Accessibility and Land Development

Winston Churchill’s 1943 quote, “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” applies equally well to the transportation infrastructure undergirding Montgomery County: Accessibility highly influences land values and the resulting building forms. This long-form story map illuminates how a series of major transportation infrastructure investments improved accessibility, defined as the ability to travel efficiently between different parts of our region, and urbanized Montgomery County.

The county is now at an inflection point in its development. As the data-driven animations in this story map show, Montgomery County has largely exhausted the supply of unbuilt land (greenfields) available for development in the last 10 years. The path forward is now through more complicated infill with new construction between existing structures, and through redevelopment of existing uses.

 Thrive Montgomery 2050  and the 2020  Growth and Infrastructure Policy  (formerly known as the Subdivision Staging Policy) reflect the shift away from simply managing the physical expansion of the county across a greenfield landscape and toward targeting infill and redevelopment by creating transport rich and attractive nodes. In particular, the County Council’s elimination of residential development moratoriums was a recognition that simply halting all growth in an area to allow infrastructure delivery to catch-up suited a rapidly expanding suburb, but poorly served our efforts to attract and promote infill and redevelopment.

In addition to these policies, Montgomery County needs further investment in our transportation systems to support infill development. The series of animations in this digital media report will demonstrate how accessibility defines development potential, and that transportation systems transform accessibility. As the animations converge on the present day, it will be clear how each of our transportation system improved accessibility to a larger part of Montgomery County and generated a subsequent wave of urban/suburban development. The animations show both how little developable greenfield land remains, and why investment in future transit, including the Purple Line and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), are critical to providing housing and jobs for the next generation of residents.

The animations in this report show the development of Montgomery County from 1885 to 2020 using recorded subdivision plats. Subdivision is an essential step in the conversion of rural or agricultural land into an urban/suburban environment. This is the process to divide large plots of land into streets providing local access and lots that could be sold and/or built upon. The connection between subdivision of land and urbanization is so tight that “subdivision” became another term for the tracts and tracts of new houses in growing suburbs. While legal documents relating to the transfer of land date to the original charter for the Maryland colony in 1632, Montgomery County digitized and mapped all subdivision plats from 1881 to the present. This mapped plat data conveniently covers almost the entire suburban development period in Montgomery County, which began with a plat for the Linden neighborhood in 1873. The animations in this story map start in 1885, after the subdivision of Linden and Takoma Park (1883) but before the boom in development along the railroad that  began around 1887 .

There is little of Montgomery County’s modern urban form depicted in maps prior to the 1880s, supporting the decision to start the animations there. There was much notable history before this date:  The Indigenous People of Maryland  inhabited these lands long before John Smith explored the Chesapeake in 1608, before the first patent for land in the county (a document asserting ownership over land) was  recorded in 1688 , before the county itself was created out of a portion of Frederick County in 1776, and before the county seat was established in Rockville in 1777.

 Samuel Lewis’ 1795 Map of the State of Maryland , one of the earlier maps to includes the D.C. region, only depicts the road between Georgetown and Frederick and one named point: Montgomery Court House (later to become Rockville).

The  1865 Martenet and Bond Map of Montgomery County  provides much greater detail, showing a county traversed by roads with communities or clusters of homes at most crossroads. Per the 1860 and 1870 Censuses, the population had grown to between 18,000 and 20,000 from 15,000 in 1800. The cluster of settlements hints at this increase and the impact to the county’s then-agricultural economy. The growth in the population and economy were facilitated by regional transportation links that conveyed goods and materials such as the Patowmack Canal whose first section opened in 1795; the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal which quickly succeeded the Patowmack and began operation in 1831; the Washington Turnpike Company’s road from Georgetown to Rockville chartered in 1806; and the Columbia Turnpike chartered in 1810.

