MD Smart Growth Wears the Dunce Cap
November 2nd, 2009 | by Clay Gump | Published in Housing
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The Washington Post today describes a study UMD National Center for Smart Growth Study on the failure of Maryland’s Smart Growth legislation:
An innovative policy to fight suburban sprawl catapulted Maryland into the national spotlight a decade ago and became then-Gov. Parris N. Glendening’s principal legacy.
But a new study says the law has been a bust, largely because it has no teeth to force local governments to comply and because builders have little incentive to redevelop older urban neighborhoods.
Our own David Daddio submitted an extensive report on this problem back in February of 2008.
College Park is emblematic of Maryland’s Smart Growth efforts. It is lined up for dense infill developments, could be getting a high capacity transit line (the Purple Line) if Congress steps up on transportation funding, is working to make Route 1 more pedestrian friendly, and is updating the Route 1 Sector Plan to try to improve some of its faults. It is clear that College Park has made some strides in Smart Growth. However the push for CP development at this juncture appears to be a reflection of demand for student housing. Development proposals here seem to be less a reflection of increased regional demand for dense housing and decreased supply of sprawl-type housing than they once were. There are a huge compendium of economic, political, and social forces that continue make Smart Growth illusive. These forces go way beyond City, County, and even (sometimes) State control.
Funding remains scarce for transit and improvements to Route 1 seem still years away. Developers continue to struggle with complexity in the planning process, NIMBYism, and politics in Upper Marlboro (counties control zoning in Maryland). These present far more hurdles for infill development than greenfield development. As the Dru-Schmidt Perkins, executive director of 1000 Friends of Maryland, points out at the end of the Washington Post article:
“if you continue to allow low-density sprawling development, then any developer in their right mind would say, ‘This will be lucrative,’ whereas smart growth is going to be complicated and expensive.”
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