Urban areas evolve as a result of economic development that generates land use changes. Such urban development styles as greenfields growth, adaptive reuse, infill development, and brownfields initiatives -- are discussed here as background for several local projects.
Greenfields development on vacant land is how most of today's urban growth takes place. It involves finding sites that are suitably zoned, adequately served by infrastructure, and available for purchase. In reality, land with all those characteristics is often hard to come by so that vacant land development regularly "leapfrogs" farther out in the urban pattern. Or, sometimes, it turns inward to more centrally located areas that have already been urbanized.
Adaptive reuse is the imaginative reworking of existing buildings to accommodate new uses. Hardly a new concept, it was formally presented by The Urban Land Institute in 1978 as a specific approach to changing the use of buildings no longer suited to their original use. (ULI, Adaptive Use, 1978 and Adaptive Reuse: InfoPacket 370, 1991)
Adaptive reuse is an essential urban improvement activity in Metropolitan Baltimore, one which creates new jobs and rescues sites from urban oblivion. The process involves:
Gap financing frequently makes the difference between adaptive reuse and languishing idleness. Techniques used include historic preservation tax credits, payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTS), tax increment financing, and other creative financing approaches.
Examples of adaptive reuse are plentiful in Baltimore and surrounding areas in the form of conversions of:
Infill development deals with sites occupied by no longer feasible uses and buildings. Often called renewal or revitalization, the infill process often involves assembly of fragmented properties into more workable sites. Demolition of obsolete or otherwise unusable buildings may be required. And infill may also include improvement or addition of existing infrastructure such as water and sewer lines or access roads. It may even include installing technology-oriented "new-economy" infrastructure like enhanced telecommunications network capabilities. Examples include:
Essentially, infill development fills the gaps in the urban land use pattern of a metropolitan area. Old communities are revitalized. Basically sound buildings are reused. And worn out parts of the urban area are replaced.
Brownfields initiatives are the most drastic technique applicable to development sites in already urbanized areas. Such sites are "abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination". (EPA Internet definition) Such sites often need:
Some examples of such brownfields projects are:
These are the kinds of sites that need major cleanup, planning, and legal protection if they are ever to be added back into the urban economy.
Baltimore's well-known Inner Harbor is a good place to start a tour of urban development activities in Metropolitan Baltimore. Of course, the Inner Harbor captures the eye and the imagination and is widely known as a vibrant tourism, entertainment, and business place. Besides, there are literally dozens of projects around the Inner Harbor. They include marinas built where nothing much existed before, the novel Power Plant conversion into an entertainment venue, the Harbor Place pavilions, housing developments, and adaptive reuse of the American Can buildings in Canton. There is even a major brownfields cleanup example at the Allied Signal smelter site now reclaimed as a prime 27 acre waterside site. One can walk around along the Inner Harbor waterfront on a nearly seven-mile promenade running from the Anchorage Apartments on Canton's waterfront to the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Key Highway. With that beginning, a tour can start.
Inner Harbor housing projects include the now expanding Harbor View Condominiums on Key Highway, new Inner Harbor East apartments, refurbished waterfront warehouse apartments in Fells Point, harbor-side town houses along Boston Street, new townhouses in Canton, The Anchorage waterfront apartment tower, and Tindeco Wharf and Canton Cove housing in renovated factories. Harborside housing development totals can be estimated at 2,000 to 2,500 units with more on the way. That housing production has taken place in a city which told itself for decades that downtown housing wouldn't work in Baltimore.
The downtown tourism and entertainment market also continues to expand. Each year now, roughly 13-million tourists and sports fans are attracted to the Inner Harbor where they can visit the rebuilt Power Plant and its national tenants like ESPN, the Hard Rock Cafe, and Barnes & Noble. Or they can take in a world-class aquarium, Harbor Place, and an expanded Baltimore Convention Center. Slightly farther afield, tourists will find Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the Ravens new football stadium, the Port Discovery play-and-learn complex, Little Italy's restaurants, other eateries, and a variety of hotels. As business, convention, and tourist visits have increased, hotel space has become ''tight'' enough that there are proposals for seven or eight budget, business, and five-star hotels totaling as many as 3,200 rooms around the Inner Harbor waterfront.
