Growing up in the planned community of New Mark Commons in Rockville, Md., Emily Ecker remembers flitting back and forth between houses in a neighborhood teeming with kids. She competed on the neighborhood swim team, and there were always older children to walk with her to a nearby playground.
So following a 15-year absence after high school, when she moved to New England and joined the Naval Reserves, Ecker returned to New Mark Commons last year — and bought the townhouse she grew up in.
“Now that I’m older, I‘ll walk through the neighborhood, and it’s amazing to me there’s so many houses I’ve been in as a kid. There’s not a street where I didn’t go to at least one house,” Ecker said. “As a little kid, I was awed by all these pear trees with big puffy flowers in the spring. The frosty white branches arching in the yards were so magical when it snowed.”
Both this sense of community and the preservation of trees were part of New Mark Commons’ plan from the beginning. The founders conducted a survey of the trees before designing the community, with the goal of placing not just the house, but their large windows and sliding glass doors to offer a sense of living surrounded by woods.
Paved paths wind through the trees and partially around the 4½ acre lake, which draws geese, ducks and turtles. With just one primary road out to busy Maryland Avenue, there’s no cut-through traffic. Many streets are short cul-de-sacs, which encourages neighbors to get to know one another.
New Mark Commons also features a pool and clubhouse. In the planning stages, a restaurant and shopping area were also part of the design, but developers and residents decided to nix that plan to ensure the community remained insulated from too many people and cars.
Ann and Marty Reiss have lived in their mid-century modern home for 51 years, moving from Long Island after visiting friends.
“Long Island was all potato fields and tons of housing built in grids where they demolished all the trees at the time,” Marty Reiss said. “We had [also] lived in California, which had a lot of contemporary houses surrounded by trees, so that’s what attracted us to New Mark.”
The Reisses, who moved in just a few years after their house was built, raised their children there and can’t imagine living anywhere else.
And that’s how a lot of residents feel. Currently, none of the 186 single family houses and 198 townhouses are for sale.
“It’s very desirable without a doubt. It’s an aesthetically unique and appealing community,” said Steve Kelley, founder of the Steve Kelley Real Estate Team in Rockville. He noted that while the single-family homes have sold with prices into the mid-$800,000s that the scarcity of those for sale means they will probably go for more than $900,000 this year. “Without a doubt, it’s almost like the price is ready to burst going upward,” he said.
In 2023, eight single-family houses sold for between $600,000 and $850,000, and 14 townhouses sold with prices ranging from $543,000 to $639,000, Kelley said. The most expensive house had four bedrooms and 2½ bathrooms, while the least expensive house had two bedrooms and 2½ bathrooms.
Kelley noted that the community is popular not only for its walkability inside its borders, but because residents can walk to the Rockville Metro station and Rockville Town Square about one mile away. The town center includes Rockville Memorial Library, Regal movie theaters, shops and a number of restaurants.
As for the community’s name, developers wanted the new concept of a planned community with mixed housing types that defied the norm of cookie-cutter suburban sprawl to make a “new mark,” in urban planning, said Kathleen Moran, president of New Mark Commons’ board of directors.
“What’s impressive about our neighborhood is that it still looks like it did when [it was] built. The fact that the neighborhood took care of itself and its landscape and didn’t allow additions not architecturally appropriate has kept it that way,” said Moran, who has lived there for 32 years.
But keeping up the walking paths and pool, and the upcoming need to dredge the lake, means homeowners association fees are on the rise, which has annoyed some residents. Over the 25 years she has lived there, the fees have grown from about $700 a year to $2,750 this year, resident Natalie Gora said.
At the same time, she relishes the sense of community and its diversity. Gora, who immigrated from Ukraine, helps organize New Mark Commons’ annual international dinner in March, in which residents bring dishes from their home countries or ones that celebrate their background.
Residents also rallied together during the community’s 50th anniversary in 2017 to have New Mark Commons placed on the National Register of Historic Places. This designation is made by the National Park Service, and communities must be at least 50 years old to apply.
Ecker says New Mark Commons offers numerous additional ways to get involved in shaping the community.
“I’m someone who’s never pushed a lawn mower in my life, yet I joined the landscaping committee,” she said. “I can point to changes that have been made over the years. I never expected to be a landscape historian, but I know this place so well. I really had to leave New Mark and then return to appreciate how special and impactful it is.”
Boundaries: Maryland Avenue to the northwest, Monroe Street and Dogwood Park to the east, Scandia Way at the tip of the southern edge, various cul-de-sacs and Potomac Valley Road to the west.
Schools: Bayard Rustin Elementary, Julius West Middle and Richard Montgomery High.
Transportation: The Rockville Metro Station is about one mile away. Ride On bus routes 47 and 56 stop at the intersection of Maryland Avenue and New Mark Esplanade. The Falls Road entrance to Interstate 270 is about a mile from the community.