 The 1879 Hopkins Atlas of Fifteen Miles Around Washington  is a useful record regarding urban form and transportation infrastructure just before widespread suburbanization began. By this point the county had grown to almost 25,000 people per the 1880 Census. The atlas shows the outline of much of our modern road network, though the roads would have hardly resembled the modern boulevards and avenues they have come to be. The map shows only three areas that resemble a gridded urban district: Rockville, which as the county seat was by far the largest town at the time; Linden (located between Brookville Road and Linden Lane in Silver Spring); and Poolesville. Some of these towns had long existed in this urban form, demonstrated by the  1803 plan of Rockville  and the Maryland State Archives  1814 interactive map of Brookville  (which despite being a clear urban area was not highlighted with a call-out box on the 1879 map).

In advance of major infrastructure development in the county, there is little in the 1879 map that differentiates downtown Silver Spring and downtown Bethesda from numerous similarly sized crossroad communities. These two neighborhoods would grow dramatically in the coming 140 years and highlight the impact of accessibility on the intensity of development and use of land. In advance of any suburban or urban development, downtown Silver Spring (called Sligo in the 1879 Hopkins Atlas) was 10-15 structures around the intersection of the Washington and Colesville Turnpike (modern day US 29) and the Union Plank Turnpike (modern day Georgia Avenue); Downtown Bethesda, which wasn’t prominent enough for its own inset box, was just 15-20 structures strung along the Rockville Turnpike.

The size of downtown Silver Spring and downtown Bethesda was comparable at that time to other crossroad communities that are now miniscule in comparison: 15-20 structures in Dawsonville; 20 structures at the heart of Mechanicsville-Olney; 20-25 structures in Damascus; and similar numbers of structures in places like Darnestown and Barnesville.

The Metropolitan Branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the transportation infrastructure that first supported Montgomery County’s transformation into an urban place, soon followed by streetcars that made the adjacent farms and fields accessible to Washington D.C. The Metropolitan Branch opened as a single track in 1873 but was double-tracked from D.C. to Gaithersburg between 1886 and 1893, which allowed for more reliable suburban passenger train service. While the first subdivision was Linden in 1873, a string of early communities formed along the railroad after 1880, including  Kensington  and  Takoma Park .

Streetcars  built by land developers in the 1890s  enabled additional development, most notably in  Chevy Chase  and  Bethesda . In contrast to the railroad that generated suburbs strung out along the line, the streetcar developments clustered along the border with Washington. Blacks, Jews, and others belonging to racial or religious minority groups were largely barred from these developments either by explicit covenants, like the example from the Silver Spring area highlighted earlier, or by other actions that prevented development by companies controlled by or selling to Blacks, such as the  case of Belmont  near Chevy Chase.

A continuous trend in this digital media report is the initiation of a transportation system in one era fueling growth and urban expansion in the next. Beginning in 1910, the State of Maryland  started a major road paving and construction effort  to link the state. These earliest roads were modest, between 14 and 19 feet of smooth material like tarmac. Over time through multiple widening efforts they would come to be the modern roadways we know today. The network initially focused on connecting county seats with each other, Baltimore, and Washington. Prior to 1920 this effort does not visibly appear to change the development pattern of Montgomery County in the succeeding animation.

The following animation shows the development of Montgomery County from 1885 to 1919. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

The state highway network became a significant factor in the urban development of Montgomery County after 1920 by greatly expanding the accessibility of Bethesda and Silver Spring through roadways like Bradley Boulevard (Route 191, paved in 1923) and Seminary Road (formerly Route 391, paved in 1930).

The  1922 Washington Herald advertisement  announcing Woodside Park highlights how quickly the automobile became the center of suburban development, providing driving directions to the site and specifically noting the smooth driveway material used on each lot. These new residents were soon served by retail that catered to them and their automobiles, demonstrated by the postcard celebrating the now historically designated Silver Spring Shopping Center and its prominent parking lot.

