No. 1, Part III – My Home State, My Interest in Local Development, and Me
Zooming in on elements of the New Build
This is part III of my first Local Note, where I’m discussing how my home state of Maryland was revamped in the wake of the Great Recession. If you missed them, catch Parts I and II here and here. We’ll close with Part IV next time around and move on to pastures further afield, so stay tuned!
The New Build
Breweries in Columbia
Columbia, MD is a fairly well-studied place in the history of urban design. Its Wikipedia page boasts that it was among the first planned communities in the US, which is true; the town is the brainchild of James Rouse, a visionary builder who caught on quick to the potential of Edina, MN's new "weather-conditioned shopping center". He opened the nation's second shopping mall in Glen Burnie, MD in 1958 and only a few years later struck on the idea of building a whole town from scratch, which was sort of a thing at the time. In 1963, after buying up some land in pastoral Howard County on the low, Rouse presented his plan for Columbia to the Board of Commissioners.
Fast forward a half-century, and Columbia routinely ranks around the top of those "Best Cities to Live In" lists you read in the magazines at dentists' offices. In Central Maryland, its main pull is the Mall at Columbia, which began a period of rapid expansion in 2014. Hewing closer to James Rouse's initial vision for a true town center, Howard County execs tapped GGP, Inc to build out a pedestrianized expansion, which opened to great fanfare.
Across the way, however, there were stirrings of divergences from Rouse's master plan, a rebellion of business activity spurred by – what else – local legislative decisions to loosen alcohol laws. A month before the Baltimore Sun covered the expansion at the Mall at Columbia, the paper covered a topic whose import would be more speedily and broadly felt in Columbia – "Your Guide to Howard County's New Breweries".
"The state," wrote reporter Julekha Dash, "now allows breweries to sell pints and growlers of beer to take home. Before, breweries could only sell four sample beers that had to be consumed on-site. Howard County also modified its zoning regulations to allow breweries to operate in industrial areas, unleashing pent-up demand for craft brews."
Would-be brewers and customers alike rejoiced, spawning a new industry in and around the planned community. Jailbreak Brewing was toed up on the starting line in 2013 and hence claimed first-in-the-county status; within a year, they had to double their square footage to accommodate demand, and by 2017, they were confident enough in their prospects to open an adjoining kitchen at a cost of $500,000. By that time, other breweries were joining the battle for craft-thirsty customers, and the market was hot enough for a whiskey distillery to enter, like Gustavus Adolphus striding into Breitenfeld atop a company of Swedish lancers, opening its doors late the year prior.
Journalists and commentators remain curiously incurious on the source of the newfound millennial taste for craft beers. Recall the Fallows' commentary on the importance of breweries for the future health of a city: "A town that has craft breweries also has a certain kind of entrepreneur, and a critical mass of mainly young (except for me) customers. You may think I’m joking, but just try to find an exception." But whence such interest?
Was it like the famous case of brussels sprouts, where actual changes to the germ line made them tastier? Or was it something else entirely, something uncaptured by changes to the DNA of hops, barley, wheat, or malt? Why would Anheuser, Busch, Coors and friends maintain a stranglehold on the whetting of American thirsts for a century and relinquish that grip the minute a hazy enough IPA entered the market?
Reviewing a smattering of trade and trade-adjacent publications on the subject reveals that the institutional brewers themselves have no clue. I think the answer lies in mere timing. The millennial coming of age was different from the one experienced by our Generation X parents, for whom the essential 20th-century structures of American life remained in ganzen und größen in place: college, marriage, family, suburbs, etc. If revolutions (of any kind) are precipitated by the broken expectations of elites, there wasn't much expectation-breaking on offer in either the Clinton boom years or the 9/11 years to seduce the young Gen X'ers away from their well-trodden paths.