Office-using businesses continue to take up new downtown space. That is evidenced by market absorption of nearly 1.5-million square feet of downtown office space since 1990.4 That space includes the 479,000 square foot Deutsche Banc Alex Brown headquarters. Another 1.0-million square feet can be expected over the next few years based on an estimated yearly absorption rate of 150,000 to 200,000 square feet and a 10% vacancy rate. A specific case is a renewed effort to replace a block of obsolete Early Twentieth Century buildings, including the long vacant Southern Hotel, with a tower having 377,000 square feet of offices, 270 hotel rooms, and 660 parking spaces. (Sun, 9/06/99)
More CBD/Downtown housing projects are also in the works as downtown living becomes increasingly popular. Recent Downtown Partnership of Baltimore market studies, as well as estimates for the West Side Renewal Plan, suggest an overall CDB/Downtown demand for 1500 to 2500 more housing units. Most of those units are planned to accommodate childless young professionals and older empty-nesters as those groups are drawn into the city by housing suited to their preferences and budgets. Out-of-use department stores, obsolete warehouses, and no longer viable Class "B" office buildings are being used for housing. Hecht's long-vacant Howard Street department store and the underused Stanbalt Building's Class "B" office space on Saint Paul Street are being converted into 300 housing units. And not so far away, impressive Nineteenth Century town houses in Mount Vernon have been renovated. Even older Barre Circle and Ridgley's Delight housing west of the expanding universities-and-medical complex on the western edge of downtown has been rejuvenated. Beyond all that, other project initiatives for housing teachers and artists are being considered.
A plan for revitalizing downtown's West Side is the most recent of several plans for this aging mixed-use area between the downtown complex of universities and medical institutions and West Baltimore. The current plan calls for 1,500 downtown housing units for those who work downtown and want to live there. The plan also addresses facilities for the arts, such as rebuilding the Hippodrome Theater and developing studio housing for resident artists. And, finally, the plan calls for a broadening of the West Side's traditional retailing role as a shopping resource for West Baltimore so that it can also serve both workers and residents in the city's center. At this point, this latest West Side Plan has generated spirited debate about proposed uses, property acquisition, appraisals, relocation costs, timing, and project execution prospects.
Adaptive reuse of existing commercial and industrial buildings continues apace. The American Can factory complex on Canton's waterfront is a recent adaptive reuse example. Once this plant made cans for Maryland seafood and vegetables. Now it is the business home of graphic designers, Dap Caulking's corporate headquarters, a "big-box" Bibelot book store, a supermarket, and an Emerging Technology Center. Nearby, in Fells Point, is the twenty-seven acre Allied Signal "brownfields" site cleared of decades of chrome pollution at a cost of over $80-million and now available as a prime waterfront site. A short water-taxi ride across the harbor, renovation of a vacant Proctor & Gamble detergent plant for high-tech office tenants, waterside retail, and restaurants is nearly complete. Also on the harbor, the once isolated Port Covington area is developing, aided by new city-funded highway access and utilities for occupants like the Baltimore Sun's printing plant.
High-rise public housing just beyond the boundaries of Baltimore's downtown has been drastically changed in the last few years. So far, Baltimore has explosively demolished fifteen high-rise public housing towers in the Lafayette Courts, Lexington Terrace, and Murphy Homes projects built in the 1950's. Planned implosion, perhaps yet in 2000, of the remaining three public housing towers in the Flag House Courts will complete the demolition of all 2,800 units of Baltimore's high-rise public housing for families. That housing is being partially replaced on the cleared sites by slightly more than a thousand less densely developed townhouses and low-rise apartments. About 340 units of that replacement housing are now being developed as Pleasantview Gardens located where high-rise housing towered above West Baltimore for nearly fifty years. Another 700 units will be built on other cleared high-rise housing sites. Then another 800 units will be built on scattered sites in the city. Most of the tower-replacing housing is part of $125-million in HOPE-VI funding for housing and community improvements. That major rehousing effort is intended to wipe away the pervasive negative effects of Baltimore's high-rise public housing. In addition, some lower-income housing will be provided by Section Eight rental housing in both the city and surrounding counties over six years. (Data from Baltimore City and HUD web sites)
Before too much longer, high-rise public housing for families will be just a bad Baltimore memory. High-rise public housing was built with good intentions. Planners adopted LeCorbusier's 1930's proposals for high-rise housing amidst greenery. Housing reformers emphasized short-term housing for the working poor. And federal officials worried about high land costs. Unfortunately, the high-rise public housing that resulted didn't work. That failure came mainly because public housing evolved into crowded inner-city housing for the chronically unemployed poor. Now the challenge is to build some low-rise public housing in East Baltimore and West Baltimore areas while scattering other units elsewhere. The net result will be more appropriate housing dispersed much more widely. Then, when public housing has been reinvented in Baltimore, a relatively few units of high-rise elderly housing will be all that remains of a well-intentioned, widely agreed on, and generally unworkable housing initiative.
