For Immediate Release: Friday, March 24, 2017
Montgomery Council committee to
Address affordable housing,
Battery Lane District for proposed
Bethesda Downtown plan
Also at worksession on Monday, March 27:
Allocation of density between
commercial and residential areas
ROCKVILLE, Md., March 24, 2017—The Montgomery County Council’s Planning, Housing and Economic Development (PHED) Committee at 2 p.m. on Monday, March 27, will address affordable housing as one of the elements of the proposed Bethesda Downtown Plan.
The PHED Committee, which is chaired by Councilmember Nancy Floreen and includes Councilmembers George Leventhal and Hans Riemer, will meet in the Third Floor Hearing Room of the Council Office Building at 100 Maryland Ave. in Rockville.
Monday’s meeting will be the PHED Committee’s eighth worksession on the Bethesda Downtown Sector Plan. When the committee has completed its review of the plan, its recommendations will go to the full Council for consideration.
At Monday’s meeting, the committee will focus on affordable housing issues, a few follow-up issues, the plan's site-specific recommendations for the Battery Lane District and the plan's allocation of density between commercial and residential areas.
At an earlier meeting, the committee decided to increase the requirement for MPDUs for all optional method of development projects from 12.5 to 15 percent. This would give developers added density to projects if they increased the number of affordable housing units. The committee was interested in exploring options to try to preserve the existing market rate affordable units in Bethesda to the extent possible.
The County’s Planning Department staff has presented different options to increase or preserve affordable housing.
The committee also will discuss the Battery Lane District, which consists primarily of garden and mid-rise apartments along Battery Lane between Woodmont Avenue and Old Georgetown Road, directly south of the National Institutes of Health campus. The plan indicates that "within this District, 1,044 dwelling units in 16 building complexes provide one of the major sources of market-rate affordable housing in Bethesda."
In 2006, when the Council considered the Woodmont Triangle Sector Plan, it deferred zoning decisions for this area and directed the Planning Board to do a study of options to preserve existing market-rate affordable housing.
The proposed plan recommends retaining zoning for the existing townhouses and single-family homes. It rezones most properties to the Commercial/Residential Zone at heights of 120 feet, which is significantly greater than the heights of many existing buildings along Battery Lane (several are four to five stories high) and is also greater than heights of recently approved local map amendments that range from 80 to 110 feet.
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Release ID: 17-102