The Great Recession changed that. The experience of our parents was an often ruinous one, but for young millennials, who had little to ruin, the experience was culturally freeing, a smashing of the conformity cemented into place by the Reagan revolution. Economic cataclysm may have even been the first actor in this drama – when incomes and career progressions were depressed enough to make family formation a less and less appealing option (especially in the eyes of the highly-educated cohort of millennial women), extended adolescence appeared as a matter of course. Twenty years of spendthrift television production shifting to the cities didn't hurt, but there was now truly wider room for new tastes, a cosmopolitanism whose greatest expressions gave us Portland, OR and Williamsburg, NYC and Ballard, Seattle and Austin, TX, four cities whose common amenity would be hard to pick out if it weren't so obvious: the ability to easily drink creatively concocted and marketed beers among similarly desirous young people.
I was walking in Denver's River North Arts District, an exemplar of the kind of thing I'm talking about, when I realized that capital had caught on to this revolutionary trend in tastes fully. I stood in a reclaimed industrial space whose floorage had been parceled out to local artisans – jewelers, clothiers after an irreverent mold, rugmakers and knick-knack peddlers. A women's World Cup final had just concluded, which meant that it was a simmering July heat which filled the air, the kind that primed my fellow twenty-something tourists to don e-scooters and see the city at a breezy, 15-mph eye level. Through the hot air pumped surgically chosen pop music and down the street waited four or five watering holes boasting food trucks and stouts and sour beers and farm-to-table whiskeys and in my mind I, examining without intent a crafty pen or paperweight, recognized for the first time that I was being pandered to. And I went on happily shopping and sipping and eating the whole rest of the day.
Brewers in Columbia caught hold of that trend in 2014 and haven't looked back. In 2019, the Maryland Assembly voted to open yet more room for the expansion of the local craft beer industry. NPR, covering the changes, wryly remarked on the deeper history of beer in Maryland:
There's something strangely ironic about the arbitrarily low cap on craft beer production and sales in Maryland, especially if we examine the state's historic defiance to Prohibition. Maryland was the only state to resist all attempts by Congress to close off and dry up the flow of alcohol around the country. The city of Baltimore played a major role in the bootlegging era. Maryland's moniker "The Free State" was born out of this insubordination.
One hundred years later, major shifts in Maryland's political structure and leadership, coupled with the rapid growth and influence of the craft beer industry, have fueled the changes being seen today in the Free State.
– from "New Beer Laws In Maryland Mean More Craft Beer In More Places," by Esther Ciammachilli, Dec 2019
The changes involved in that 2019 law are minor, procedural, but they are representative of the mood.
What does this expansion feel like, on the fingers of the would-be Yelp Elites and Google Local Guides? A better reportage than I could put together was given by the writer Nicole Dieker, who described for Vox in 2019 the experience of moving from Seattle back to Cedar Rapids, IA as "the best $5,929.10 [she] ever spent".
I especially love, in a way that makes me laugh when I think about it, that I am currently living out my teenage dreams: the industrial-chic apartment, the coffee shops and literary festivals, the rehearsal rooms. I thought I’d have to leave the Midwest to find all that — but I only found my heart’s desire, to borrow from another famous Midwestern story, when I came back to my own backyard.
– from "The best $5,929.10 I ever spent: moving back to the Midwest," by Nicole Dieker, Mar 2019
I find that similar feelings accrue when grabbing a growler of something delicious from Crooked Crab to share at home with my parents, to whom the taste of an IPA is alien. It's a happy, urbane surprise resting on the back of titanic capital movements over the past decade, each of which conspired to attract and keep in Maryland its population of potent young people. It's working.
Frederick, the Newly Millennial Town
Frederick, MD is growing new millennials at a rate double that of the rest of the state. From 2010 to 2018, the town's stock of millennials increased by about a fifth, while Maryland's grew only by about a tenth.
It's worth stopping here to ask ourselves what we might expect the downstream impacts of a change like that to consist of a priori. What are the salient features of millennial life, and thus, by generalization, of millennial populations?
To start at the beginning, per the Institute for Family Studies, it was in 2018 that the proportion of US births by millennial women peaked – 88 out of every 100 new babies that year were born to millennial parents.
The cohort forming and expanding their families is in the market for good jobs to work at and comfortable places to live. And it was to the provision of those needs that the boosters of Frederick decided to devote their attention. The rewards are plain to see in the transformation of what was once a sleepy town far away from the main thoroughfares of the Northeast Megalopolis.
