Posts about Chevy Chase Lake

The Montgomery County Planning Department recently finished work on a sector plan for Chevy Chase Lake in anticipation of the Purple Line, which when built will have a stop there. They envision creating a compact, but dense neighborhood around the station, with housing, shops and a new urban park, and a stretch of Connecticut Avenue into a real main street.

Disagreement over future of Chevy Chase Lake

The Chevy Chase Land Company's 2011 vision for Chevy Chase Lake.

However, the size and scale of that neighborhood was up for debate. In 2011, the Chevy Chase Land Company, which was originally founded by Senator Newlands and still owns several offices and shops in Chevy Chase Lake, proposed building up to 4 million square feet of new development there, including up to 3,000 new homes and several buildings up to 19 stories tall.

Transit advocates supported their vision, arguing that concentrating housing around the future Purple Line will help alleviate congestion in the future, but some neighbors were upset about the amount of development, fearing it would cause traffic. They found common ground with county planners, who sought a more nuanced approach to development in Chevy Chase Lake.

"There is no transit system in the world that creates 18-story buildings at every transit stop," wrote then-planning director Rollin Stanley. "Not every transit station has to be downtown Silver Spring or Bethesda. In reality, the best transit systems have a very diverse network of transit stops."

What Chevy Chase Land Company proposes today. Image courtesy of the Chevy Chase Land Company.

The resulting plan, which was approved by the Planning Board in January, calls for 2.2 million square feet of new development, including about 1,300 new homes, in the entire commercial district. Most of it won't be built until after the Purple Line is funded and built; until then, most properties would either stay the same or be allowed slightly more density than there is today.

Instead of 19-story buildings throughout the commercial district, there would be 3 buildings between 100 and 150 feet tall adjacent to the Purple Line station. Elsewhere, building heights would be restricted to 55 to 80 feet, while townhouses would form a transition to adjacent single-family homes.

Connecticut Avenue would transform from a traffic sewer into a main street, with on-street parking, new traffic signals, and sidewalks with streetscaping. New bike paths, trails and improved connections to the Capital Crescent Trail would knit the commercial center into the community, making up for the area's disconnected street network.

Mid-rise buildings and a plaza would replace the Chevy Chase Lake Shopping Center.

Meanwhile, the Chevy Chase Land Company's plans have shrunk, to just 1.5 million square feet of development and fewer than 900 apartments, and split into three phases. The first, which would occur before construction of the Purple Line, would replace the Chevy Chase Lake Shopping Center at Connecticut Avenue and Manor Road with 3 buildings containing a mix of apartments and retail space around a half-acre park.

Once the Purple Line is built, later phases would replace their headquarters building at Connecticut Avenue and Chevy Chase Lake Drive and the Lake West shopping center across the street with additional retail, apartments and townhouses, and a new headquarters.

Neighbors use Purple Line to discourage development

The Purple Line and the Capital Crescent Trail in Chevy Chase.

While this is much less than what the Land Company first wanted, not everyone's satisfied. Some neighbors formed a group called Don't Flood the Lake, raising concerns about traffic and calling the plan "wildly out of scale with the area." They also question whether we should allow new development around the Purple Line when there's no money for it yet.

It's unclear whether this group has any connection with Save the Trail, an anti-Purple Line group that's campaigning against funding for the Purple Line and other transportation projects. But not building the Purple Line or development associated with it won't fix traffic. No Purple Line means people have fewer alternatives to driving, while no new housing in Chevy Chase means people working next door in Bethesda, one of the region's largest job centers, have to commute from further away.

1,300 new homes in Chevy Chase Lake will be far less of a burden on Connecticut Avenue than the influx of thousands of workers, patients and visitors who currently drive on Connecticut Avenue to the new Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.

Single-family homes and mid-rise buildings coexist in Chevy Chase, DC. Why not in Chevy Chase Lake?

