspot in recent times in DC.
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