Steve Burns
WMAL.com

BETHESDA, Md. – (WMAL) They aren’t hard to spot. Huge hulking clusters of office buildings on the side of six or eight-lane highways with a big sign draped over several floors – FOR SALE. It’s been a growing problem for years in the D.C. region. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments pegs the office building vacancy rate in the region at 14.9 percent, the highest in 20 years.

Marriott, the world’s largest hotel company, will contribute to that number once it has moved out of its campus in North Bethesda into a new building in downtown Bethesda over the next decade.

“The idea of the suburban office park was to say, ‘let’s get workers out in a bucolic setting without a lot of distractions,” Montgomery County Planning Director Gwen Wright tells WMAL. “They can focus on their work. They can be surrounded by nature. They can be in a bubble.”

Office parks were largely a product of suburbanization and car culture that arose after World War II. But along with an unmistakable revitalization of city centers and downtowns came an evolving preference for the kind of environment in which people prefer to live and work.

“Office users have a strong preference for mixed-use, vital locations,” Wright says. “Those types of transit-rich environments are the ones that are most attractive to office tenants these days.”

In short, people want to live, work, eat, and play all in one area, and not be held captive to the car and the congestion that comes with it. The suburban office park became the antithesis to the movement and an impediment to attracting a younger workforce, Wright says.

The challenge now, Wright says, is figuring out what to do with these isolated office campuses, some of which have become abandoned and overgrown.

“It does require us to step back and be creative,” she says. “We believe it’s very doable to convert older office buildings into other uses, whether they be residential, schools, or other kinds of public facilities.”

She notes new growth can’t come without a proportional improvement in the county’s infrastructure. It was evidenced in a battle that played out over the summer when the County Council attempted to relocate a school bus parking lot to make way for new development near the Shady Grove Metro station, only to see widespread opposition from neighbors of the proposed new locations. Some at the time protested that Montgomery County was built out and can’t handle new development, and the influx of people that come with it, in its infrastructure and schools.

Wright sees it as a mandate to think more outside the box.

“You can’t stop growing, but you can manage that growth in a way that is as compatible and as compatible and as beneficial as possible,” she says. “The county is not built out. The county has to change its focus from large-scale developments to focus on more infill kinds of projects that require a higher level of scrutiny on compatibility and infrastructure support.”

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