This section is about metropolitan adaptation and adjustment. Throughout its more than 200 year history, Baltimore has changed with the times. Now the advent of a global economy, wireless telecommunications, and high technology industries creates accelerated change and calls for skillful adaptation. First we will look at the region's urban pattern and its communities of distress. Then we will discuss how the region might substantially improve those communities or relieve their distress. After that we will examine some regionwide planning and urban development initiatives that could lead to a better development pattern than today's often gridlocked sprawl. And, finally, we will summarize some regionwide cooperation initiatives that are under way or being considered.
Today's multi-centered Beltway Metropolis doesn't work as well as it could. Distressed areas exist in the city and some inner suburban areas. Because the most distressed neighborhoods are in the city, they have an adverse impact on tax revenues and on the ability to provide services. That, in turn creates a "polarized" situation for the city and surrounding counties in which:
At the same time, sprawled development continues drawing development outward because it is easier to build in suburban areas beyond the beltway where the average American prefers to live (Downs, 1994). And so, cars and trucks travel too many miles and, thus, create excessive smog and pollution. Jobs are often too far from workers. And, in fact, they are unattainably distant for chronically poor inner city people who don't have cars. As a result, the metropolis is less than it could be because of inner city urban distress, population outflow from the city, and sprawled development in the suburbs.
In overall terms this disparate Metropolitan Baltimore is one of the nation's "beltway cities" with an expressway circling the city and serving as the region's new Main Street. New employment, standardized office space, distribution facilities, and mass retailing outlets cluster in edge city areas accessible to the beltway and other expressways. Vehicle miles traveled rise each year, but only one-quarter of the metropolitan area's trips are primarily job-oriented. The end result: More cars and trucks going more places more often.
Suburb-to-suburb, single-driver trips now predominate and Metropolitan Baltimore has become one of the multi-centered cities that began to emerge just after World War II, as suburbs welcomed FHA-financed and VA-financed housing while the Interstate Highway System made getting there easier, at least to begin with.
Metropolitan Baltimore's urban pattern occupies 400 of the 2,200 square miles making up the city and surrounding counties. The suburbs-to-city population split is 3-to-1 and the employment split is 2-to-1. In addition, the city continues to lose population and the suburbs continue to gain more new jobs than the city. Within the overall distribution of population, employment, and housing there is urban distress and economic disparity.
Baltimore City -- and some older, closer-in portions of the suburban counties -- exhibit such signs of urban distress as:
Myron Orfield's research suggests that the first three factors -- extreme poverty, chronic unemployment, and lagging schools -- are major indicators of severe urban distress (Orfield, Metropolitics, 1997). Vacant and abandoned housing is a fourth factor in Baltimore. The other five factors simply reinforce the basic sense of decay, decline, and despair. Orfield also found that parts of inner suburbs near a distressed central city display the same "signals" as those found in the city. In Metropolitan Baltimore, Orfield found 25 "high social need outer places" in surrounding counties and 27 "high social need inner places" in Baltimore (Orfield, CPHA, 1997).
Concentrated extreme poverty is a primary indicator of urban distress. Poverty alone means a constant struggle to survive from one day to the next. Residents of poverty-stricken communities have little time for anything else. At the same time, such communities often have few successful role models or leaders, largely because those with adequate incomes have moved outward to become part of the middle class. Such outward movement is made easier as more and more housing is built in the suburbs. Orfield found that successive groups moved outward and left inner-city poverty community housing at the abandoned end of a "chain" of housing displacement (Orfield, Metropolitics, 1997, page 15 onward). The 1999 PlanBaltimore suggests that suburban home building means housing at the inner city end of the "chain" becomes less and less attractive and winds up as substandard housing for the very poor or as abandoned housing blighting those communities.
Chronic high unemployment also contributes to poverty and despair. But unemployed workers are only a partial measure of employment distress and poverty. That is so because unemployment is often accompanied by joblessness and underemployment:
Poverty community residents face limited job growth in the city. Yet strong suburban job growth is often inaccessible, particularly for those without automobiles. As a result, employment growth has become ''polarized'' by circumstances in which suburban job gains clearly exceed city job increases. Baltimore's central city job disparity is also indicated by a December 1999 city unemployment rate of 5.6% versus an overall regional rate of 3.1%. In more personal terms, 17,000 Baltimore individuals were counted as unemployed in December 1999. Clearly, Baltimore City has a substantial concentration of unemployed, jobless, and underemployed persons. In addition, it is evident that a clear majority of those individuals are part of the city's 65% African-American population majority. And a substantial proportion of them are to be found in the city's communities of extreme distress.10
Lagging school performance also contributes to urban distress (Orfield, Metropolitics, 1997, page 39 onward). Schools in distressed communities have high proportions of children from impoverished single-parent families. Parent participation and student expectations are low. Absentee and dropout rates are high, with dropout rates sometimes exceeding 50%. Performance is often substandard. As a result, students from impoverished communities more often than not go through a school system that leaves them unprepared for the end of the Twentieth Century. More importantly, it leaves them unprepared for the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. Orfield suggests that poverty and chronic unemployment are, in fact, advance indicators of underperforming schools soon to come.
