State and local leaders touted the promise of a proposed mixed-use development to be built over an existing North Bethesda Metro station as a way to grow Montgomery County’s burgeoning life sciences and tech industries.
The facility is still years away from breaking ground. But Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich said the effort could transform the area into something similar to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where technology firms are located close to MIT.
“I had been fascinated by the people I had been talking to about life sciences, and talking to me about Kendall Square in Boston, and talking about the urban campus, and talking about the value of collision spaces … rather than everything being done in office parks, where you never talk to the scientists in the next building,” Elrich said.
The county executive said too often research is confined to offices and research parks where there is little interaction with others.
“And in Boston and in Kendall Square, they created an environment … where brains could get together and have lunch, could have dinner, could talk to people from different companies, meeting with each other and talking about the work they’re doing,” Elrich said during a Tuesday press conference to unveil the proposal. “And I saw this as an opportunity to create that kind of collision space in Montgomery County.”
The plan calls for construction of as much as 3 million square feet of mixed-use space at the North Bethesda Metro station, which is adjacent to the Food and Drug Administration offices.
Officials with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, which owns the 14-acre parcel, annouced Tuesday that Hines, a global real estate investment firm, would act as master developer on the project.
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