Developer, neighbors wonder what it takes to make a Village

By Jennifer Deseo | Nov 25, 2008

A development project planned for Fenton Village turns a cold shoulder to East Silver Spring and existing businesses on Fenton Street, neighbors complained at a recent public forum.

Proposed designs for the Studio Plaza project would draw pedestrians away from Fenton Street businesses by placing retail and green space along an interior courtyard, area residents said during a public forum Wednesday night.

Currently, the 10-year-old project proposes to plop a half-acre green space (below, left) on a block sandwiched by Georgia, Thayer and Silver Spring Avenues, and Fenton Street. Four buildings — three of them residential — would surround that park, developer Bob Hillerson explained.

Studio Plaza greenish space

Most of the project’s buildings would have street-level retail — a total 61,000 square feet of it — with some next to the interior park and along a pedestrian alley through the site (above, right). That game plan would give residents in Fenton Village and the nearby Ripley District a central place to hang, Hillerson said.

And that didn’t groove with some residents’ ideas of what Fenton Village should be.

“It looks like you made a green area that caters to people who live there. There’s nothing activating the other streets,” Debbie Spielberg, an East Silver Spring resident and member of Silver Spring’s citizens advisory board, said. “It looks in, instead of looking out.”

East Silver Spring resident Karen Roper (below) added that the alley’s retailers should not make the place a shopping destination like Downtown Silver Spring, as developer Hillerson suggested. Rather, they wanted the businesses to serve basic services like dry cleaning and shoe repair, as the planning department’s sector plan suggests.

But Gary Stith, director of Silver Spring’s regional center, asked people not to sweat it. “More retail there will create a draw and will help existing businesses,” he told forum participants.

The project has already displaced at least two businesses — Roadhouse Oldies Records, and and the Silver Spring Market, both of which worked a Hillerson-owned building slated for demolition on Thayer near Georgia. The record shop recently moved to a storefront on Silver Spring Avenue, which Hillerson offered to them.

But the Silver Spring Market, now on Fenton near Sligo, wasn’t extended an invitation to stay on Hillerson property, he said.

“I didn’t renew their lease because the pan handlers used to stand out front, ask for money, go inside to buy beer, urinate and vomit in public, then do it all over again,” Hillerson claimed.

Hillerson’s next move for the Studio Plaza development is to file a project plan with the planning department, with a public hearing anticipated for April or May 2009.

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Planners dump Silver Place developers

By Jennifer Deseo | Nov 3, 2008

First Madonna and Guy Ritchie called it quits. Now the county’s planning board has dumped its private partners in a project to redevelop its downtown Silver Spring headquarters.

During a closed session late last month, planning board commissioners decided to cut ties with a trio of developers pegged to build Silver Place, a mixed-use project set for the corner of Georgia Avenue and Spring Street (below). The board announced its decision Thursday in a press release.

The trio of developers – The Bozzuto Group, Spaulding and Slye Investments, and Harrison Development — was first supposed to manage construction of the board’s new mothership on part of the three-acre site. Then, the trio would have bought the remaining land to build about 300 residential units.

But the planning board and developers couldn’t settle on what the board called “key financial terms”, and that included what price the trio would pay to score that remaining slice of land. The board still plans to roll with private residential developers — just not the guys listed above.

And despite the breakup, the board said basic plans cooked up in June (below) are still the way to go. Back then, architects, planners and area residents decided to plant a 30- to 40-foot-tall building on Georgia at Spring for the planning board. The rest of the planning department will get new digs inside a 90-foot-tall office building on Georgia, next to the Crown Plaza Hotel.

Behind those buildings will be some green space, plus residential buildings reaching up to nine stories towards the center of the lot and tapering to four stories on Spring Street (below). At least 30 percent of those units will be tagged as affordable housing, the board’s press release said. No retail space is in the mix.

“The issue was of more traffic and service vehicles, and whether we can make retail have any critical scale,” John Torti, the project’s master planner at the time, explained at the wrap of a week-long charette (French for “brainstorm”) in June.

“The conclusion was no,” Torti said.

The planning board announced it will hold a public meeting on the Silver Place project sometime in mid November. At some point, it’ll hit up the county council for funds to build the office space. It’s unclear how much that tab will be.

