Housing developers are shying away from the new commuter market being created by the InterCounty Connector in Montgomery County, the first leg of which opens Tuesday. With just one development in the planning stages for the Georgia Avenue interchange in Olney, planners say ICC spinoff development has largely been discouraged by existing land restrictions.
“I haven’t had a single client coming in and saying, ‘I want to be close to where the ICC is,'” said Jody S. Kline, a land-use lawyer with Miller, Miller & Canby in Rockville. “Whenever there’s new highway, usually people jump at that.”
And it’s not just housing — development activity of any kind along the highway’s path through mostly farmland and existing housing communities in Olney, Burtonsville and the western edge of Laurel near Interstate 95 is relatively quiet.
“The joke is don’t run out of gas after Georgia Avenue,” said Rollin Stanley, Montgomery County’s planning director.
But Stanley says the county intended that to be the case — that “the planning and zoning was designed to protect unwanted growth from happening in areas where we don’t have the infrastructure for it.”
Potential zoning battles are a big deterrent to developers, Kline said.
The lone housing development planned just off the path of the ICC is a 262-unit mix of town houses and multi- and single-family homes on roughly 31 acres in an already well-traveled area of Olney. The Ryland Homes community will be planted at the ICC ramp to Georgia Avenue near Norbeck Road, the end of the first highway leg that begins at Interstate 370 in Shady Grove.
Officials from Ryland Homes did not return calls for comment.
Growth related to the ICC is encouraged in places where there is already an established hub of activity. It fits the county’s development strategy of building upon — or rebuilding in most cases — existing population centers to accommodate more people and preserve open space.
“So you look at Burtonsville — an existing node of activity,” Stanley said. “You look at Glenmont. We’re looking at places where things already happening.”
