October 19th, 2010 |
by David Daddio |
published in
Book Exchange Site, Downtown, Housing, Old Town
Local leaders have really put themselves in a quandary over the Book Exchange controversy. An array of officials who are reliably pro-smart growth have teamed up with Old Town Civic Association (OTCA) in an effort to quash the proposed 6-story project that could bring 830 student beds to downtown College Park—along with roughly 170 beds geared towards graduate students [...]
October 7th, 2010 |
by David Daddio |
published in
Book Exchange Site, Housing, Old Town, Politics
In 2006, roughly 23% of the single-family homes in College Park were rental units. In Old Town (the area bounded by Route 1, Paint Branch Pkwy, Calvert Rd and the Metro tracks) about 3 in 4 houses are rented (red and blue dots above). This is according to a detailed GIS study conducted by Eric [...]
September 27th, 2010 |
by Fazlul Kabir |
published in
Book Exchange Site, Housing, Old Town
[Update 9/30/2010: This post has been updated with comments from District 4 Council woman Denise Mitchell] The proposal to build a 6-story, 334-unit student housing on the current Book Exchange property may still be in its very primitive stage, yet some City Council members have already started to take sides on this development. Interestingly enough, not [...]
November 8th, 2007 |
by Rob Goodspeed |
published in
Historic District, Old Town
One of the most important policies relating to the future of downtown College Park continues to make its way through a convoluted approval process that involves more lawyers than College Park Residents. When it is implemented, the Old Town Historic District will require property owners within the designated area (shown on a map here) to [...]
October 18th, 2007 |
by Rob Goodspeed |
published in
East Campus, Environment, Old Town, Transportation
The East Campus Community Review Steering Committee has been meeting since August to hear from the developers and their consultants about a wide variety of issues surrounding the project. We have encouraged our readers to attend these meetings (and many have) and I am an official committee member of this committee. The meetings are preceded [...]
April 5th, 2007 |
by Rob Goodspeed |
published in
Historic District, Housing, Old Town
With College Park’s Old Town Historic District nearing final approval with county officials, the first public controversy regarding a property in the district has emerged. We had previously reported that the Old Town Historic District faced an additional hearing with the Prince George’s County Zoning Hearing Examiner’s (ZHE) Office. In response to complaints from some [...]
March 29th, 2007 |
by Sam Snellings |
published in
Downtown, Old Town, Transportation
The University of Maryland’s Department of Public Safety has recently established the ‘preferred’ route from the University of Maryland Campus to the College Park Metro stop through a partnership between the University of Maryland and the City of College Park. This route has been given increased lighting, additional emergency phones and landscaping improvements in order [...]
February 28th, 2007 |
by Rob Goodspeed |
published in
Downtown, East Campus, General College Park, Old Town
As anyone familiar with College Park’s neighborhoods knows, in some neighborhoods officials gone to great lengths to limit traffic on residential streets. Although most were developed with interconnected, gridiron street networks, over the years many streets have been cut off totally or made one way. The result is what one local resident calls a “traffic [...]
