No. 1, Part IV: The Triumph of the New Urbanism in Maryland and Some Links
Pedestrianization comes to the suburbs, with great success
This is Part IV in my all-too-long essay on how Maryland has changed in the past decade. If you’d like, you may find Parts I-III here, here, and here. After this, we’ll be headed west, so stay tuned to read a Local Note concerning a whole different part of the country.
Triumph of the New Urbanism
It was in Fulton, MD, that a generation of Central Maryland band and orchestra students picked up their first instruments; there in that town could be found the only Music & Arts store for miles, the natural home for the rental of violins, clarinets, and, appropriately for your correspondent, trombones as well.
Music & Arts, for its part, was founded in 1952 by an enterprising Marylander of Bethesdan stock named Ben O’Brien; it never aspired to much more than East Coast expansion but, in 2005, was bought by Guitar Center, the national instrument retailer, who themselves filed for Chapter 11 protection from their creditors just in November of last year.
Fulton, a western-lying drag along US Route 29, was apart from its instrument rentals distinguished mostly by the presence of a tremendous water tower, prominent in a very rural sense above the flow of cars pumping south from Columbia and north towards Baltimore. This is altogether to say that in Fulton very few people lived. Even in 2010, the Census could only find 2000 souls living in its borders.
The decade following 2010, however, brought dramatic changes in population growth to this southern slice of Howard County. The agent of that change was largely the developer Greenebaum Enterprises, who began work on the land that would become Maple Lawn, Fulton’s major development, all the way back in 1986. The development of 600 acres of lush, empty Howard County hillside into suburban sprawl became a long game; it was only in 2004 that the first homes in Maple Lawn were completed.
That incubation period allowed a distinct architectural flavor to filter into the eventual developments at Maple Lawn, one which privileged narrow streets, a denser core, and walkable connections from residential neighborhoods to commercial developments. In this respect, Maple Lawn was emblematic and even quietly representative of the push towards the New Urbanism of the late aughts.
New Urbanism is a sort of architectural movement so privileged in the minds of its adherents as to deserve a Congress. The Congress of the New Urbanism, who do terrific work, describe their mission as one of championing “walkable urbanism”.
We provide resources, education, and technical assistance to create socially just, economically robust, environmentally resilient, and people centered places. We leverage New Urbanism's unique integration of design and social principle to advance three key goals: to diversify neighborhoods, to design for climate change, and to legalize walkable places. We build places people love.
– from “Who We Are,” Congress of the New Urbanism, accessed 2/8/21 (emphasis original)
The core tenets of this architectural movement can only be understood in opposition to those which flourished in modern cities in the post-war period, the dreaded car-centric planning of new western cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles and eastern renovations like urban renewal. Where a strain of modernist planning thought in the mid-century believed we’d all be happiest taking our cars from our residential zones to our office zones and in between to our commercial zones via highways of beton brut and rebar, the New Urbanism, by contrast, “focuses on human-scaled urban design” – “walkable blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible public spaces”.
What’s tough about executing on the undeniably attractive elements of New Urbanist design is the extent to which its antagonist features are embedded within the developmental institutions of modern American life. Ask any urban planner on Twitter and you’ll be treated to a standard litany of curses: parking minimums, minimum lot sizes, setbacks, and the truly detested “neighborhood character” stipulations. Each of these are legalistic notions privileged by existing planning processes which serve to deter the kind of human-scaled urban design New Urbanists see as key to the healthier development of our cities and towns.
Therefore all the greater the surprise that a few of Central Maryland’s latest developments have managed to buck institutional constraints and densify construction, introducing New Urbanist principles into popular, well-traveled new builds along the way.
Case in point: in 2014, a developer named Federal Realty finished up work on one of their biggest projects, a 24-acre build-up known today as Pike and Rose. The new plaza was eventually to offer high-scale shopping and eating amenities in close quarters with high-rise urban construction – today REI and Target anchor a center self-identifying as the “premier destination for shopping, living, dining, and working in North Bethesda, MD”.
Federal Realty broke ground on the development in 2004, contravening some traditional timelines of New Urbanist work as being entirely post-Recession; still, the Washington Post acknowledged in their review of the new center’s opening the debt it owed to the changing tastes of a generation:
If strip malls represent the zenith of the American love affair with the car, new walkable urban-suburban communities exemplify the new love of walking, biking, ride-sharing and relying on public transportation. The replacement of acres of parking lots and shops with ‘surban’ developments is more than a fad; it's a re-imagination of how people prefer to live.