And when the buildings will actually be done is anyone’s guess. In June, months before the breakup, master planner Torti estimated it could be five or six years before anyone moves into anything.

Images courtesy of SilverPlaceWorkshop.com.

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Council debates buyout on moderately priced homes

By Cindy Cotte Griffiths | Oct 1, 2008

ROCKVILLE — “The new pricing system for MPDUs [moderately priced dwelling units] will work but if not, we’ll come back to the Council,” offered Richard Nelson of the Department of Housing and Community Affairs. Council president Michael Knapp wasn’t buying it. He wants the amendments to MoCo’s Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit law to be based on empirical data rather than waiting to “see if it works” and possibly having less affordable housing in an already strapped market.

Four years ago the County Council tried to fine tune the MPDU program and now they’re at it again. The new legislation would regulate the sale prices of MPDUs so that they are based on affordability not construction costs. Both proposed bills would stop developers from being able to “buyout” of building the required MPDUs by paying into the Housing Initiative Fund.

A recent Office of Legislative Oversight report found that from 2005 to 2007, 27% of the MPDUs built were too expensive for the program participants and another 29% were only affordable to those with the highest incomes permitted.

Nelson stressed that the intent of the MPDU law is to make housing affordable in all types of housing throughout MoCo. He doesn’t understand why we would let developers build big with extra units and then allow a buyout. If we make an exception for high rises, it’s conceivable that there wouldn’t be any MPDUs in Bethesda and Silver Spring. It’s difficult to determine the actual cost to produce the MPDUs. If the developer is getting height and density allowances that make the development more profitable then this should make the MPDU’s affordable.

Erlich questioned whether setting the sale price would work in high rises. If a developer owned a whole block, he should be able to put the MPDUs wherever he wants. If our purpose is to have economic integration in a community, then it shouldn’t matter which building is used. He questions why it is so critical for MPDUs to be in high rises.

The Council Staff recommends that the buyout authority remain in the law. Their recommendation is to require the developer to pay “at least 90% of the cost of a comparable market rate unit in the same building or development”. The bar needs to be set high enough to meet the MPDU goals. Elrich thought it should be whatever the cost is to provide an MPDU and not simply a punishment. Staff thinks that a buyout could result in more than one MPDU at another location.

When asked directly by Knapp, Elrich stated that he “wants to retain the buyout”. Knapp would like to look at the options for keeping buyouts. They also want to consider whether households should spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Nelson pointed out that people have been spending more and we have foreclosures, but he’ll get the statistics for the next worksession.

Cindy Cotte Griffiths is Editor of Rockville Central.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Rockville Central. Reprinted with permission. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Faceless B.

Updated Oct 5, 2008, to put Marc Elrich back on the county council. — JD

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Ripley residential project rolls forward

By Jennifer Deseo | Sep 22, 2008

A pair of slick apartment buildings and a mythical street in the Ripley District got a collective thumbs up from the planning board Thursday.

The Midtown Silver Spring project jumped through its last hoop in the review process without a hitch during the board’s weekly meeting near Woodside. Expect construction on the two 20-story towers (below) to hit Ripley Street and that alley behind the Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center any … day … now (or late 2009, says The Gazette.)

According to planning board documents, each building will stand about 200 feet tall, the maximum head space for that neck of the woods. Combined, they’ll contain 314 rental units, 40 of them moderately priced. And 5,400 square feet of space has been pegged for street-level retail, though what kind of shops will occupy those slots has not been announced.

The developer will also construct the long-fabled Ripifant Street (above), a new roadway connecting Ripley and Bonifant Streets. (Ripifant isn’t the street’s official name, but developers and members of the planning department have been bouncing it around for at least a year.)

That new street could come in handy, given the project’s ample parking supply: up to 480 spaces, according to documents from 2004. Once completed, the buildings will sit around the corner from the Silver Spring Transit Center, and adjacent to the Dixon Street public garage.

But don’t sweat it, said Don Hague, of Home Properties (yeah, that Home Properties), which bought the project from another developer.

“When this parking number was set, the project was intended to be a condominium,” he told planning commissioners. The intent was to sell the parking spots along with the housing units, he explained.

“Now that it’s a rental, we’ll look into that number,” Hague added.