The focus on the automobile was heightened after 1935  when all of the remaining street lines were torn out , except for the line to Cabin John which persevered until 1960. As shown in the next animation, as the pre-World War II era came to a close, a clear urban nucleus around Bethesda and Silver Spring was served by a dense network of roadways built and/or paved by the state, connecting these suburbs to Washington.

The first multilane boulevards built in 1935, including a small portion of East-West Highway in Silver Spring and an extension of Massachusetts Avenue at the southwest corner of the county, mark the start of a network of multilane roadways that would support the wave of post-war development after 1945.

The following animation shows the development of Montgomery County from 1920 to 1939. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

Following World War II, the state continued expanding and/or building multilane roadways radiating out from Washington D.C, such as Georgia Avenue, Connecticut Avenue, Veirs Mill Road, University Boulevard, Rockville Pike, and East-West Highway. These boulevards significantly increased the area of Montgomery County within a reasonable commute of the employment centers in Washington.

This increase in accessibility coincided with rapid population growth, the movement of some federal institutions out to the suburbs, and national policies promoting suburban housing development. The improved accessibility and these enabling conditions collectively fueled a wave of  suburban subdivisions filled with tracts of homes  for a rapidly growing federal government workforce and burgeoning regional population. Many of these homes were and remain “starter homes,” relatively small, low-cost properties aimed at first-time home buyers, like the Cape Cod from the 1949 Glenmont Village subdivision promotion shown, or the identical homes in the aerial photo of the Viers Mill Village subdivision taken soon after it was built in the late 1940s. This population was largely white as a result of racial covenants recorded on the lots sold in Viers Mill Village. The tracts of homes built during this time form a large portion of Wheaton, Twinbrook, Forest Glen, Potomac, Woodmoor, and Burnt Mills.

The next animation shows that growth during this era was more concentrated in the east side of Montgomery County than in the west side, a trend that would soon reverse as a result of the construction of the first interstate highway in Montgomery County, then called US Route 240 and now named Interstate 270. This road began to make its way south in stages from Frederick starting in 1953 and would highly influence development patterns after 1960. A 1973 Washington Post article cited in the Comsat Building National Register of Historic Places  nomination form  describes the extreme impact the roadway would have:

“in the more than two decades since state road engineers designated the path of their new highway … it has become the backbone of a bustling corridor city of some 130,000 residents, plus 720 private businesses and nine federal agencies with 37,800 jobs. Where Cows had grazed and barns had dotted the countryside, there are no corporate offices for firms like IBM and Comsat and sprawling federal campuses for agencies like the National Bureau of Standards and the Atomic Energy Commission.”

The following animation illustrates the development of Montgomery County from 1940 to 1959. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

The completion of the highway to Frederick and then the Capital  Beltway in 1964  as part of the National Highway System dramatically increased accessibility from Montgomery County to the rest of the region. Further enabled by the  Wedges and Corridors General Plan  from 1964, Montgomery County continued the boom in suburban land development that started in the 1950s and that has not been replicated since. During this period subdivisions spread out in unconnected clusters across the face of the county, in contrast to the compact expansion of prior periods that hewed tightly to railways or arterial roadways. The accessibility generated by I-270 significantly shifted the focus of development away from US-29 and East County and towards West County again, a trend increasingly noticeable in the animations after 1970.

Montgomery County was not alone in its pace and form of growth at this time. The rest of suburban Maryland and Virginia also benefitted from extensive highway development and the increase in accessibility that fueled rapid land development.

The following animation illustrates the development of Montgomery County from 1960 to 1979. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

The Silver Spring Metro Station  opened in 1978  and marked again the arrival of an infrastructure system at the tail-end of one era that would expand accessibility and support continued growth in the next. The construction of the Metro Red Line, built with considerable federal resources, increased accessibility in the greater Gaithersburg area by providing an alternative to long commutes on roadways filling with traffic. The establishment of the Agricultural Reserve in 1980 halted the unconstrained outward expansion and guided suburban development to fill in the gaps between established suburban neighborhoods.

