Reply to What are the commercial lease rates are at Friendship Heights?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Friendship Heights needs to just revert back to single family or townhouse type. Like a new upscale McLean Gardens. Lord and Taylor and Mazza razed would provide lots of room for delightful family housing.  [/quote]

What are you talking about - you are going to put single family homes on Wisconsin Avenue or even Western?  Good luck selling those!

Friendship Heights problem is it is a regional destination retail center that can't compete against other regional destination retail centers that are bigger in a retail environment where lots of stores are going out of business.

Friendship Heights has too much retail and not enough residential.

Redeveloping the Lord and Taylor site and Mazza into mixed use buildings with residential above a lesser amount of retail would bring things more into balance and as is the case in most mixed use buildings the residential would subsidize the retail giving the landlord more flexibility to lease to start-ups and small businesses.

And there are some pretty good reasons why a bunch of the businesses failed, primary among them being that even in a wealthy neighborhood there are still a finite number of people willing to pay $900 for a blender at Sur La Table or $200 for a meal for two at Range (which had 400 seats!) or spend $800 for a handbag or $1400 for a suit at Neimans and that is not even getting into the bonkers luxury stuff across the line in MD.  It is important to remember that neither Chevy Chase Pavilion nor the Chevy Chase Center (where Tiffany and Giant are) used to be all upscale and when the two properties re-developed they jacked up the rents and brought in a bunch of luxury retailers and expensive restaurants almost all of which have failed - it is true that Steinmart is also in bankruptcy but they outlasted Range by several years.

The Cheesecake Factory and World Market have both been among the most successful stores in each respective chain and the Embassy Suites has long been a cash cow for the chain and despite ridiculously high rents the office buildings on both sides of the line were doing quite well pre-covid as were the 2 Starbucks within a block of each other.

Chevy Chase Pavilion in particular is really poorly managed - I've known for years the guy who runs the little newsstand in the basement and in the midst of a pandemic they are jacking his rents despite having retail that has been empty for years!  They should be grateful to have anyone in that space and instead are squeezing him out.  They also ran out the Washington Sport and Health that used to be in the basement and used to bring lots of people in the neighborhood in every day who would then shop at Starbucks and CVS and that space also remains empty.[/quote]

I actually like the look of the Lord and Taylor and Mazza Gallarie structures there. If they could figure out how to drop two stories of three or four bedroom apartments on top of them, that would be amazing (no more one bedroom or studio apartments please). There is more super inefficient parking back there than you can imagine. There has to be a way to better use that bit of land. Again, I am NOT talking a bunch of single bedroom apartments.

I don't understand the PP saying that nobody lives on Western Ave. There are single family homes all down both the DC and MD sides of Western Ave. Drive from Mazza to Mass Ave and you will only pass SFH's. I don't think that you replace Mazza with single family homes but that comment from PP just shows that they probably don't live there or have any familiarity with the area outside of GGW or some other blog.

Redeveloping into mixed use buildings is simply a throw away comment. What is the retail? There is retail now, what are you going to replace the retail with? Why is a Karate studio under a mixed use development any more successful than the one there right now. Mixed use is simply sales talk.

I thought that the article made an interesting point when it said that there is no Business Development Group for the area. That is amazing and seems like an oversite. So with these businesses relocating for years to City Center and Bethesda, the remaining businesses never thought, 'how do we keep this thing going before we all are out of business?'

Cheesecake Factory and Maggianos have figured something out. It is funny, but living in the area, those are the only two restaurants that I have not eaten in. Sushi Ko, just down the street actually moved to the area from Glover Park (Larger location, though I might have liked the GP location better)

I agree with someone who said it earlier, it is a shame that there is not a 'regular' grocery store there. The Whole Foods is amazing and the Amazon Go will probably be nice, but sometimes my kids just want name brand stuff. Actually sometimes I just want name brand stuff.

The Pavilion was actually a hidden gem. The Embassy Suites gave the interior a hotel lobby like feel that was kind of nice. It seemed like it was thriving back in the pottery barn world market days. I think somebody was correct that Pottery Barn moved to collocate all of its names along one street in Bethesda.

Look, the area has ALL of the ingredients all of the densifiers are always screaming about. Lots of space, zoned correctly and metro access. It is on a regional seam. Everything spells success. It will be amazing to see  if the city and the neighborhood come together with a robust plan to reimagine the area an not simply 'density boxes' of one bedroom apartments.[/quote]

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