The Sandtown-Winchester Area west of Pennsylvania and Fremont avenues and east of Fulton Street has 72 blocks of vacant or dilapidated inner-city housing which is being replaced or rehabilitated in an effort to create an improved community. In 1990 fully half of this area's 10,000 people were poor to the extent of having family incomes under $11,000, while half the adult population was unemployed. Since then, seemingly dozens of organizations have made use of $60-million in CDBG grants, housing assistance programs, Neimiah housing, HOPE-VI funds, and other imaginative approaches to upgrade Sandtown-Winchester for the long run. So far 300 new and rehabilitated housing units have been developed by the Enterprise Foundation while another 400 are in the pipeline. But there remains the question of how viable battered areas like Sandtown-Winchester can be in an urban world still dominated by population outflow.
Business Parks and adaptive reuse can be found at scattered city locations. A notable example is Seton Business Park located on a large tract in northwest Baltimore. Since the site was owned by the Archdiocese of Baltimore and occupied by a seminary for many years, it was off-the-market for decades. But when the seminary closed, the site became available. And now it is home to organizations as varied as TCI Cable, the national headquarters of NAACP, and a Baltimore Association of Retarded Citizens employment center. Seton Business Park serves as an example of land use changes made possible by changes in long-term land ownership. One can also find long-standing former textile mills and warehouses which have been converted into space for offices, crafts makers, small technology firms, and apartments. Some easily reached places to find such adaptive reuses are Hampden-Woodberry, Downtown's west side, and Fells Point.
Commercial-office-industrial employment centers can be found farther out in the suburbs. Some of them might be considered edge cities, reflecting a term coined to describe large-scale employment centers developed in outlying suburban areas (Garreau,1991). An edge city is defined as having more than 5-million square feet of office space, at least 600,000 square feet of retail, more in-commuting workers than out-commuting residents, and more jobs than housing units. In addition, an edge city must be generally perceived as an employment-oriented end destination. Areas such as BWI, Columbia, Hunt Valley/Cockeysville, Owings Mills, White Marsh, and The Route-40 Technology Corridor in Harford County might be viewed as Baltimore Region examples. However, the main point for purposes of this commentary is that there are large and varied employment centers occupying readily accessible sites all around today's metropolitan areas -- enough to have created a multi-centered employment and urban development context much different than the single center, downtown-oriented urban pattern with which we began the Twentieth Century.
The Owings Mills Growth Area in northwest Baltimore County is served by I-795 and the mass transit Metro line to downtown Baltimore and the Johns Hopkins medical complex in East Baltimore. Planned to accommodate 44,000 residents and 32,000 jobs in a 13,000 acre community, Owings Mills now has a 1.2-million square foot regional shopping center, 5.6-million square feet of commercial-office-industrial floor space, and 6,100 housing units. Now a more community-oriented "main-street" commercial area is under consideration. Though generally rated a success, Owings Mills faces some upcoming problems. Those challenges include unexpected traffic congestion due to higher than expected employment density, lack of household diversity attributable to a preponderance of townhouse and multi-family units, and a school shortfall of about 2000 seats.5
The White Marsh Growth Area in eastern Baltimore County is served by two major highways. Interstate-95 provides direct commuter access to Downtown Baltimore and East Coast access from Maine to Florida. That East Coast access has attracted a variety of distribution and manufacturing operations. In addition, the existing MD-43 White Marsh Boulevard allows congestion-reducing movement between the traffic-jammed Baltimore Beltway and equally crowded I-95. At the same time, it provides access to the 1.1-million square foot White Marsh Mall and other commercial growth areas. Soon White Marsh Boulevard will be extended eastward into the county's East Side Revitalization Area. That extension will serve more than two thousand acres of newly developing and redeveloping commercial-industrial areas. Since 1990, the White Marsh Growth Area has attracted roughly 2.9-million square feet of privately financed non-residential development and 2,800 units of housing with 1,700 more to come. Those developments have made White Marsh one of the fastest growing employment centers in the region, even though it is not yet up to edge city size standards for office space.