Frederick's origins date back to 1745. Roger Taney, who decided Dred Scott, is buried in a cemetery downtown. The city was briefly the locus of the famous struggles by Abraham Lincoln to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, as secessionist assemblymen fled the statehouse in Annapolis for the presumed securer site in Maryland's northwest. The trick didn't work, and Lincoln tossed them (and a sitting Congressman!) in jail as a consolation prize. But that was sort of the end of history for Frederick for a while – the town's population wouldn't crack 40,000 until 1990. In the thirty years since, however, the citizenship has nearly doubled again, for want of the sort of jobs attracted by Frederick's peculiar brand of infrastructure.
Give credit to the town's developers for being clear-eyed about where they came from: they admit, in an article titled "Why Frederick is Turning Investors' Heads," that their beloved burg has grown "from a sleepy small town to the second largest city in the State". A powerful biomedical industry, powered by federal funds, has been key to this renovation.
Fort Detrick, a sprawling governmental campus lying in northern Frederick, is charged by the US Depts of Agriculture, Defense, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security, and Veterans' Affairs with applying "biotechnology in pursuit of health protection and medical advances". To that end, the Fort employs 10,000 highly educated professionals, by whose labor the successful operation of programs like the National Cancer Institute is achieved.
More to the point, Fort Detrick, which was founded in the 1930s and used to host the US' biological warfare program, anchors a regional economy dense in biomedical and pharmaceutical businesses. AstraZeneca, ThermoFisher Scientific, and Kite Pharma are among the blue-chip pharma names demanding thousands more well-educated researchers in Frederick.
Among a certain stratum of economic and urban commentators, this is basically a dream scenario. "Biomedical" has been a watchword in urban (re)development for the length of the 21st century, the idea being that this subsector of the economy will be so powerful in its demand for just the perfect employees, so alluring in its capacity for installing an educated tax base, that would-be Austins and Portlands and Madisons would be foolish not to prioritize its needs in planning for the future.
Frederick is reaping the fruits of its investments in biomedical industrial development. High-value-added manufacturing and businesses of other adjacent subsectors are piling in as well, stoking the fire of economic growth, and, more importantly, bringing more millennials to town. Where to put them all?
Most of the answer lies in new construction. In 2018, the county's housing stock grew more quickly than any other county in the state. Prices rose at a good clip too, growing 4% year on year. Most of this construction growth came from multifamily developments, a situation which local officials felt noteworthy enough to distinguish to the Frederick News-Post.
Brick Lane, a development company, pressed the trend further when they opened a new apartment complex, designated The Bottling Plant, in early 2020. The complex backs onto the grounds of Rose Hill Manor Park, where slaves once toiled on an estate dating to the 1790s. Its colorful name derives from the building's former life as an actual bottling plant for Coca-Cola.
A precious crucible of growth, however, lay in older beams. Washingtonian looked at Frederick’s growth in 2016 and, in an otherwise thrillingly gossipy article, attributed it to older millennials returning to a cheap urban core ready for move-ins.
Today the city seems to have hit a cultural sweet spot, appealing to a mobile young workforce that puts a premium on quality of life—a 20-minute drive from the Appalachian Trail, the county also boasts a long network of bike paths. ‘Just look at how people want to live,’ says Gardner. ‘If you want a bikeable, walkable community connected to an urban core, the city of Frederick is the place to be.’
Walking Frederick on a summer weekend can give anyone struggling to keep a toehold in the District a case of rowhouse anxiety: A six-bedroom Civil War–era house with crown molding and hardwood floors recently sold for less than $300,000. ‘I’ve told friends from high school, “Come back or you’re going to miss it,”’ says Brennan Gmeiner, 25, who returned home after college to work for a financial-services company.
– from “Frederick Could Be an Urban Suburb of DC–Unless Its Good Ol’ Boy Past Gets in Its Way,” by Miranda Spivack, Sep 2016
Frederick and Columbia found a pathway towards small-town urban revitalization in appealing to millennial tastes. What lessons does this successful strategy offer to the rest of Maryland, and other similarly situated places in the US? Look out for the conclusion to this Local Note, and hopefully an answer to that question, in Part IV.