Chevy Chase Homes for Sale

Chevy Chase is a collection of historic, leafy neighborhoods straddling the Maryland–DC line, built out from the plats the Chevy Chase Land Company began laying down in 1890 and known for gracious early-20th-century homes, mature tree canopy and walkable access to the upscale shopping of Friendship Heights and Wisconsin Avenue. It is also unusually confusing on paper. “Chevy Chase” is the shared name of six separately incorporated Montgomery County municipalities — seven if you count the Village of Martin’s Additions, which sits inside the same cluster but does not carry the name — plus a state-chartered special tax district, a large unincorporated area the Census Bureau calls the Chevy Chase CDP, and a Northwest Washington neighborhood in ZIP 20015 that sits entirely in the District. USPS puts a Chevy Chase, MD 20815 address on several of them plus neighbors like Somerset that were never part of the Land Company’s sections at all. Which one a house actually sits in changes its property tax bill, the permit path for any work you do to it, and which school system assigns it — so the first question on any listing here is not what the mailing address says, but what jurisdiction the parcel is in.

Which Chevy Chase is it? A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction map

Start with the map, because the name is doing a great deal of work. Seven incorporated Montgomery County municipalities sit in the cluster, and six of them carry the name. Chevy Chase Village — Sections 1, 1a and 2 of the original subdivision — received state sanction as a special taxing area in 1914 and incorporated in 1951; as of August 2026 the Village describes itself as 720 homes on just under half a square mile, and the 2020 census counted 727 housing units and 2,049 residents. The Town of Chevy Chase is the former Section 4, incorporated in 1918, with 2,904 residents on 0.47 square miles at the 2020 census. Chevy Chase Section Three was organized as a special tax district in 1916 and incorporated as a village in 1982; Chevy Chase Section Five became a special taxing district in 1922 and incorporated on June 25, 1982 after a May 18 referendum. The Village of Martin’s Additions — the one municipality in the cluster whose official name leaves “Chevy Chase” out — dates to a 1916 special tax district and incorporated March 19, 1985. North Chevy Chase, tucked just south of the Capital Beltway near the Connecticut Avenue interchange, incorporated in 1996. Chevy Chase View is the outlier: a special tax district from 1924, incorporated October 28, 1993, sitting roughly two miles north of the rest of the cluster, bordered by Kensington and carrying ZIP 20895 rather than 20815. Around and between them lies unincorporated Montgomery County — the Chevy Chase CDP, 10,176 residents on 2.41 square miles at the 2020 count. The Village of Friendship Heights is not an incorporated municipality but a state-chartered special tax district created in 1914, about 34 acres bounded by Wisconsin Avenue, Willard Avenue and Somerset Terrace. And Chevy Chase, DC is a Washington neighborhood bounded by Rock Creek Park on the east and Western Avenue and Tennyson Street on the north, split between Wards 3 and 4 along Broad Branch Road by a redistricting effective January 1, 2002 and represented by Advisory Neighborhood Commission 3/4G.

What the jurisdiction line actually governs: taxes, permits and school assignment

Three practical consequences follow, and they are the reason the distinction is worth an hour of a buyer’s time. First, taxes. A home inside a Maryland municipality pays Montgomery County property tax plus a municipal property tax set by that municipality — in Chevy Chase Village the Board of Managers adopts the operating and capital budget and sets the real and personal property tax rates at the Village’s annual meeting each April, after a public hearing; that is the Village’s published procedure as of August 2026 — while a house a block away in unincorporated Chevy Chase carries no municipal layer at all. Montgomery County partly offsets the overlap through the municipal tax duplication payments it makes to incorporated municipalities under Chapter 30A of the county code; the amounts are set annually in the county budget, and the program was in place as of August 2026. A home across Western Avenue in DC is in a different system entirely: District property and income tax and District agencies, with no Maryland state or county income tax. Rates are reset every year on both sides of the line, so confirm the current figure for the exact parcel — the block across the street can sit in a different municipality, or in none. Second, services. As of August 2026 Chevy Chase Village runs its own police and public works departments; service arrangements differ municipality by municipality, so ask what the specific town or village actually provides. Third, schools. Montgomery County Public Schools serves the Maryland side, with the Chevy Chase municipalities generally in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School cluster — B-CC is at 4301 East-West Highway in Bethesda — while elementary and middle assignment varies by street, drawing on the paired Rosemary Hills (pre-K–2) and Chevy Chase or North Chevy Chase (3–5) elementary schools and feeding either Westland or Silver Creek middle school depending on the boundary. The DC side is DCPS, where Chevy Chase addresses feed Lafayette or Ben W. Murch elementary, Alice Deal Middle and Jackson-Reed High, and where any school other than your in-boundary school is reached through the My School DC common lottery rather than a transfer request. Those are the published assignments for the 2026–2027 school year. Boundaries move; verify a specific address with MCPS or DCPS directly rather than relying on a listing sheet.

