July 30, 2026
Chair Artie Harris
Montgomery County Planning Board
2425 Reedie Dr, 14th Floor
Wheaton, MD 20902
Re: Support for Friendship Commons (GEICO Site), Sketch Plan 320260030, Preliminary Plan 120260140, Site Plan 820260120, Forest Conservation Plan Amendment F2026007A
Dear Chair Harris and members of the Planning Commission:
My name is Carrie Kisicki and I am testifying on behalf of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. CSG is the leading organization advocating for walkable, inclusive, transit-oriented communities as the most sustainable and equitable way for the D.C. region to grow and provide opportunities for all. We count over 4,000 supporters across Montgomery County.
We ask you to support the plans before you tonight.
This project is especially meaningful to me because I lived in this area when I first moved to Maryland after college. I was participating in a yearlong service corps program that included housing on Western Avenue. I got to know my neighbors well and I absolutely loved living here.
But at the end of my fellowship, I had to move away, because as a 23-year-old nonprofit employee, I could not afford housing anywhere nearby.
I live now in downtown Silver Spring. Per the latest Community Trends Report, average rent here is around $2,000 and the average home value is $730,000. In the Community Trends Area that includes Friendship Heights and Brookdale, the average rent is $3,000 and the average home value is nearly $1.4 million. That number has increased over 54% since 2010.
There is a reason it’s expensive to live in Friendship Heights. It’s largely because it’s a really great place to live. But it’s also because the housing we’ve built hasn’t kept up with the number of people who want to live in walkable, transit-connected places.
That is why we are urging you to approve this project. We cannot miss this generational opportunity to get this site right—to build for the sustainable and equitable future we want to see, and provide new homes and community spaces right near transit.
This development will be within easy walking distance from the Friendship Heights Metro, as well as a major Ride On and Metrobus station, and numerous grocery stores, shops, and restaurants. It is very much a match for neighborhood character. All the frontages with multi-family buildings are set across from existing residential high-rises. It will provide new dedicated affordable housing, community spaces for new and existing residents alike, and safer bike and pedestrian connections for everyone in the area.
It’s not everyday that you see a project that so embodies what smart growth stands for. There are enormous climate and equity benefits to allowing more people to live in such close proximity to truly top-tier transit, connected to potential jobs and to friends, family, and opportunities throughout the entire region without needing to depend on a car for every trip.
These benefits are proportional to the number of homes that are created, and any reduction in the height of this project or the number of homes provided would very directly mean fewer people are able to benefit from these opportunities.
Finally, I do want to touch on tree preservation. I want to thank Sarah and Mikel from Little Falls Watershed Alliance for taking me on a walk through the site earlier this week, which I deeply appreciated. There are some truly beautiful trees, and walking the site with Sarah and Mikel, I understood and felt myself the heartbreak at the thought of these trees coming down.
I don’t take that lightly and I know that the Planning Board will not take that lightly. You have a wealth of testimony and detailed staff analysis before you, and if there is a better solution for the trees I trust that you will work to reach that solution.
That being said, I am absolutely terrified of the climate future we are hurtling toward right now. I am 27 years old and I think all the time about what our rapidly changing climate means if I decide to have children, and about what it means for the safety of my parents as they age.
We do need shade and we do need healthy trees, but we also need to change the fundamental patterns that led us into this climate emergency. Transportation is the largest driver of carbon emissions in Maryland, and those emissions are aggravated by patterns of development that require more car trips.
Building in a more sustainable way near our high-capacity Metro system is climate action. There is not a path to addressing our climate crisis without fundamentally changing where and how we build, and making it much easier for people to get around safely by bike, walking and transit.
This development is a chance to act on that. It is a chance to course-correct from decades of car-dependent, sprawling growth and build something that is really good, and really needed.
For these reasons, we ask you to approve this project. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Carrie Kisicki