Public Involvement in U. of Maryland East Campus Planning

Tonight at an event at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning I met Harry Mattison, the author of a blog about the Allston Brighton Community Blog. He’s also a member of the Allston Brighton Community Planning Initiative.

The map below sums up what’s happening in the neighborhood. Clockwise from the left, the red areas illustrate the neighborhood’s institutional land owners: Boston College, St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Harvard University, and at the bottom right Boston University. More than passive neighbors, most of these — especially Harvard through its Allston Initiative — have been expanding. The dots show existing and planned development projects. (For the initiated like myself, ABCPI’s old presentations provide an introduction.)

All this development activity, much of it planned by none other than Harvard has resulted in a climate of antagonism and distrust in the community. Discussing these issues with Harry, I was reminded of the procedural elements to the East Campus Redevelopment Initiative in College Park, Maryland.

When I first arrived on campus in College Park to begin my master’s program in the fall of 2006, the University of Maryland was initiating the process of selecting a private developer to redevelop over 100 acres of their land into a mixed-use project with restaurants, apartments, a hotel, stores, and offices. The site is located just up the road from downtown College Park, strategically between the university’s main campus, and the Metro Station and University research park. (Yellow and green on the map to the right)

The administration had planned a three public forums about the project, complete with large maps and a panel to discuss the projects. Despite the preparation, turnout was abysmal and University staff easily outnumbered attendees. We requested and were granted a meeting with the then-Vice President for Administrative Affairs John Porcari and two other administrators to discuss public outreach about the project. Although they listened politely, the administrators firmly insisted the process of selecting a private developer must remain closed. Once one was selected, however, they pledged a full and public process.

That fall Porcari left the University to become the state Secretary of Transportation, but the next spring we had a meeting with one of the administrators from the original group and an expanded group including student leaders and administrators. At this meeting, we presented our recommendations for what a positive public engagement plan would look like. We argued it should be consensus-based, proactive, candid, and transparent, and provided specific recommendations and a brief summary of how other universities had handled input for facilities planning. The document is no masterwork, but because of it we brought far more substantive input than any other participant.

Shortly after that meeting, former Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan was appointed to the position that would oversee the project planning, Vice President for Administrative Affairs. The veteran of a complex public-private project revitalizing Silver Spring, Maryland, Duncan was no stranger to the politics of urban development. I emailed him to congratulate him on his appointment, and asked for a position on any steering committee created.

During the summer, I received this letter from the University president:

July 20, 2007
Mr. Robert Goodspeed
AGNR-Plant Science & Landscape Architecture
2139 Plant Sciences Building
College Park, MD 20742-4452

Dear Rob:

With the recent Board of Regents approval of the team of Foulger-Pratt/Argo Investment as the developer with whom the University can negotiate a development plan for the East Campus site, I am seeking the input of a Community Review Steering Committee. The Committee will work toward achieving a consensus plan for the development of the University’s east campus site and toward promoting the revitalization of the Route 1 corridor. Planning for this project must provide for current institutional needs, future campus goals and the enhancement of the surrounding community.

The Committee will work in open session, considering issues that have been brought to it by the campus community, area neighborhoods and local businesses. Comment from the public will be solicited at public events and through members of the committee. We look forward to lively dialogue and a collegial exploration of ideas between our Committee members and the development team. Committee members will be charged to work with the Foulger-Pratt/Argo team on the development of the plan. They will be in a position to gain a high level of understanding of the project in order to provide input and to build broad support for it.

You have been recommended for membership on this Committee, and I ask for your participation. I hope that you will consider this opportunity to represent the community in this transformational planning process. I value greatly the input of our diverse community for the east campus development. I am excited by the long-term vision of a vibrant, mixed-use center that will serve the University and the College Park communities. I have attached the schedule of the meetings planned as you consider this invitation. Being optimistic, I would like to thank you in advance for agreeing to serve. Please contact [EXCERPTED] to confirm your availability and interest in helping to make the east campus a truly great contribution to our community.

Yours sincerely,

C. D. Mote, Jr.
President

The following schedule was enclosed.

East Campus Community Review Steering Committee
Tentative Meeting Schedule

Chair of Committee: Mr. Douglas M. Duncan
Vice President for Administrative Affairs
University of Maryland

The following is a tentative schedule for meetings and topics for discussion. All the meetings will be held from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. in the Visitor Center Auditorium located in Turner Hall.

* August 13–Introduction; background on RFP process, developer presentation; committee goals/charge

* August 27–Market dynamics and proposed uses: retail, residential, office, and hotel

* September 12–Economic impact of development and public finance options

* September 24–Transportation planning: Route 1/Paint Branch connections/traffic calming, public transit, and pedestrian/bicycle connections

* October 8–Land use options and concepts: placemaking, street-facing retail, views, plazas, connections, and residential over retail.