The 1890s plats and how the ground was laid out

Francis G. Newlands and Senator William M. Stewart incorporated the Chevy Chase Land Company on June 6, 1890, after quiet straw purchases assembled 1,712 acres along the route of a Connecticut Avenue that did not yet exist north of the District line — including Grover Cleveland’s 26.5-acre “Oak View” estate, bought in February 1890. The company built the avenue itself, spent roughly $1.5 million on an electric streetcar line, and dug Chevy Chase Lake to generate power for it; the first streetcars ran up the new Connecticut Avenue to the Maryland terminus at Coquelin Run — where the lake was — in September 1892, and the lake later became an amusement destination before being drained in the 1930s. Commerce was deliberately kept out of the residential sections. The deeds carried construction covenants: buyers on Connecticut Avenue had to build a house worth at least $5,000, and at least $3,000 on the side streets, with design controlled by the company’s supervising architects Leon Dessez and Lindley Johnson. The numbered sections filled in over the decades that followed, and that numbering survives in the municipal names today: Sections 1, 1a and 2 became Chevy Chase Village, Section 4 became the Town of Chevy Chase, and the ground platted as Sections 3 and 5 organized as special tax districts in 1916 and 1922. Chevy Chase Circle, where Connecticut Avenue meets Western Avenue at the District line, is the formal gateway; the Francis Griffith Newlands Memorial Fountain at its center was erected in 1938 and is operated by the National Park Service as part of Rock Creek Park. Congress has repeatedly been asked to strip Newlands’s name from it — Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced the Francis G. Newlands Memorial Removal Act in February 2021 and Senators Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen filed a Senate companion in the same Congress. No bill has passed; the National Park Service instead installed an interpretive panel about Newlands, which was removed in 2025. That was the state of play as of August 2026.

The housing stock, from catalog kit houses to Friendship Heights towers

What that history left is a genuinely varied stock inside a small area, which is why one street tells you little about the next. Chevy Chase Village holds the oldest of that stock, on comparatively large lots along Grafton Street, Hesketh Street, East and West Kirke Streets and Cedar Parkway, with brick sidewalks and heavy tree canopy. Move north and east into Chevy Chase Section Three, Chevy Chase Section Five and Martin’s Additions, and the lots tighten and the streets narrow: Martin’s Additions covers 0.14 square miles, Section Three 0.12 and Section Five 0.11. The DC side is where the early-20th-century catalog house appears in quantity: researchers cataloging kit houses in ZIP 20015 have authenticated close to a hundred surviving examples across 61 models from four manufacturers — Sears Roebuck, Lewis Manufacturing, Gordon-Van Tine and Sterling — built in the 1910s through the early 1930s, with the catalog still growing. Those are the published figures as of August 2026. The kit houses sit alongside Colonial Revivals, brick Tudors, Craftsman bungalows and Cape Cods. Then there are the two ends of the density spectrum, both of which also carry a Chevy Chase address. The Village of Friendship Heights, those 34 acres off Wisconsin Avenue, is almost entirely high-rise residential. And at Chevy Chase Lake on Connecticut Avenue near the Beltway, the Land Company and Bozzuto opened the first phase of a mixed-use redevelopment in October 2023: three residential buildings, roughly 100,000 square feet of retail and a 13,000-square-foot pedestrian piazza, including the Barrett and the Claude apartments and Ritz-Carlton condominiums. Touring here, the questions that matter most are the construction era, whether the house has been through a substantial addition or a gut renovation, and whether the lot sits inside a municipality, inside the historic district, or neither.