In addition to the apartments, retail and parking, the project plants a small park on Ripley and what will be an extension of Dixon, behind what’s now Pyramid Atlantic. The project’s masterminds previously announced they would name the joint in honor of environmentalist and Silver Springer Rachel Carson.

Images courtesy of MNCPPC.

Updated Sep 24, 2008.

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Planning board: Build ‘em big for workforce housing

By Jennifer Deseo | Sep 16, 2008

ROCKVILLE — The county’s planning board is cool with a proposed zoning change that gives buildings more height or density, as long as the extra space squeezes in workforce housing, a spokesperson testified before the county council Tuesday.

Greg Russ, with the planning board’s development-review team, said the proposal’s only problem was its crappy wording. According to the proposal, a project with workforce housing can score an additional 10 percent of its floor-area ratio, even if that tops the limits set in the county’s sector plans. However, the project won’t be allowed to top limits pinned to its zone.

If approved, the zoning change would back another rule that raised the roof for projects (one in particular) in Fenton Village. That rule, approved in late July, set building heights off Georgia Avenue’s east side at 110 feet max if they squeezed in workforce-housing apartments.

The change also backs additional height for Silver Spring’s library project on Fenton at Bonifant Streets. That county-led mixed-use project might need the extra headroom to replace apartments lost when it bought — and later demolished — the Bonifant Court apartments.

But the Montgomery County Civic Federation wasn’t digging the idea of more apartments, or more residents. Jim Humphrey, who testified on the organization’s behalf, said up to 85,000 new housing units can be built in the county without screwing with zoning laws.

Humphrey also suggested revising the master plan. A revision, he argued, would give planners a shot to study how much the existing infrastructure can take, and how much it would cost to build and maintain added infrastructure.

The county council’s planning committee mulls over the proposal in early November.

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So you’ve got a wrecking ball aimed at the Falklands. Now what?

By Jennifer Deseo | Sep 8, 2008

The planning board’s decision to nix Falkland Chase’s northern parcel may not have been the final nail in its coffin, but it was certainly the shrill creak of that lid closing. On Thursday, the board said redevelopment on the apartment complex’s north side wouldn’t ruin the historic character of its southern and western parcels, which would be preserved in perpetuity. The final decision belongs to the county council.

But commissioner Joe Alfandre, new guy on the planning board and Kentlands developer, said he wanted to see redevelopment on that site move as one piece. That would give the planning board muscle over what any new plan would look like, and “to ensure that we see the whole thing in the proper context” of garden-style apartments, he said.

So now what? While the blogosphere dreams of dashing through a wide-aisled Harris Teeter, and preservationists plot to chain themselves to Falkland’s front doors, the property’s owners have cooked up plans of their own.

Gone is the original concept racking high-rise towers around a large green space (below). According to representatives of Home Properties, which owns the property, that idea was “too literal an interpretation” of public-space requirements.

Instead, Home Properties has come up with a tentative plan B. That concept drops 60,000 square feet of street-level retail space along East-West Highway. (Earlier concepts set most of the retail away from the street.) Building heights will step down as the project moves south, away from the CSX tracks, keeping in line with the southern parcel’s historic buildings (below).

According to documents submitted to the planning board, about 1,060 new apartments could be constructed, with 133 pegged as moderately priced dwelling units and 100 set aside as work-force housing. The new buildings would contain a smattering of studio apartments plus one-, two- and three-bedroom digs, which Home Properties claimed would improve the neighborhood’s diversity.

None of these ideas are carved in granite. The planning board still must put them through the wringer, even if the county council okays demolition of the north parcel’s existing structures.

As for the southern and western parcels, planning staffers on Thursday said they would hold Home Properties to a covenant for improvements to those buildings. That rings up to $13,000 of insulation, plumbing, wiring and exterior improvements for each existing apartment, Home Properties’ Don Hague told the board. However, board commissioner Alfandre worried that amount wouldn’t cut it.

And what about current tenants of the north parcel’s 182 existing apartments? Residents told the board that Home Properties would relocate them to other apartments on the property, though some worried the space wouldn’t be there.

“When I checked on apartment availability on the complex’s own website, … there were only ten vacant units in the entire three parcels,” testified Jane Bergwin-Rand, who has lived at the Falklands on and off for more than 30 years. “Current residents should not be forced to move for the sake of phantom future renters.”

Images courtesy of MNCPPC.

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