* October 22—Concluding meeting

Although the precise timing and topics varied somewhat from this schedule (the meetings didn’t wrap up until January 2008, for example) it generally suggests the approach taken. After every meeting and at other times during the process I wrote detailed blog posts on Rethink College Park, sharing all the technical documentation and information discussed at the meetings. In general, these meetings were very well attended and despite tense moments were generally respectful. During the entire time period, me and the other Rethink College Park contributors wrote a staggering 366 posts about East Campus. The university posted a variety of information to their website about the project.

Chaired personally by Doug Duncan, the meetings were very good at sharing information and providing a venue for community engagement. However, they weren’t perfect. Here’s a few of my concerns:

• The composition of the committee was half university, half community, with a few others (including 3 students) thrown in. If the university is a developer, why should they have such a large representation?
• The format of the meeting was designed for one-way communication, not discussion. The group sat in a “U” facing a presenter. The only structured discussion was during Q&A.
• No designs in more detail than massing and site plans were presented. This was the biggest failure of the process: nobody saw the public plans until after the group stopped meeting.

Last summer, I made one last trip to College Park to see the unveiling of the final plans, which were submitted to the county for approval last summer also. In addition to what’s described here, the project involved dozens of other components I haven’t mentioned, ranging from talking with members of the closed-door campus architectural committee to visiting with administrators to discuss how to make the project website more user-friendly. Needless to say, the true impact of any of this on the project is impossible to say and the final chapter of this project is far from over. Nevertheless, I hope the information here about the public process may prove a useful record.

> U. of Maryland East Campus Redevelopment Initiative (Official site)
> Rethink College Park: East Campus Posts
Rethink College Park: “Engaging the Community in the East Campus Redevelopment”
> See also, “NIMBYism, Urban Development, and the Public Involvement Solution,”

Measuring Regional Transit Oriented Development

WMATA recently released the 2008 Metrorail Station Access & Capacity Study (PDF) which analyzes how the system can accommodate future growth in detail. David has a good summary of the report’s major recommendations for improvement and expansion. A table in the report caught my eye that showed the estimated number of jobs and households around a number of Metrorail stations from the year 2005. Metro’s Office of Long-Range Planning was kind enough to provide me the complete spreadsheet of the number of households and jobs within half a mile of each station, distilled from the Washington Council of Government’s transportation planning data. (I assume the numbers were calculated by summing the jobs for each traffic analysis zone whose center was half a mile from a Metro station.)

I’m using the data for a larger ridership study that should appear here sometime in the future, but in the meantime I realized it allows us to evaluate the level of transit oriented development in each jurisdiction. For Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, because the stations are spaced sufficiently far apart, we can also estimate the percentage of total jobs within half a mile of a Metro station. This relative measure takes into account the many more jobs in Montgomery County. Because the half mile radii overlap significantly in Arlington, Alexandria, and D.C. I can’t easily say what proportion of all jobs are accessible by transit for those jurisdictions.

Here’s the results after averaging the development for each station in the various jurisdictions.

The analysis confirms what we might expect: D.C. and Arlington have the most jobs near their stations, and the Prince George’s County stations have the fewest in absolute terms. The pattern holds in relative terms for the Maryland counties — according to the WMCOG data, roughly 50% of Montgomery County’s 500,293 jobs were within 1/2 mile of a Metro station, versus only 38.4% of Prince George’s County’s 358,450 jobs. While I agree there’s much Prince George’s should be doing to boost development around their stations, there are a couple important caveats. The county has seen much less real estate investment than other parts of the region, and the Metro stations are much newer. Metro made it all they way out to Shady Grove in 1984 and Glenmont in 1998, versus Greenbelt in 1993, Branch Avenue in 2001, and Largo Town Center in 2004.

For households, on average Arlington County’s stations have slightly more than D.C. stations, likely a reflection of Arlington’s aggressive development of high density housing along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and the low-density residential neighborhoods surrounding many D.C. stations.

Not surprisingly, some of the least-used stations I identified in my popular post on station ridership also have the least development around them. My next step is to use a regression to evaluate the relative role of jobs, housing, parking, bus lines, multi-modal access, and a variety of other variables to explain ridership.

Montgomery County Loves to Park

In a previous post on parking I reviewed some of the region’s bloated parking requirements. Today I was re-visiting the Montgomery County Zoning Code’s parking requirements and decided to post a more detailed list. Although these requirements can be adjusted somewhat for uses near Metro stations or in parking districts or for other reasons, this list is taken verbatim from the zoning code as the standard requirements. The next time you’re struck by excessive suburban parking, remember it is often our laws that put it there. The D.C. regulations can be found here, and they generally require a bit less.