The Route-40 Technology Corridor located farther to the northeast in Harford County has developed, so far, as an elongated distribution-office-manufacturing employment center located in the county's planned development envelope. It stretches 19 miles along I-95 and US-40 from Joppa to Havre de Grace on the Susquehanna River. Once the corridor was dominated by the sprawling Aberdeen Proving Ground and related highway commercial activities catering to military personnel. Originally APG tested tanks and artillery, but now deals with biological defense and high speed computers. Over the years, other land in the corridor has become the focus of significant centers for such distribution and manufacturing names as Mercedes Benz, McCormick, the Gap, Saks Fifth Avenue, Rite Aid, Frito Lay, and Clorox. Already developed with a wide variety of office, distribution, and manufacturing space, the Route-40 Corridor is gradually shifting from a drab roadside commercial strip to a series of employment-providing nodes located at I-95 interchanges. Development of employment areas is being aided by use of zoning categories for industrial employment and mixed office activities. Concentrating such development is intended to reduce the county's 42% out-commute rate by locating jobs near suitable housing in accord with the Smart Growth live-near-work principle.6 Recently the corridor also made use of infill development when long-vacant Bata Shoe buildings on the Bush River were blown up to make way for a waterside office park, 400 houses, and other waterfront activities. As its employment-oriented character evolves, the Route-40 Technology Corridor is becoming a prime example of improved development fostered by such Smart Growth concepts as priority funding areas, orderly infrastructure provision, infill development, and live-near-work initiatives.
Infill Development in Southeast Baltimore County and an adjacent city area provide interesting challenges. Both city and county have been buffeted for more than thirty years by industrial decline and unemployment brought about by the fading away of steel-making, ship-building, and related industries. Now these areas are receiving infill development attention. The county plans to build a $63-million extension of White Marsh Boulevard from the White Marsh Growth Area to serve industrial parks in the Middle River area (Sun, 11/22/99). More immediately, several hundred units of poorly maintained forty-year-old housing plagued by drug trade problems and crime are being demolished. At the same time deteriorating sidewalks and alleys are being rebuilt while schools are being refurbished. Other sites are being readied for new, market-rate housing (Sun, 11/22/99). Partially developed areas of Back River Neck and Bowleys Quarters closer to the Chesapeake Bay are also a concern because they have failing septic tanks. They are being considered for sewers amidst concern about potential bay-side environmental damage. On the city side, the Southeast Community Organization (SECO) has prepared a guide plan for upgrading the Highlandtown Area, which contains still viable housing and many sites suitable for the kinds of distribution activities found up and down the nearby I-95 corridor. 7
The Pikesville Business District along Reisterstown Road between Sudbrook Avenue and the Beltway has undergone substantial, though sometimes subtle, change in recent years. Planning started with its 1920's store-by-store strip development style and then added streetscaping, a public plaza, unified signage, roadway improvements, and coordinated parking. Today the Pikesville Business District is more cohesive and shows signs of thoughtful revitalization combining small shops from the past with some of the "big-box" stores geared to current retailing concepts. Similar revitalization efforts are under way in Essex, Catonsville, Towson, Glen Burnie, Annapolis, elsewhere in the suburbs, and at places in the city as varied as Belvedere Square and Highlandtown.
