Baltimore Grows

We’re happy to have another guest post today courtesy of Urban Discoveries Living Blog. Check out all their great content.

The State Center was supposed to be one of those far-sighted projects that would help transform Baltimore into the vibrant, accessible city of the future. Though it wasn’t scheduled to be completed until 2018, even just the vision had a lot of people excited. The idea:  to redevelop and reshape the 28 acres around the current State Center, an area that currently includes huge city offices, a light rail stop, and… a lot of parking lots and chain-link fences. The State Center development was supposed to change all that, reconnecting neighborhoods and creating a vibrant livable community. But problems have cropped up—new legislation, worrisome language in the state budget—that have some people worried that Baltimore is just going to end up with more of the same.

Why spend so much time and money on the area anyway?  Well, there are plenty of assets not being taken advantage of here, is the thinking—not only does the area already boast a much-used transit hub (both the light rail and the subway stop here), and it’s here that vibrant neighborhoods (Mt. Vernon, Seton Hill, Bolton Hill) would come together, if there was anything there worth coming together for. So the stuff is there, for the most part; it’s just not connected well at all.

The original plan—the one currently under threat by the legislature—sought to remedy that by following principles of Transportation-Oriented Development (TOD), an offspring of the Smart Growth movement. There’s plenty of idealistic rhetoric out there (check out the Center for TOD website if your interest is piqued), but at its heart, TOD basically encourages mixed-use development with a transit stop at its center. The goal is high-density communities that are walkable, compact, and diverse; places where you have easy access to a well-developed public transit system and don’t need a car to get around. Mixed-use development would mean that the area would get used at all times of day—it could be a place for people to live, work, grocery shop, and eat out.

Streuver Brothers, Eccles and Rouse (one of the two developers; the other is McCormack, Baron, Salazar, Inc.) has crafted a snazzy (if rarely-updated) website where you can see the proposed plan in all its glory.

But after several years of forward-moving planning, a counter-proposal from the State Department of Legislative Services essentially scraps all this fancy city-planning stuff, and proposes to demolish and rebuild the current structures without significant changes, and without private partnership. In some ways, this makes sense—It’s a conservative move in a time of economic crisis and unstable real estate values. But do we really make progress by building the same failed structures over and over again? Many people don’t think so — check out several takes here and here. And public support for the State Center remains strong—Omari Patterson of SBER, assistant development director of the program tells us that “a lot of people have been getting a lot of calls in Annapolis.” As it stands now, the budget has gone through its first-read in the Senate and has been referred back to the Budget and Taxation Committee. “I just want to thank all the stakeholders who believe in the State Center and showed their support,” Patterson added.

The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance makes several good points in favor of the original plan—that it would deliver “a green, sustainable, mixed-use, mixed-income” development bringing in both jobs and tax revenue; and also that the financial burden will be shared by the private developers, who will have to finance much of the construction and development.

One thing to keep in mind—all this fancy new building will be right there next to the McCulloh Homes, the 31-acre low-income housing project. There seems to be some intention to include the Homes in the planning process, but it remains to be seen exactly how.