The western portion of the Red Line to Shady Grove, with its acres of parking for automobile commuters, opened in 1984 and coincided with a surge in development in the Germantown and Gaithersburg areas. The transit served to connect commuters, who still needed a car or bus ride to get to the station, with job centers in DC, and was not integrated into the neighborhoods, which were still primarily low density, single use development. At the time, the Zoning Code’s prohibitions on mixed use, the knowledge and experience of developers, and financial markets responding to the perceived desires of consumers all demanded single-use developments. Kentlands, an iconic new urbanist development in Gaithersburg that started construction in 1988, is a notable exception. The  history  of Kentlands includes a “friendly foreclosure” and the bank taking back the deed to the land, which indicates how difficult it was at that time to attempt a then-new style of development.

By 1990, 30 years after the development of I-270 and reinforced now by the Metro, the Bethesda/Gaithersburg/Germantown corridor remained the clear economic spine of Montgomery County in accordance with its better connectivity to the rest of the region. The development pattern reflects the 1993 refinement to the 1964 Wedges and Corridors General Plan, which confirmed I-270 as the only corridor in Montgomery County. The development moratorium imposed on East County  from 1986 to 2004  only increased this disparity.

The following animation showcases the development of Montgomery County from 1980 to 1999. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

The pace of subdivision in Montgomery County notably slowed after 2000 because there was less greenfield land available (with the exception of Clarksburg). Additionally, more development occurred on infill parcels that may not have required subdivision and thus are less visible in the data set used for this analysis. 

There was one major completed infrastructure investment during the last 20 years in the form of the $2.56 billion Intercounty Connector (ICC, or Route 200) connecting I-95 with I-270 across the middle of the county. The ICC was originally envisioned as part of a never-built outer Beltway loop. While usage of the road  has increased in recent years , the land near the roadway remains zoned for low-density uses.

The following animation shows the development of Montgomery County from 2000 to 2019. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

Thrive 2050 recommits to concentrating growth in downtowns, town centers, rural villages, and intensively developed centers and nodes along major corridors. The Plan calls for more transit, including BRT, as the most efficient and sustainable way to increase connectivity between these centers of activity. Construction on the Purple Line started in 2017, but due to additional delays, completion is not expected until 2023. However, in anticipation of its completion, we are already seeing redevelopment in several locations along the corridor, facilitated by the  2015 Chevy Chase Lake Sector Plan  and the  2014 Bethesda Purple Line Station Plan .

What follows is the complete animation from 1885 to 2019. Each year is 1.5 seconds of animation.

Data on the routes and dates of operations of the streetcars in Montgomery County come from a number of online resources:

• Montgomery County Historical Society – History of the Streetcar Lines in Montgomery County, 1974
• The Chevy Chase Trolley station that moved to the country, July 27, 2018, Greater Greater Washington
• Places from the Past: The Tradition of Gardez Bien in Montgomery County; M-NCPPC, 2001
• 1917 Baist Real Estate Plat Book

Data on when state highways were built, paved, and/or expanded come from the annual reports of the Maryland State Roads Commission from 1909 to 1960, accessed through Worldcat.org. Where reports were unclear on when specific road segments were paved, the author made best-guess assumptions based on the date of improvements in nearby roadways.

Data on when parcels became park land came from the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Department’s real estate database. Where the provenance of parcels was unknown, the author made estimates based on underlying subdivision plats, the date adjacent parcels became parks, or the date the state or federal Government authorized the creation of specific state and national parks in Montgomery County.

Thank you to the many staff at M-NCPPC that supported the creation of this product. In particular the author is grateful to the following individuals who provided valuable support and feedback:

Stephen Aldrich

Rebeccah Ballo

Laurence King

John Liebertz

Caroline McCarthy

Chris McGovern

Christopher Peifer

Atul Sharma

Tanya Stern