Historic review, tree rules and deed language: the permit path as of August 2026

This is where a Chevy Chase purchase differs most from a comparable house a mile away, and it is worth reading slowly before you plan an addition. Everything in this section is the published position as of August 2026; confirm each step with the municipality itself before you set a schedule. In Chevy Chase Village a Village Building Officer issues the Village’s own building permits, and the Village will not issue one until the Montgomery County permit has already been issued — and where the county requires a Historic Area Work Permit, not until that HAWP is issued either. The Town of Chevy Chase runs a parallel process: it will not approve a building permit application until a county permit is issued, requires a site-management meeting before permits are issued for new construction, demolition or work adding 500 or more square feet to any floor of a building, and enforces its own Urban Forest Ordinance with tree protection plans and tree removal permits. Chevy Chase Section Three has its own code of ordinances governing construction, published in September 2024, and a Permitting Coordinator who reviews plans against Section Three’s setback rules before an application goes in. Layered on top of all of that, part of Chevy Chase Village lies in the Chevy Chase Village Historic District, listed on Montgomery County’s Master Plan for Historic Preservation; work inside it is reviewed under Chapter 24A of the county code and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards, with the Village’s Local Advisory Panel advising the county Historic Preservation Commission. Zoning itself is the county’s: unlike Rockville and Gaithersburg, these municipalities sit inside the Maryland-Washington Regional District and are zoned by Montgomery County. Finally, read the chain of title. Alongside the Land Company’s construction-cost minimums, the company under Edward Hillyer, who became its president in 1932, inserted covenants barring sale to Black and Jewish buyers. Those clauses have been judicially unenforceable since the Supreme Court’s 1948 decision in Shelley v. Kraemer and are void under federal fair housing law, and Maryland Real Property Article Section 3-112 lets an owner record a restrictive covenant modification — reviewed by the county attorney — that re-records the document with the offending language struck. The company publicly acknowledged this history in 2020. In September 2024 the Maryland Historical Trust installed a marker near Wisconsin and Western Avenues for Belmont, a 31-acre subdivision that four Black investors bought and began selling lots in during 1906; the Land Company refused to release title to their purchasers, which collapsed the venture into foreclosure in 1909, and company executives later had the subdivision extinguished from Montgomery County’s property books in 1926.

Getting around: Friendship Heights, the two avenues and the Purple Line, as of August 2026

Friendship Heights station, at 5337 Wisconsin Avenue NW, opened August 25, 1984 and physically straddles the DC–Maryland boundary, with street entrances on both sides of Western Avenue and connections into the Chevy Chase Pavilion, the Shops at Wisconsin Place and the bus bays at the Chevy Chase Metro Building. It is on the Red Line, which puts downtown Washington within a single-seat ride. The two avenues carry the rest of the traffic: Connecticut Avenue is signed Maryland Route 185, running 8.30 miles from Chevy Chase Circle north to MD 97 in Aspen Hill, and Wisconsin Avenue becomes Maryland Route 355 at the line; Western Avenue is itself one of the three boundary streets between the District and Maryland. The change now under construction is the Purple Line, a 16.2-mile light rail line from Bethesda to New Carrollton with 21 stations. Its Connecticut Avenue station is being built on elevated structure just east of Connecticut Avenue at Chevy Chase Lake, with two side platforms, no parking, and the rebuilt Capital Crescent Trail running alongside on the former Georgetown Branch right-of-way. As of August 2026, MDOT’s official Purple Line site describes the line as slated to open in late 2027 and the project as roughly 90 percent complete, and lists active work at the Connecticut Avenue station, on Jones Mill Road, and on the trail segment between Elm Street Park and Rock Creek Park. The opening date on this project has moved more than once, so check purplelinemd.com for the current schedule rather than relying on a listing or an older news story.

Development pipeline on both sides of Western Avenue, as of August 2026

Both sides of the line have live proposals to add housing near their commercial corridors, and a buyer should know where each one stands. On the DC side, the Council approved the Chevy Chase Small Area Plan on July 12, 2022, directing new housing, retail and community amenities to upper Connecticut Avenue NW. The DC Zoning Commission followed on January 30, 2025 by approving two new zones: NMU-4/CC1, covering most of the commercial corridor between Western Avenue NW and Livingston Street NW and requiring ground-floor retail with residential above; and NMU-4/CC2, applying only to the District-owned Chevy Chase Civic Site between Northampton and McKinley Streets NW. In January 2026 Mayor Bowser selected Rift Valley Chevy Chase, LLC to replace the library and community center built in 1968 and 1971 with a 23,500-square-foot library, a 21,600-square-foot community center and 177 affordable and market-rate homes. As of August 2026 the project remained in pre-development with no construction start announced; check dmped.dc.gov for its current status. On the Maryland side, the County Council approved the Chevy Chase Lake Sector Plan in 2013, setting the framework for redevelopment of roughly 25 acres around the future Purple Line station. County-wide, the Council approved Zoning Text Amendment 25-02 on July 22, 2025, permitting duplexes, triplexes, townhouses and apartment buildings capped at 40 feet on lots whose front lot line abuts a corridor at least 100 feet wide with three existing travel lanes, with a 15 percent workforce-housing requirement. The amendment took effect November 1, 2025. Whether a particular block is touched turns on that corridor-frontage test, so check the parcel rather than the neighborhood.