The slumber of Montgomery County's decline from regional economic giant to bedroom community is about to deepen. A developer has proposed turning the current Marriott International headquarters property at 10400 Fernwood Road in Bethesda into a continuing-care retirement community. While there is certainly a need for new senior housing options in the county, the Rock Spring office park area is rapidly transforming from a business hub into a sleepy residential neighborhood. The makeover is very much in line with the county's moribund economic development climate.
ELP Bethesda at Rock Spring, LLC is proposing to construct 1300 independent living units (with 15% of those being MPDU affordable units), 210 assisted living and memory care units, 50 skilled nursing care units, 5300 square feet of retail and a public park. These would be spread out over two newly-subdivided portions of the Marriott property. Marriott is moving to downtown Bethesda next year. The current Marriott HQ would be demolished, but ELP would keep the parking garage, and place some of the residential units above the parking deck.
In an ironic twist, the primary concerns about the proposed development's tree-removal and building placement plans have come from residents of the new Montgomery Row townhome development. That residential development was constructed on a site that had originally been anticipated to hold two office buildings with high-wage jobs.
You can't blame ELP, who is providing a needed product, and responding to a weak office space market in an economically-stagnant county. But you can blame our elected officials for a disastrous economic development record. The county hasn't attracted a major corporate headquarters in a quarter-century, and ended the last decade dead-last in the region by every relevant economic development statistic.
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| Map showing planned green space for the development |
Word that the Marriott site in a once-vibrant office park is becoming a retirement community is yet another humiliation for our elected officials. Were this Tysons, real estate observers would have been placing their bets on which Fortune 500 company would replace Marriott. Northern Virginia continues to eat our lunch, and with most jobs and many of our wealthy residents heading there, Montgomery County taxpayers are increasingly picking up the check for the meal.
The Montgomery County Planning Board will take up the sketch plan and preliminary plan for the ELP Bethesda development at its July 1, 2021 meeting. Planning staff is recommending approval of the project.
Images via Montgomery County Planning Department
14 comments:
Back in the day this area was effectively equivalent to Tysons. A Mall anchored suburban office park flanked by major highways and close to the city, but no metro stop. Look at what business friendly policy has done for Virginia/Fairfax County vs. Maryland/Montgomery County.
Total MoCo failure. And I bet Elrich will be there at the ribbon cutting announcing all the great jobs being created, while glossing over that most of those are low-paying, low-skilled jobs.
Northern Virginia got Amazon HQ2; MoCo is getting new retirement and end of life centers, including in our urban Metro areas.
Millions of sqft of new office space built in downtown Bethesda to meet shifting employer/employee demands and dated, unwanted auto-centric office park seeing a billion dollar redevelopment to switch to meet retiree demand. This is a win-win to all but the bitterly anti-MoCo crowd.
StarKist Co. plans to close its Pittsburgh headquarters office and relocate to Northern Virginia in 2022. StarKist is the world's largest supplier of canned and packaged tuna with more than 40 percent of the market. This is another example of a corporate relocation failure for Montgomery County.
The "outer" Purple Line alignment through Grosvenor along the NBTW and to Montgomery Mall should have been selected. Doug Duncan was right.
12:22: Many of the most successful and largest corporations in the world are building, or have recently built, campuses in suburban office parks just like Rock Spring...only not in Montgomery County. They are only "unwanted" because no major company wants to locate here.
Northern VA has brought in Northrop, Volkswagen, Hilton Hotels, Nestle, Intelsat, Gerber, CEB, Lidl, and a little company called Amazon.
Montgomery County brings in a retirement home. It's humiliating.
None of the office buildings constructed in downtown Bethesda has brought in a new, major corporate headquarters. They have had to lease up with smaller tenants, sometimes with subsidies from County taxpayers.
This is a lose-lose to all but the handful of MoCo cartel supporters who are satisfied with mediocrity in government no matter the cost or damage.
A couple of silver linings is that at least they are redeveloping downcounty rather than up county where the roads are not handling what they got already; and those old folks will be near the medical care facilities in Rock Spring.
Learning
1:25 PM - the total number of StarKist employees relocated from Pittsburgh to Reston: 80. Their new office will occupy 24,000 square feet, about 80% the space that the old Barnes & Noble store on Bethesda Row used to occupy.
StarKist is a subsidiary of a Korean firm. They narrowly averted bankruptcy in 2018 following z guilty plea to felony price fixing charges and facing a fine of between $50 and 100 million.In 2019 they also paid damages to customers in a class-action lawsuit over misrepresenting the weight of tuna in cans.
Follow-up to the comment @ 6:27 PM:
-The former Barnes & Noble store, now Anthropologie, was actually 37,000 square feet, so the StarKist office would only occupy 65% of that space.
-StarKist is not a Fortune 500 company.
Nova is the de facto choice for corporate HQs in the region but that has as much to do with the pro business policy at the state level in Virginia vs higher taxes in Maryland as it does with the Moco government. DC has the same problem.
Also three of the four new office towers in Bethesda (4747 Bethesda, The Wilson, Marriott HQ) are fully leased. I suspect Avocet will lease up pretty quickly once office tenants stop kicking the can and make decisions on their future space needs.
The Moco biotech market is also white hot right now. There have been a ton of new tenants and expansions just in the last year. There would be a lot more but there's literally no space.
8:38: Maryland state policies are definitely a contributing issue, but our current uncompetitive state business climate is supported by the Montgomery County delegation to Annapolis, so they bear much of the responsibility for that.
The office picture isn't quite as rosy when you start breaking down the situation. Marriott's building was only built and fully leased because they decided to move downtown, and they are filling it. 4747 and The Wilson have leased up, and have some nice tenants, but none are major corporate headquarters that weren't already here to start with. The Wilson also has WeWork, the future of which is hardly secure. But all smaller tenants than what we're seeing on the skylines in Tysons and Rosslyn.
Biotech has been hot here pre-dating the MoCo cartel's seizure of the County Council in 2002. It does well because of A) smart decisions made back when we had elected officials of a higher-caliber, and B) there are many incentives and subsidies extended to biotech.
There is plenty of space downtown and upcounty for more biotech or office in general, but the market demand isn't there because of the hostile business climate, and poor strategy that continues to fail in attracting Fortune 500s to the county.
Office space in the DC and VA is not in demand. Raytheon has just stated they are reducing leased space by at least 25%. Other DOD contractors are moving in the same direction. Working remotely will not go away. The idea office space is equivalent to prosperity is outdated. Just like movies need to be shown in large theaters. Ask HBO-Max and Disney subscribers.
12:52: It's not so much having every employee working in-person, as it is having the company's headquarters in your jurisdiction. Then we get the same revenue no matter where the employees work from. Right now, we're not getting any of it, and NoVa is. At the same time, if we focused on aerospace and defense firms and get them to also locate manufacturing and research facilities here, those are jobs that can't be done from home. That's why those - like biotech - should be our primary focus.
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