Besides, the scale proposed at Chevy Chase Lake isn't much different than what Senator Newlands built around streetcar stops just a few miles down Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase, DC: mid- to high-rise apartments interspersed with shops and offices and steps away from quiet streets lined with single-family homes. If this could work a century ago, why can't it work today?

Traffic is a big issue in Greater Washington and will continue to be so as the region grows. Yet the answer, in Chevy Chase Lake or any other neighborhood, isn't to stop anyone new from moving there. If neighbors don't want to see more traffic on Connecticut Avenue, they should join groups like Get Maryland Moving to ensure that the Purple Line gets the funding it needs.

And they should support the Chevy Chase Lake Sector Plan, which will not only give them a great town center within walking distance and allow others to live in a place where they don't have to drive everywhere.

The Montgomery County Council will hold a public hearing on the Chevy Chase Lake Sector Plan on Tuesday, March 5 at 7:30 pm. To sign up to testify or to send written comments, visit the County Council's website.

I included in my presentation a video I took at a major intersection in Toronto on a cold spring day around 4 p.m. More than a dozen street cars go through this intersection in about 30 seconds. The buildings are all four floors or less.

This intersection is about 2.0 km from downtown. Count the streetcars going through the intersection in about 35 seconds. Even a guy on a bike. How tall are the buildings? Were we not maximizing the transit investment? Or is this a great example of how transit serves its purpose—moving people from one place to another, providing options for people to move to where they want and need to go.

The same is true for the Toronto subway stations. The one I used for commuting if I did not take a streetcar passed through neighborhoods of three to five-story buildings all along the corridor. The subway line ran under Danforth Ave, including Greektown, an incredibly vibrant 24-hour neighborhood, then continued for miles, with a stop every four blocks or so. (Cue the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding). In sum, a pedestrian-oriented, active, mixed use, diverse corridor with three-story buildings on top of a subway line with about a dozen stops. Any Toronto resident would say we capitalized on our transit infrastructure.

Photo by Geof Burbridge.

This is the 502 street car line in Toronto I used to ride to work every day. There were two other lines that shared some of the route. It traveled for over 20 km across the width of the city. Check out the buildings that line the street. Ends was a terrific clothing store with some apartments up top. For the most part, the buildings are two and three floors along the route except at major street intersections. During rush hour, you never wait for more than four minutes for a ride.

The point is simple. Not every transit station has to be downtown Silver Spring or Bethesda. In reality, the best transit systems have a very diverse network of transit stops.

A month ago, I spoke to residents in Park Hills, located around the Wayne-Dale intersection west of downtown Silver Spring. Great people, willing to listen about change, transition, transit and stable residential neighborhoods. They asked about the changes the Purple Line might bring to the Wayne- Dale intersection in terms of land use. Well, not much, for a number of reasons.

1. This is a stable residential community. The purpose of public transit is to move people to where they want to go, not to tear down neighborhoods to do it. These goals are not at odds, they can work together.
2. Wayne & Dale will not be downtown Silver Spring. There is a lot of property to develop in downtown Silver Spring for decades to come, and we hope the Purple Line will help. And maybe the residents of Park Hills will ride the Purple Line to get to Fenton Village and its restaurants in the future. Imagine, public transit getting people to entertainment rather than just being used to up-zone every neighborhood a rapid transit line runs through.
3. Nobody would invest the money, even if it were permitted, to buy up small lots at high prices, just to build a low-scale building where the number of units would not be a whole lot different than the original houses on the site.
4. There should never be tall buildings at Wayne & Dale. It does not make sense. With so much infill to do elsewhere, new rapid transit will help maximize the potential for redevelopment where it makes sense. And it does not make sense everywhere.

For those of us who have run streetcars into new emerging neighborhoods, who rode them each day through vibrant, ethnic, low-scale neighborhoods to reach the 50-story buildings downtown, we understand how transit connects people and neighborhoods. Rockville Pike has a subway under it, and, we hope, terrific bus service in the future.