Read the rest of this entry »

Rethink College Park Among Top Planning Websites in 2008

The blog I co-founded about urban development issues in and around College Park, Maryland, Rethink College Park, has been named one of the web’s Top 10 Urban Planning, Design, and Development websites by the planning portal Planetizen. The award recognizes the hard work and support of all the site’s contributors and others who have provided assistance since our launch in July 2006.

The other winners include WalkScore, Trulia’s fascinating Hindsight tool, and the very slick (and new to me) Ourbania.

Debating Purple in College Park

For urban observers, it’s a rare opportunity to watch a major urban planning mistake being made before your eyes. We can only wonder “what were they thinking?” years later, when the project is complete and communities are left with the builder’s errors: dead-end highways, blank walls, and train stations far from where commuters need to go.

Although its construction is years away, today a debate is raging in College Park that will determine where the Purple Line light rail link between New Carrollton and Bethesda will run on campus. (Detailed route) For years, state planners with the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) have discussed running the line through the heart of campus, where hundreds of university shuttles and other buses run daily, discharging their passengers in front of the Student Union just steps from the major campus buildings. This Campus Drive alignment maximized access to campus as well as passing through campus efficiently.

High level university administrators, led by University President Dr. Dan Mote, have been less enthusiastic. Just before a MTA briefing in College Park on the project and after months of silence, Mote broke his silence. He declared in an op-ed in the student paper in October that the university would support the project—on the condition it would be routed on an alternate alignment at the north end of campus along a road called Stadium Drive shown in orange above. At the MTA briefing, state officials argued they thought Campus Drive was the best location for the line, presenting these renderings as well as a variety of data about what the effect of the line would be.

Since then, the student paper has published three student editorials, one a half by myself, supporting the Campus Drive alignment as well as a staff editorial critiquing Mote’s proposal. Meanwhile, on Rethink College Park we have broken down the various proposals in gritty detail with over 100 community comments in the past two weeks, and launched a Facebook group dedicated to the issue.

Nonetheless, administrators are pressing on in their quest for a circuitous northern route that gives the transit engineers headaches. Last week Mote spoke to the undergraduate student government about his plan, and this week bringing their case to the university’s Faculty Senate. The debate will continue on campus Friday as the Graduate Student Government will consider a resolution supporting the Campus Drive alignment. State planners will return to College Park in December to present the results of their study of alternate routes for the trains on campus. According to the current project schedule, the state hopes to finalize the route by next spring, to use to apply next year for federal funds for the project.

Will the Purple Line eventually have a stop in front of the student union, as pictured in the MTA image below? For now, it’s unclear, and the conversation continues on campus in advance of the next MTA meeting. Care to join a Facebook group?

Great Falls

I took a trip to the Maryland side of Great Falls for the first time this past weekend. It’s hard to believe you’re just 8 miles from the District.

The West Hyattsville Enigma

Less than one mile from the District of Columbia stands acres of vacant land. Wildflowers and grasses have gone to seed on a long-abandoned playing field (above). Weeds sprout in a dry, sun-drenched lot (below). An abandoned warehouse sits on land abutting picturesque parkland. Although large lots of undeveloped land inside the beltway are rare enough, these photos are even more remarkable if one considers the land is surrounding a Metro station.

This curious phenomenon is not due to inadequate zoning or neighborhood resistance. The area has been zoned for transit oriented development since the 1990s, and the Prince George’s County Planning Department recently published a special transit district plan for the area, that would accommodate thousands of housing units, a million square feet of office and retail space, and a system of public parks and open space.

There are a myriad of causes for the lack of development. The suburban jurisdictions most successful at cultivating transit oriented development, Montgomery County and Arlington County, revised their zoning codes early after the advent of Metro and even there it has taken decades to realize transit oriented developments. (Despite decades zoned for high density development, almost all of the buildings near the Ballston Metro Station were built in the last ten years.) Prince George’s County has taken a more piecemeal approach, creating small transit districts instead of revising the entire county’s plans. A recent Washington Post story suggests political leaders and Metro itself may share part of the blame. Furthermore, this area has significantly lower incomes than Arlington or Montgomery, and the county as a whole hasn’t seen the same amount of investment as elsewhere in the region.

Regardless of the precise causes, our region has already spent billions constructing a transit system and suffers some of the worst traffic and sprawl of any city in America. We have a mandate to realize development at sites as well-situated as the West Hyattsville Station.