Six-Story, 300-Unit Apartment Building Planned for North Bethesda

• 11:25 AM EST

by UrbanTurf Staff

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A vacant office building in North Bethesda could be replaced with a 300-unit apartment building, under a new plan filed with Montgomery County. 

Network Realty Partners has filed plans to demolish the seven-story office building at 2101 East Jefferson (map) and replace it with a six-story residential building with 300 apartments. 

The project, designed by MV+A Architects, would use the county’s Commercial to Residential Reconstruction process to speed approvals for converting qualifying vacant office buildings to housing. Rather than clearing the whole site, the developer plans to keep the existing three-level parking garage and build the new apartments on top of it. 

The developer also plans to build a roughly 1,000-square-foot plaza at the corner of Josiah Henson Parkway and East Jefferson Street, and will seek a noise waiver for it, since a sound wall would undercut the goal of activating the corner. The developer also proposes to build a public natural trail through the wooded area on the site’s western edge, connecting Josiah Henson Parkway to a trail built by the townhouse community under construction to the south. 

This new proposal is just one of several office-to-residential projects taking shape in the North Bethesda area. Pulte Homes won approval last month for a 106-unit townhome and condo community at 6001 Montrose Road, which it pursued through the county’s expedited process for converting vacant offices. That project would replace a vacant, ten-story office building. The owner of a vacant office building at 2115 East Jefferson Street has been advancing a plan to replace it with 86 townhomes since at least 2023. In the nearby Rock Spring area, Rockledge Associates has filed plans to replace a vacant six-story office building at 6610 Rockledge Drive with roughly 285 apartments.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/six_story_300-unit_apartment_building_planned/25158.