Taking the long view on Maryland's future
A small group of environmentalists, developers and government officials have taken the first step in what could be a long journey toward rethinking how Maryland should grow over the next century.
That's right: 100 years, not just five, 10 or even 30. Inspired by reports of success with a similarly long-range visioning exercise for the Seattle area, representatives of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Home Builders Association of Maryland and nine other groups pledged Wednesday to launch the "Maryland 100-year Horizon Parntership."
By taking such a long-range view, says John Kortecamp, executive vice president of the home builders, the Maryland group hopes to get past the NIMBYism (aka "not in my backyard") that always seem to bog down efforts to develop more compact, walkable communities in the state.
Participants in the "Cascade Agenda," as the Seattle-area effort is called, explained at a conference at Martin's West on Wednesday that it has succeeded in building consensus among developers, environmentalists and government officials there about halting the loss of forest and farmland to suburban sprawl by building up cities and towns.
Gene Duvernoy, president of the Cascade Land Conservancy and one of the founders of the Seattle effort, said looking at long-range projections of how the region's population would continue to mushroom prompted environmentalists to realize that the keys to conserving Washington's natural resources lay in providing affordable housing and sustainable employment opportunities for the newcomers. It also won agreement that existing cities and towns need additional money to make themselves more attractive in order to ease the pressure to develop beyond the region's growth boundaries.
"It was a sloppy process," Duvernoy recalled, with lots of false turns and reverses. It took thousands of hours of talks, but the effort has gained traction, he said, in large part because it is based on using market-based incentives to conserve forests and farms rather than more government land-use regulations.
The effort's only about five years old, and still working the kinks out of mechanisms for transferring development rights from lands targeted for preservation to urban areas. And they're eyeing "taxpayer increment financing," a type of creative government borrowing increasingly common with urban development projects in Maryland, to raise the money needed to build up cities' infrastructure.
Change comes slowly in land use. But there've been a few shifts, proponents say. The state of Washington has refocused its land preservation efforts to acquire private in-holdings to protect large tracts of forest, and politicians in the suburban city of Kirkland were persuaded to overcome resistance to a 2,000-home development and accept what proponents said was their "fair share" of the region's projected growth.
"If we're going to preserve our quality of life," Duvernoy said, "we need to change how we exercise it now."
Proponents of the 100-year planning horizon say it somehow gets people to think outside the box and leave aside their own personal stake in the status quo. But some Marylanders yesterday were still having trouble seeing how it would work here.
Maryland, after all, has been struggling to reform its "Smart Growth" laws that despite being hailed as national models have largely failed to halt suburban sprawl. It was only a few years ago that a similar long-range planning exercise known as Reality Check tried to forge consensus around building more compactly to handle projected population growth in the next 30 years. The expected groundswell of change didn't happen, and the debate continues in Annapolis and the courts.
"We've already had this conversation," observed Jennifer Bevan-Dangel of 1000 Friends of Maryland, which was notably absent from the list of "partners" sponsoring the latest effort. "We're more focused now on policy change."
Rob Etgen, head of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy, likewise said he wasn't sure how a 100-year planning discussion could bring together the disparate interests across Maryland -- from the mountainous west where politicians are more worried about attracting new residents, to the Shore, where there's broad concern about the loss of rural land and small towns. But, Etgen added, "just having the dialog is a very very positive thing, and in a 100-year time frame, is terrific."
Comments
Can we start with effective methods to REDUCE the population? I'd say a MINIMUM 30%-40% fewer would be a meaningful approach.
Imagine the whole country with 60,000,000 fewer people to feed and clothe and house and educate and provide transportation and medicine to...
Imagine... it's easy if you try.
Posted by: MrRational | October 29, 2009 11:59 AM
The density/environmental connection is an easy sell, executing it in the real world is another.
I'm from Puget Sound area, and when the rubber meets the road, the Cascade Land Conservancy falls short. Most notable of these is an effort to build dense affordable housing adjacent to our brand new light rail line in an area of affordable owner occupied homes(Rainier Valley).
This effort fell flat - for some reason these same working homeowners did not want to revisit the mistakes of 'project' affordable housing. CLC kept their name out of the negative press, this supportive article does reference the debate.
http://www.seattlepi.com/connelly/400802_Joel20.html
Also of note are the organizations close ties to incumbent Mayor Greg Nickels who failed to advance past the primary in this year's Mayoral race and the leadership of WAMU, the law firm of Foster Pepper whose business practices are at least partially revealed.
Posted by: Douglas Tooley | October 30, 2009 3:32 PM