Vacant and abandoned housing is also a distressing sign of urban decay. No one wants to own such housing because no one will pay to live in it. The Baltimore City Department of Planning estimated about 12,000 units for 1998 (PlanBaltimore, 1999). Since then, abandonments have exceeded demolitions so that the current "inventory" may be up to 30,000 units. And, in fact, some say the total is as many as 40,000. But even 12,000 still standing abandoned and vacant houses awaiting demolition or rehabilitation is far too many. The city has demolished several thousand units and renovated many more, but there is still a severe backlog of unusable housing clogging the inner city, making life difficult and investment unlikely. And without concerted effort there will be still more.
Taken together, those conditions create the critical urban distress and fiscal capacity ''polarization'' identified by Orfield (Metropolitics, Brookings, 1997) and cited as sufficient for urban disaster by Brookings Institute urban/metropolitan director Bruce Katz in a June 1999 Baltimore Metropolitan Council symposium on BALTIMORE: 2000 AND BEYOND.
Myron Orfield (Metropolitics, 1997) suggests near-term improvement reforms to reduce the "polarization" of distress in the city and inner suburbs relative to suburban fiscal capabilities:
Further ideas for timely "polarization" reduction that have been suggested as ways to improve Metropolitan Baltimore economically and functionally over a relatively short time are listed below:
Those reforms and initiatives are a major challenge now. They will require regional cooperation and coordination if they are to be successful.
But there are differing viewpoints and six powerful local governments involved in any regional change. Metropolitan Baltimore has only six major local governments because counties are Maryland's primary local government. Initially that suggests regional simplicity and might seem to imply that a few near-equals could readily reach regional decisions. But that simplicity fades quickly when one realizes that any of the six jurisdictions would qualify as a small to medium sized metropolitan area. As a result, Baltimore and its five surrounding counties each have significant leverage in regional decision making. In fact, having only six major local governments can cut either way. Six jurisdictions with a common view can take action fairly quickly. But six jurisdictions at odds can fail to agree just as readily as can the hundred or more jurisdictions that make up a more typical metropolitan area.
Urban form alternatives and metropolitan "regionalism" have been discussed by Anthony Downs (New Visions for Metropolitan America, 1994) and debated in a Lincoln Land Institute Conference (Ingerson, 1995). Notable urban form alternatives are:
The most inefficient and costly urban pattern is generally agreed to be today's essentially unlimited urban sprawl. That pattern generates a low-density residential pattern of mostly single-family homes on individual lots. That housing is, then, surrounded by large, low- density employment sites and commercial areas. Such sprawl leads to high infrastructure costs for added pipes and paving. It also leads, quite perversely, to more traffic and congestion than one might imagine.11 In Metropolitan Baltimore, this has led to the Baltimore Beltway carrying far more vehicles than it was designed for. No wonder the average Baltimore commuter reportedly waits in traffic 47 hours a year, often while listening to an upgraded CD/Stereo system. No wonder the Baltimore Beltway seems to be continually in the process of being widened, a process that one can't readily imagine going much beyond four lanes in each direction.
Meanwhile, back in the city, some housing markets are "soft" because virtually all new housing is being built out in the suburbs. That means that almost anyone who can afford to do so is more easily drawn out of the city. And the result of that is more and more concentration of the chronically poor inside the city in a lose/lose situation. Achieving any of the urban form alternatives to today's relatively unlimited low-density suburban sprawl would, presumably, involve such initiatives as:
Downs suggests, as have others, that we aren't really likely to do much better than achieve slightly more compact urban development in the future by using techniques available for the past thirty or forty years. But perhaps we can do better by adapting some of the Smart Growth and regional cooperation notions just listed.