The new JBG building, just under 300 feet high, stands a block away from townhouses on Woodglen Drive, which are across the street from a seven-story building that houses a new Whole Foods on the ground floor.

This building height/use relationship is terrific; after a few months, everyone seems happy, except for a few people quoted in the paper saying they are not used to parking in a parking structure to go grocery shopping. (Welcome to the 90s—this is how the rest of the urban world shops.) This is a place where we decided maximizing transit investment makes sense.

There is road capacity on the Pike. There is an existing transit line with lots of capacity. The location is a major regional shopping node, and it can be designed so that within a block, there are townhouses.

Chevy Chase Lake meets none of those characteristics. In Chevy Chase Lake:

• There are considerable issues with traffic
• If this was such a desirable location, something would have happened here in 2004, during the biggest real estate boom ever, when there was 250,000 square feet of approved building capacity that was never taken advantage of.
• This is not downtown Bethesda, so would 18- and 19-story buildings really be appropriate at this location?
• Would 4.5 million square feet make sense at this location, as some have suggested?
• Should there be a near- and long-term strategy of phasing zoning and infrastructure to provide for sound, orderly development with higher levels of capacity once the Purple Line arrives?

We believe there should be orderly development structured around reasonable expectations of what might and should happen within this small node along a busy street. We have floated the idea that the near-term strategy should reflect the current approvals for development that has existed for many years—an extra 250,000 square feet, with the added flexibility to convert some of that space to residential uses.

We also suggest that once the Purple Line is under construction, additional floor area capacity be raised another 750,000 square feet, for a total of just over one million additional square feet. Those recommendations fall right within the Brookings fellow's criteria for upzoning around transit. With the exception of a transit corridor running out of Dallas, I believe he will be hard pressed to say the early ideas for this plan are not building on transit investment.

I stated to the Bethesda Chamber that the role of the planning department in master planning was not to increase land values, but to manage expectations. This means creating plans that have both short- and long- term scenarios. It also means setting the stage to maximize real estate where it makes sense, and at a scale appropriate to the immediate environment.

I have asked the staff working on several master plans to look at implementing "phased" zoning, where changes are made now in expectation of local potential, and then, when certain conditions and infrastructure change occur, maybe additional capacity is freed up. In this way, the community understands how the future landscape can evolve over time, and builders and landowners realize how their land holdings may develop over the next five, 10 and 20 years.

The County has had many master plans built on grand visions that had little basis in reality. Not every commercial area has the potential of White Flint, not even the area north of Montrose, as I wrote about a few weeks ago. And this is a good thing. MoCo is very fortunate to have such a diverse set of neighborhoods. Our planning efforts should capitalize on the individuality of each of those communities to help them grow and thrive and, more importantly, help the diverse people living in our communities realize the potential of their neighborhoods.

The Purple Line

The safety and convenience of crossing Connecticut Avenue on the CCT will improve greatly when the Purple Line is built. The plans call for the CCT to cross Connecticut Avenue on a trail bridge alongside the Purple Line light rail bridge.

The trail will have a direct connection to the elevated station platform on the east side of Connecticut Avenue. The MTA aerial photograph below shows the route of the Purple Line and CCT through Chevy Chase Lake, and the location of the station platform. More aerial maps are available at MTA's Purple Line website that show better detail.

Future CCT bridge crossing of Connecticut Ave.

The CCT will be elevated through much of the Chevy Chase Lake sector, on the bridge over Connecticut Avenue and at the transit station platform, and on the trail ramps that approach from both sides. This may become important, because future development may bring much local pedestrian activity to the sector. The trail elevation will allow us to keep trail/local pedestrian conflict areas limited to the designated trail access points.

Two competing visions for the Chevy Chase Lake redevelopment

On April 27, the Chevy Chase Land Company (CCLC) presented its vision for Chevy Chase Lake to the public at the National 4-H Youth Conference Center. That presentation is available as a YouTube video. Several illustrative drawings from that presentation were also shown in the Purple Line Progress Report that PLN President Ralph Bennett presented to the Affordable Housing Conference of Montgomery County on May 9.

