On a cool winter Monday morning the newly minted Mayor Brandon Scott and the also still relatively new Executives of Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Howards County, Olszewski, Pittman and Ball huddled around the entrance to Hopkins subway station. They held a press conference in support of transit funding. Together they demanded better funding of the MTA which serves all four of the jurisdictions with bus or rail service. No longer see the regional leaders transit as only an issue that affects merely Baltimore City.
A bit later in January Steuart Pittman launched an online "Future Forum" under the title "Common Ground: Urban Rural, Suburban". His speakers included former Baltimore Mayor Rawlings Blake, former State Planning Director Hall, The Bay Foundation's Allison Prost and Colby Ferguson from the MD Farm Bureau. There was some tough talk about land use and preserving open space. No longer sees this executive land use solely through the lens of homeowners and property rights.
Pittman showed himself during his online event in front of a scenic photo of a farm meadow and a wooded edge. "This is the last larger farm near BWI", he explained, "it will soon become a bunch of warehouses. That wasn't in the plan", he observed, "but a council member voted for a zoning change, and so it goes", adding that this continued land consumption has to stop. Indeed, Maryland's' development footprint increased in the last 50 years more than it had occupied in the 250 years before, another way of saying it more than doubled in only 50 years! Neither city nor suburbs can thrive if the natural environment is destroyed.
The Baltimore Business Journal ran a cover story of its print edition under the headline "Howard County's Smart Growth Challenge" in which the paper points out that only 2% undeveloped or not protected open space is left for development in Howard County. Executive Ball promises a balance between the County's environmental, economic and social standing. His Planning Director is pointing to redevelopment as the new frontier for growth.
“We are at a point in our maturity as a county where we are having to look at redevelopment opportunities for the future and less on typical suburban growth patterns,” Amy Gowan, director of Howard County’s Department of Planning and Zoning.
For a shift in the growth paradigm it comes in handy that both, Baltimore County and Howard County are starting new masterplans this year. Brandon Scott has vowed to restructure City government and pay way more attention to the City's disinvested neighborhoods. Equity and economic development is no longer a zero sum game where one jurisdiction can thrive while the other fails.
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| Mayor Scott and Executives Olszewski (at the podium), Ball and Pittman at the Johns Hopkins Metro Station. |
Together these young leaders can be quite a force. Will they be?
The Baltimore Metro area, as defined by the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, also includes Harford and Carroll Counties which are more rural and more conservative and have historically put their foot on the break when the core jurisdictions became too brash. Given the multi-pronged crisis we are facing, the quartet of progressive young leaders may just be the medicine this region needs if they continue to forge ahead with a coordinated and prudent land use and transportation strategy that looks at economic development, environmental protection and social justice all at once. There is much to do.
- Sprawl is continuing unabated, threatening farms and forests and putting pressure on the designated agricultural preserves all the while Baltimore City's population continues to shrink and the amount of abandoned land grows.
- Neither in the three Counties nor in the City growth does development pay any attention to where transit is already on the ground, especially expensive high capacity rail transit. Before Hogan Maryland's Department of Transportation had once worked out that all of the State's growth could fit into the underdeveloped lands around existing transit stations.
- All three Counties have a history of picking the lucrative raisins out of growth combined with overt racism. As a result economic energy was directed towards the suburbs and siphoned out of the region's core city.
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| Steuart Pittsman's new platform: Future Matters |
All four jurisdictions never zoned land so development would be concentrated where the MTA stations are. The region's lukewarm relation to MTA and its transit system was a key reason why Hogan could get away with killing $ billion Red Line and returning nearly $1 billion of federal funds to the feds. For decades transit oriented development (TOD) remained just a slogan with a few half-hearted projects such as Symphony Center, Odenton and Dorsey Road as fig leaves on the generally dismal state of affairs. Of course, today Howard County would love to have rail access to Columbia. Instead it lost its bus life line when MTA struck the 150 Express bus, the only transit connection from Columbia to downtown.
Although land use (and its relation to transit) sounds like a geeky and esoteric topic to most people, it is key to solve the cacophony of crisis we currently face:
- the crisis of inequity and racism,
- the crisis of climate change and
- the crisis of depleted public coffers.
Rash development on green fields once created a gold rush of quick revenue for local government. Increasingly this pattern has turned into a fiscal liability with the insight that edge developments age and the endless new roads, schools, and pipes will have to be maintained or repaired. Meanwhile the core city of the region, Baltimore is suffering from abandonment. Its concentrations of poverty, crime and failing schools have long become a problem that also affects the surrounding communities and the State of Maryland as a whole. The Baltimore region is not unique in this paradigm. In fact, the entire US will be in trouble if the trifecta of inequality, climate crisis and public debt isn't addressed promptly and fairly radically.
The pandemic has made discrepancies crystal clear. Although experts differ greatly in their predictions of what the longterm effects of this unprecedented health crisis will be, they agree that it has already heightened and amplified all the other ailments from which our nation suffers.
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| Regional problem: Trash |
Mayor Scott and County Executives Olsziewski, Ball and Pittman need all the support they can get to succeed in turning the regional ship around. The Maryland Legislature is considering several bills this period which would be of great help for the Central Maryland region. Two are of exceptional interest: The Transit Safety Investment Act and the Climate Solutions Now bill. The former is the reason why the Executives had gathered at the Hopkins subway station.
Many other urgent issues that affect everyone's daily life are awaiting solution and know no jurisdictional boundaries: The aging regional water system and its billing troubles, the aging regional trash incinerator that sits in Baltimore City but 50% of the trash burnt there is from the County, the regional and State electric grid that needs to become more resilient and much greener and the Chesapeake Bay which knows no boundaries, only watersheds. (A WYPR moderated discussion with County Executive Olszewski and others about regional collaboration for the Chesapeake is here).
The Baltimore region is one of only a very few in the nation, where the core city is not part of the surrounding county. While there is little hope for a truly regional government in the near future, well cooperating leaders and legislators are exactly what is needed to solve our multi-prong crisis. But they can only succeed if residents are willing to bury the illusion that they will be fine if they managed to secure a safe and secluded spot on the map and that racism, climate or transportation should not concern them.
With collaboration and a focus on regional solutions the untapped potential of our metro area is vast. Let's tap it!
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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