Urban growth boundaries (UGB) are designed to contain new development and assure compact growth. Inside the UGB, urban growth is encouraged with the aid of focused infrastructure funding. Outside the boundary, development is discouraged by large-lot rural zoning and refusal to provide infrastructure.
The first metropolitan area urban growth boundary was in Portland, Oregon, in 1973. Twenty-five years of experience suggest that the UGB has dampened urban sprawl. Some say it has also escalated land and housing prices, while others argue that population growth and a booming economy are to blame. Now there is interest in extending Portland's regional UGB. That may well be desirable as urban growth pushes against the limit that held for a quarter-century.
There is an implicit, but fuzzy, Metropolitan Baltimore urban growth boundary which can be seen on the 2020 Baltimore Metropolitan Council Transportation Plan map in There Are No Boundaries (BMC, 1999). It can be considered a still incomplete regional work in progress:
Inside the region's implicit growth boundary, there are specified growth areas like Columbia, all of Baltimore, Owings Mills and White Marsh, the Route-40 Corridor, and other areas intended for urban development.
For still further urban growth focus, individual jurisdictions have prepared priority funding area designations intended to match development with land capacity, fiscal capabilities, and desired urban patterns.
Regional transportation planning is related to several elements of Smart Growth and offers prospects for regionalism. To be sure, it connects residential areas and employment opportunities and links the region to the rest of the world. Yet, as it serves these functions, Metropolitan Baltimore reveals a somewhat uneven overall transportation system:
Highways are essential elements in the skeleton of Metropolitan Baltimore's presently sprawled urban pattern. Like many metropolitan areas, Baltimore has a reasonably well developed expressway system comprised, for the most part, of Interstate Highways, such as:
Curiously enough, Baltimore doesn't have some of the Interstate Highways proposed in the 1960's. Citizen activists halted construction of I-70 through West Baltimore and the Franklin-Mulberry Corridor into Downtown Baltimore. They also helped stop running I-83 through Canton to link up with I-95. Likewise, the proposed Northwest Freeway was never built, at least not inside the beltway. Not building those expressways lessened impacts on city neighborhoods without unduly diverting traffic.
Some unbuilt expressway segments were replaced by grade-level boulevards on existing roadbeds. This was done in order to distribute I-83 traffic headed for southeastern Baltimore. It also helped carry vehicles around the west side of downtown. Later some unspent federal mass transit money was used to extend the Metro subway line into East Baltimore.
Over the longer run, the region's expressway approach has shifted from new construction to a combination of maintenance, rebuilding, necessary construction, and intermodal traffic management. The end result is a reasonably well developed expressway system that, despite frequent congestion, provides fairly short commute-time trips and provides critical links for the movement of goods and people up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
Mass transit is somewhat less effective in Metropolitan Baltimore. Most observers would agree that the transit system is disjointed with:
Once again, some things didn't happen. The remaining five radial lines of the unified mass transit system planned in the late 1960's never got built. The light rail line, much of it single-tracked, has yet to be joined by any other lines. And more cross-regional, suburb-to-suburb transit demand needs to be provided for -- a difficult task in low-density suburbs.
The Port of Baltimore with its automated Seagirt Terminal, growing container capability, and aggressive marketing operates successfully and takes good advantage of intermodal opportunities.
BWI Airport is a local passenger gateway, eastern seaboard travel hub, growing international facility, and handler of freight. That freight flow can be seen any night from nine o'clock on into the morning, as trucks deliver to sorting centers and then to cargo planes -- a process reversed along about four o'clock in the morning and on into the working day.
Water taxis are a quirky piece of the system. You can see them skimming across the harbor carrying tourists and local people. Regular riders are called Frequent Floaters.
Telecommunications are also part of today's transportation system, moving information and images instead of people and goods. A recent Baltimore Metropolitan Council study (TSCNOTES, 12/99) reports that about 50,000 Metropolitan Baltimore workers -- 3.6% of the labor force -- telecommute an average of three days a week. That level of telecommuting calculates to more than 100-million miles not traveled during the course of a year.
In overall terms, Metropolitan Baltimore's transportation system works pretty well when one considers how it has been put together over the years. Some periods have favored highways, while others have favored mass transit. Partly completed efforts have been dropped or scaled back. Most significantly, perhaps, the overall transportation system hasn't been used to stimulate more concentrated development and reduced travel volumes. Nor has it been consistently used to accommodate cross-region demands of a multi-centered metropolis.
