Hi all – this is Part II of my first Local Note, focusing on how my home state of Maryland got renovated in the decade after the Great Recession. Click here to read Part I if you missed it, and look out for Part III coming next week. After that, our sights will turn away from Maryland and towards other locales, so stay tuned!
Among the first movers in the wave of new building which came over Central Maryland following the worst of the Great Recession was the University of Maryland. Wielding remarkable power over the town of College Park, home to the state system's flagship college, UMD's administrators directed the expansion of the campus through the recession.
Legacy infrastructure, generally dating back to the post-GI Bill expansion of the 1950s, was remodeled and renovated. New residence halls opened in 2011 and 2014, breaking a streak active since 1968 of no new on-campus housing.
In the pre-recession years, a handsome and cavernous hall known as the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, devoted to the music and fine arts departments, had been the campus' major addition. In the years following, however, expansive new academic buildings, all glass and steel cantilevers, opened to house departments of journalism, computer science, and biosciences.
At the opening in 2019 of the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, luminaries including the Governor and head of the Maryland Senate came to toast the new spirit of construction which had taken College Park by storm.
Crucial to the university's larger impact, however, was the East Campus Development Initiative. Promulgated in the university's 20-year facilities master plan, released in 2011, the initiative set to wholly make over the area of campus east of high-traffic US Route 1. East Campus, per the plan, would "undergo more changes than any other [area] on campus."
The plan, devised in partnership with the city and private developers, was to "transform" what was then an "industrial, back-door service area" into "the new face of the campus". Boosters from across the DC Metro area got their wishes granted as the University vowed to put new housing and mixed-use building at the forefront of the redevelopment efforts.
The university tapped Southern Management to raise up the diamond of the new East Campus, the Hotel at UMD. They broke ground on the project in 2015 and on the occasion of its opening in September 2017, the reporter Jon Banister wrote of the changes sweeping College Park:
Looking out from the terrace, one can see multiple signs of College Park's transformation that extend beyond the hotel.
On the edge of campus across Route 1, construction is underway on the Brendan Iribe Center, a $31M gift from the Oculus VR founder. The 215K SF computer science facility is expected to open next year.
In the parking lot behind the hotel, a nondescript one-story brick building will soon be home to a WeWork co-working space, the company's first Maryland location. Ulman said he will soon announce a Fortune 100 company opening a 7,500 SF innovation lab in College Park.
– from “Opening Of $180M Hotel An 'Incredibly Important Moment' For College Park's Transformation,” by Jon Banister, Sep 2017
That the efforts of the highly resourced, highly motivated leadership of UMD were critical to revitalizing building in College Park is unsurprising, and moreso part of a common pattern. James and Deborah Fallows, who set out in 2012 to chronicle changes in small town life all around the states, cited the presence of a major research university as one of their ten leading signals of civic success.
"Research universities have become the modern counterparts to a natural harbor or a river confluence," wrote James Fallows for The Atlantic in 2016. "In the short term, they lift the economy by bringing in a student population. Over the longer term, they transform a town through the researchers and professors they attract: When you find a Chinese or German physicist in the Dakotas, or a Yale literature Ph.D. in California’s Central Valley, that person probably works for a university."
Certain others of the Fallows criteria are characteristic of the College Park boom, namely the presence of real public-private partnerships (#3), a culture of openness to outsiders (#9), and big plans for the future (#10). And indeed, the future these signals forecast came into being sooner than could have been expected.
A healthy mix of new commercial and residential development hit the city of College Park in the years following the university's push, mostly concentrated on that key US Route 1 corridor.
New multifamily housing sprouted like weeds to the north of campus, with buildings like the Mazza Grandmarc, the Varsity, University View, the Alloy and the Enclave at 8700 catering to the swelling student population. German grocer Lidl picked College Park to be among its first US expansion sites in 2017 and made good on the plan in 2019, opening a large retail space adjacent to a new Korean BBQ restaurant. The grocery, which helped alleviate the town's former designation as a "food desert," was also compelled to add stations supporting College Park's bike-sharing program to its parking lot. Augmenting the capacity opened up by the Hotel at UMD, Marriott and Hyatt brought in new builds of their own, a process which the indispensable Hyattsville Wire had to describe in November of 2019 as an "Upscale Hotel Boom".
And in the case of a parcel known as the Cafritz development, named for a Coolidge-era Russian émigré who ended up a Maryland landholding baron, development finally came to what once was the largest undeveloped property in all of surrounding Prince George's County. That changed when a new shopping center anchored by a Whole Foods Market arrived in 2017.
The vaunted developmental benefits of the Amazon subsidiary were lost neither on local politicians nor the Washington Post, who ranked the successful completion of the Cafritz development among the broader surge of building up and down Route 1:
'This opening is the realization that the county is competitive with the region,' County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D) said. 'It symbolizes change.'
The opening means Prince George’s, the most affluent majority-African American jurisdiction in the United States and one long ignored by big-name chains and businesses, is no longer an afterthought, Baker said...
The Riverdale Park store’s opening follows the December debut of the $1.4 billion MGM National Harbor casino resort in the southern part of the county and a wave of redevelopment in its northern end in Laurel. New residential and commercial projects are in the pipeline for New Carrollton, in central Prince George’s. And the Route 1 corridor, where the Whole Foods is located, is experiencing a construction boom from the District line to the Capital Beltway.
– from "Whole Foods debuts in Riverdale Park, another symbol of Prince George’s progress," by Luz Lazo, Apr. 2017
What's more important for our story is that this construction boom did not remain limited to the Route 1 corridor. Instead, this new ethos of concrete, steel and glass spread in a creep all over Central Maryland, radically changing the built environment and the experience thereof, remapping the contours of settled, suburban daily life.
The full story of how this expansion hit Central Maryland will be our focus in Part III.