Chevy Chase Land Company illustrative site plan.

The CCLC vision is for transit oriented development of up to 4,000,000 square feet of mixed commercial/residential uses, with about 3/4 of the development being residential (up to 3000 residential units). Building heights transition from 6 stories high at the edges to up to 19 stories high near the center. The plan features a local street grid with extensive public spaces, a public plaza at the Purple Line station, and neighborhood oriented ground level retail.

CCLC illustrative drawing of proposed Main Street public spaces.

Looking west on the proposed Main Street. (The arrow at the left side marks the CCT ramp up to the light rail station and bridge over Connecticut Ave.

Montgomery County planning staff released a narrated video to present their very different recommendations for the new Chevy Chase Lake sector plan on June 8, 2011. That video is available on their Chevy Chase Lake webpage.

The planning staff is recommending to the Planning Board that a smaller portion of the Chevy Chase Lake Sector be rezoned to allow slightly over 1,000,000 square feet of mixed use (commercial/residential) development, 250,000 square feet now and another 800,000 square feet to be allowed when Purple Line construction begins.

This is only slightly greater than that approved now under the current zoning. Building heights would be limited to 65 feet, only about six stories. (The CCLC building already on the site is 13 stories high, and a residential building now stands immediately south of the site alongside the Columbia Country Club that is 18 stories high.)

The CCLC and the Montgomery County planning staff visions differ greatly on the density to ultimately be allowed at Chevy Chase Lake. The planning staff recommends only a marginal increase in the number of residential units over that already approved. The Montgomery County planning staff will hold a public meeting to present its recommendations at 10 am to noon Saturday, June 18 at the Chevy Chase Village Hall, 5906 Connecticut Avenue.

Does the density at Chevy Chase Lake matter to trail users?

The major features of the CCT itself will not be impacted much by the different levels of density being proposed for Chevy Chase Lake. The trail ramps and bridge will not change, and most of the trail will be separated from the local pedestrian activity by being on elevated structure.

Both the CCLC and the planning staff visions call for a public plaza at the Purple Line station, and the CCT would pass through that plaza area. A higher density would make this a more pedestrian active area. But careful design of the pedestrian crossing paths in this plaza will be mandated by the need to keep pedestrians clear of the light rail activity that parallels the CCT. Pedestrian crossings will likely be focused to only one or two points and this will minimize the trail/pedestrian conflict areas.

A higher density at Chevy Chase Lake will have a bigger impact on trail users when they leave the primary trail in this area. Higher density with taller buildings makes it more likely we will have a good local street grid with public spaces, like that envisioned by CCLC.

If the building height is limited to 65 feet as called for by planning staff, then a developer must cover more available land with low buildings to get up to the floor-area ratio allowed by the zoning. A smaller project will also give less economic justification to set aside space for wide streets and public spaces, and the County will have less leverage to require these amenities as a condition for the project.

There may be less local pedestrian and motor vehicle traffic in a smaller project, but the local street grid may be more limited, streets may be narrower, and space set aside for public use may be smaller so biking conditions could feel congested even with less traffic. Smaller may not be better for bicycle friendly conditions overall.

Trail users don't have a strong reason to enter the discussion of density at Chevy Chase Lake to protect or advance the CCT. We have other reasons to join the discussion about how our region will grow, however, as members of the community. Trail users are likely to have diverse views about "smart growth" and "transit oriented development".

I'm joining the discussion as an individual in support of a higher density at Chevy Chase Lake. Opportunities for transit oriented development are very limited. We have a strong need for more residential housing to balance with jobs in the Bethesda area—especially for housing close to the National Naval Medical Center, where up to 2500 new staff positions are coming with BRAC. If we won't allow more residential housing units here, then where else should it go that is better?

And besides, I want one of those residential units. I'd love to live in a place like this.