As far back as 1929, the first Regional Plan for New York contained a suggestion by Robert Murray Haig, a noted urban economist of the time, that a major goal of the plan was to create a transportation system that would minimize total miles traveled for any given land use pattern. That is still an appealing Metropolitan Area transportation planning guide.
Metropolitan transportation planning is a well-established and fairly well-standardized activity across the nation. It involves such steps as population and employment projections, estimation of expected trips by mode, distribution of trips to likely destinations, determination of likely highway-versus-transit choices, approximation of likely link-by-link traffic loadings, and evaluation of traffic volumes, congestion points, and other planning issues.
That's fine. It tells planners a lot about effects likely to be associated with an urban pattern or, for that matter, several alternative urban patterns. But there is frequently limited explicit consideration of how transportation and land use decisions might interact, even though they are usually considered to be inextricably linked to each other (Moore and Thorsnes, 1994): Some examples:
Those ideas lead to the notion of metropolitan transportation planning which includes more specific land use and transportation interaction effects than is often the case.
Today's metropolitan transportation planning process includes computer capabilities for each of the planning activities already noted. It also includes capability for projecting interconnected land use and transportation effects. While such models are hardly precise, they can indicate major differences between alternative plans. That suggests that the Baltimore Metropolitan Council's proposed metropolitan vision effort might use such "sketch-plan" capabilities to ask "what-if" questions about alternative transportation and land use plans. That effort can be graphically oriented, since today's computers can produce on-screen multi-color maps and charts for ready review.
There is, of course, much more to metropolitan planning than transportation and land use planning. In fact, metropolitan planning organizations can usually do almost anything their constituent local governments agree on as making regional sense. Some other regional planning activities of current, on-going concern or prospective, longer-term interest in Metropolitan Baltimore include:
This comprises a list of planning activities of particular regional concern and scale. Perhaps the most common aspect of these tasks is the fact that none of them respect jurisdictional boundaries. That, if nothing else, makes them regional.
The region has lacked a clearly articulated -- and widely shared -- vision of its future. This can change as 2000 takes shape. Public sector leaders (including the elected officials of the Baltimore Metropolitan Council and the public-private leadership provided by the Greater Baltimore Alliance and the Greater Baltimore Committee) are embarking on new efforts to help position the region for the future. They join with other local environmental and citizen interest groups (including the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, 1000 Friends of Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Baltimore Urban League) in recognizing the need for this shared vision.
The region's new vision should look into future potentials and problems. Perhaps the vision should be as ambitious and sweeping as Greater Cincinnati's PREPARING FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM. That global vision was framed in terms of context, environment, transportation, infrastructure, economic development, education, health, culture, arts, sports, history, urbanization, governance, public management, and the future in twenty-four big pages of words and graphics.
Metropolitan Baltimore's vision should be uniquely suited to its potentials and aspirations. Elements to be considered in framing a regional vision include:
Whether -- and how -- any of this happens is a challenge facing many, if not all, of the nation's 350-plus metropolitan areas, including Metropolitan Baltimore.
The Metropolitan Baltimore of 2050 may be quite a bit like today's metropolis since most of today's infrastructure and urban pattern will still be in place. That still standing urban inheritance will reflect today's multi-centered Beltway Metropolis with its urban travel pattern dominated by automobile and truck trips.
But at the suburban margins, as well as at infill opportunity sites for adaptive reuse and brownfields land renewal, a changed regional metropolis will take shape. Some of its characteristics may include:
Imagining the physical form of the metropolis is the easy part in many respects. How metropolitan Baltimore responds to the challenges of regional cooperation will also determine the region's urban future:
These comments simply suggest that Metropolitan Baltimore will be much like it is today but could also be significantly different, for better or worse, by 2050.
Much of the region's future hasn't been imagined yet, which means that there is ample room for "visioning" about our metropolitan future, perhaps by:
In the meantime, we hope you have found this material interesting and possibly useful as Metropolitan Baltimore heads into its future.
10 Estimates of central city unemployment are subject to a good deal of error. Nevertheless a rough estimate of 17,000 unemployed in Baltimore seems supportable when one considers more reliable total population and total employment estimates and a recent city unemployment rate of 5.6% reported by the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (December, 1999).
11 See Real Estate Research Corporation, The Costs of Sprawl (1974), J. E. Frank, The Costs of Alternative Development Patterns, (ULI, 1989) and PlanBaltimore (1999).
12
Presentation to the Baltimore Chapter of Lambda Alpha by Arnold F. "Pat" Keller, III, Director, Baltimore County Office of Planning (10/20/99) .