Transforming the former strip malls along Rockville Pike in North Bethesda into the Pike & Rose development may seem like a natural outgrowth of the contemporary taste for citylike neighborhoods, but Rockville-based developer Federal Realty Investment Trust, owner of the property since the 1980s, began planning the redevelopment more than a decade ago.
– from “Pike & Rose: A community grows on Rockville Pike,” by Michele Lerner, Oct 2017
Similar developments cropped up elsewhere around Montgomery County, most notably in Wheaton, MD. Previously distinguished by an escalator deemed the longest in the Western Hemisphere, Wheaton got some high-rise, high-density build of its own in 2013, when Patriot Realty united plans for the introduction of a new Safeway grocery store with the addition of 900 residential units into a 17-story megastructure towering over southern Maryland.
When developers tried to run the same play with Maple Lawn, they were met with consternation. A group of existing homeowners, fearful of what growth would bring, got together under the name Smart Growth Fulton to broadcast their grievances on a larger scale, a form of organization usually referred to by its critics as NIMBY-ism – that is, “not in my backyard”. In one of the worst justifications for opposing the project, Katherine Taylor, the lawyer representing the NIMBY interests in pre-build Fulton, got the Baltimore Sun to credibly quote her saying that somehow “high density [was] typically less environmentally friendly” (for the record, there is nothing less environmentally-friendly than single-family housing). The Iager family, stewards of hundreds of acres in the region since the Van Buren administration, beat Smart Growth Fulton’s challenges back in court and were finally able to rezone the land up to levels sufficient for actual development.
Fitting with the New Urbanist ethos, an early brochure for Maple Lawn boasted the goals of offering to residents “an eclectic mix of local, high-quality dining establishments, boutique shops and service retailers…without the congestion of traffic.” Maple Lawn’s residential architecture, freed from the minimum lot size requirements which breed a stultifying similarity among usual-build subdivisions, diversified rapidly. Among its most popular incarnations was the flavor of home construction led by Williamsburg Homes, who built “Victorian-looking townhouses and estate houses with mansard roofs reminiscent of Second Empire 19th-century France architecture”.
One Washington Post story was so enamored of Maple Lawn’s approach as to declare that “if it weren’t for the 21st-century sedans and minivans, the houses in the Howard County planned community of Maple Lawn could be mistaken for another era’s.”
More to the point, this radical shift in (sub)urban planning has yielded the communal benefits desired. Today, Maple Lawn – a community wholly non-existent before John Kerry’s presidential run – “hosts the Maryland HalfMarathon, a music festival in October, and a large street festival in July”. Shed your cynical lens a second and recognize in this kind of organizing the end, desired effect of higher-density building – that is, the disabusing of a pattern of thought present in the mentalities of many suburban dwellers, that living close to your neighbors was ever a bad thing.
No, I and those leading the New Urbanist wave in Maryland must say to that thinking – close quarters breed familiarity, friendliness, and, eventually, family out of sometime strangers. New Urbanism won its way into Maryland through the action of ideological partisans with points to prove about urban planning and zoning reform. It’ll win its place for good by the undeniable effects of its good government.
Links
Because it’s been so much Maryland to start at Local Notes, I wanted to share some of my favorite readings from the past few weeks on local goings-on around the world. Hopefully we’ll be able to visit some of these places in the near future and discuss them ourselves.
The Squamish of Vancouver, BC, in possession of a prized satchel of downtown land, have decided to dramatically upzone their landholdings and build thousands of apartments in an area usually constricted by NIMBY interests to very limited new building. This is fantastic!
A passel of local government actions seems to have mandated more residential construction over crisis-plagued California, from San Francisco to the South Bay and Beverly Hills to Santa Monica. Here’s hoping the groundswell for action continues in whatever form of gubernatorial administration endures into next year.
Rep. Marcia Fudge is the Biden administration’s pick for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and this article from the unsurpassed CityLab presents some of her ideas for what she’d like to get done upon confirmation. If she can get even one of President Biden’s major initiatives passed, the result will be massively advantageous to the state of housing in this country. Here’s hoping!
This Economist article is worth it for the description of would-be real-estate tycoons in Hegang, China, located in the deserted border zone with Russia, trying to flip new developments on the quick. If any readers of Local Notes have heard of Hegang prior to this article, please let me know – I’d be shocked.
Not a Local Note, but a clip from the episode of Family Guy I watched after Patrick Mahomes got drubbed in the Super Bowl made me laugh, so I thought I’d share:
Until next time!