Columbia lies southwest of Baltimore, about half-way to Washington, in affluent Howard County. It was first envisioned as a self-sufficient 14,000 acre new town by the late James Rouse. Building began in 1967. Thirty-some years later Columbia has come of age with 88,000 people in 33,000 dwellings readily accessible to 5,300 acres of open space. Columbia is also home to 67,000 jobs in nearly 25-million square feet of commercial, office, and industrial space located in more than a dozen business parks and commercial areas.8 One might think, initially, that those numbers imply more than enough jobs in Columbia for Columbia residents. But there is strong evidence that most working residents of Columbia go somewhere else to work and most workers in Columbia come from somewhere else. 9 Evidently the wages and skills associated with Columbia's jobs don't match those of Columbia's mostly affluent resident work force. As a result, most jobs in Columbia are held by people who, for the most part, drive from other places to work in Columbia. A good many of those people drive to jobs in Columbia because they choose to live elsewhere. But others are service workers, including teachers, firefighters, and policemen unable to afford Columbia housing costs. This jobs-and-housing imbalance serves as yet another reminder of urban dispersion leading to high levels of automobile travel and chronic road congestion. The proposed addition of lanes and interchanges to US-29 serving Columbia makes that reminder more concrete. Still, Columbia gets good marks for having a more orderly and efficient land use pattern than would have occurred since Columbia was proposed as a hopeful alternative to the unfettered urban sprawl facing Howard County back then.
Cold Spring New Town is Baltimore's mixed-outcome New Town In Town. A late 1960's vacant land survey found 375 acres at Cold Spring Lane near the Jones Falls Expressway. The partially hilly and wooded site included an inactive quarry envisioned as a small lake. Moshe Safdie designed the project for 3,800 dwellings to be built on terraced concrete decks atop under-deck parking. But, when development finally started, sharply higher mortgage rates, inflated construction costs, and the continued decline of city schools brought development to a stop in the 1970's. In fact, only 252 of the originally planned units were built. A modest number of mid-rise moderate income housing units for the elderly were added in the 1980's. Since then, roughly a hundred units of "suburban" style single family detached housing units and townhouses have been added. (Baltimore Messenger, 12/15/97) Today Cold Spring has about 500 dwellings, all on hilly land north of Cold Spring Lane. Substantially smaller than planned -- and criticized by some as too costly and wasteful -- it is still popular with many of its residents and serves as a truncated example of what might have been.
Now we have finished a verbal tour of selected Metropolitan Baltimore urban development activities and community revitalization projects. One could see most of them in a day of driving and observing. And, in fact, those attending the Lambda Alpha International Board of Governors meeting were able to see about half of the examples discussed here by bus on April 29, 2000.
4 The rough estimate of about 1,500,000 square feet of added downtown office space is based on a BDC tabulation of citywide office absorption for 1993 through 1998 in Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (Draft) July 1999 -- plus data on specific downtown office projects and some discussion with Downtown Partnership of Baltimore staff. Vacancy rate estimates are from Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, Central Business District Plan, 1999.
5 Detailed comments on Owings Mills and White Marsh as growth areas is in Baltimore County's Master Plan - 2010 (Part 4) at http://www.co.ba.md.us/p.cfm/agencies/planning/mastplan.cfm.
6 Presentation to Baltimore Chapter of Lambda Alpha by Thomas Sadowski, Director of Harford County Office of Economic Development and Rick Haughey, Redevelopment and Land Use Coordinator, Harford County Department of Planning and Zoning (9/15/99).
7 Presentation to Baltimore Chapter of Lambda Alpha by Robert Hannon, Director Baltimore County Office of Economic Development and Andrea VanArsdale, Revitalization Director, Baltimore County Office of Economic Development (6/17/98).
8 Columbia data can be found at the Rouse Company's web page http://www.columbia-md.com/. Similar data for a somewhat larger Baltimore Metropolitan Council (BMC) Regional Planning District containing Columbia can be found in BMC's Forecasts of Population, Households, Labor Force and Employment: Round 5-A (October, 1997).
9 There are no specific estimates for Columbia itself. However, estimates for Howard County as a whole indicate that 34% of the county workforce commute from outside the county, 20% commute to other parts of Metropolitan Baltimore, 24% commute to Metropolitan Washington, and 21% work in the county.