Rethink College Park

Although city officials are still waiting to see if more absentee ballots are returned, according to the Diamondback it appears Stephanie Stullich and Mary Cook have won seats on City Council in yesterday’s special election.

> Diamondback: “Student city council candidate far behind in special election count“

(Third in a series of three)

To conclude our discussions (Part I & Part II) from before on what features would make a successful square on East Campus, we have these final points to add:

• Make the square “performance-enabled”. Small orchestras have performed for free in Washington’s public spaces. The square could encourage this by pre-installing a sound system for the park. The sound system should be used only for these occasional performances, not to “enhance the ambiance” with contrived white noise; urban spaces provide their own endless soundtrack.
• Provide a space for outdoor, interactive art. College Park benefits from a young, energetic population. The square could serve as a platform for the occasional outdoor art exhibit, thus bringing both variety and intrigue to the city. For three weeks in February 2005, New York artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude displayed “The Gates” (above) in Central Park to much acclaim, fanfare, and mystery.
• Maintain the square with a Business Improvement District. Many cities employ these quasi-governmental organizations to maintain sidewalks, sweep streets, and even plant flowers. The ideal square is self-sustaining, with commercial lessees paying a fee to support the maintenance not only of the square but of the sidewalks as well.

• Mandate public ownership. Public spaces, by definition, are open the public and are not privately owned. Whereas a private mall has the right to limit access, ban political expression, and constrain artistic exercises, public spaces are subject to the laws of free expression that democracies enjoy. It is absolutely paramount that the University reserve all future East Campus public spaces under its own jurisdiction. The construction of the square should be the responsibility of the selected developer, but constructing the square should not entitle any private entity to its ownership.

Although local leaders want them, state law means new dorms are unlikely to be the answer to the student housing problem at Maryland. In response to our question about alleviating the student housing crunch on our city council special election candidate survey, District 3 candidate Stephanie Stullich and District 4 candidates Mary Cook and Russell Scarato all mentioned new dormitories as part of their answers.

New dorms are thought of as unlikely because state law demands dorms be self-supporting. Official University policy on student housing explains in more detail:

Residence Halls, the Graduate Apartments, and dining halls must be self-supported by mandate of the General Assembly. No State or University funding is received, so student fees must be sufficient to pay all expenses including utilities, facilities renewal, plant maintenance and construction debts. In addition, the affected departments (Resident Life, Graduate Apartments, Dining Services) must pay a percentage of expenses to the University as overhead.

The effect of the law is that the University itself — or a private partner — must bear the debt burden to construct any new dorms. The last residence hall (suites) the university built by itself was New Leonardtown in 1982. The last traditional dormitory they built was La Plata Hall in 1968!

Since then the university has partnered with private developers to build the 1825 bed South Campus Commons and the 700 bed University Courtyards. In 2005, the Diamondback reported university officials were optimistic they would be able to finance a new dorm on North Campus that would house 500 students. However, since then the Board of Regents denied funding for construction.

The trend away from state supported housing has been hugely problematic - especially since a lot of the demand comes from freshman wanting traditional dormitories without kitchens (not conducive to a public-private partnership) thus pushing older students off-campus. In the mid-90’s, 50% of freshmen sought on-campus housing. Now it’s over 90%.

We’d like to remind everyone that the College Park special election is tomorrow, January 16th, from 11:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. If you’re in College Park and registered to vote in the following areas please remember to cast your vote at the indicated locations. If you filed for an absentee ballot remember to mail it!

District 3: Old Town, Frat Row, Graham Cracker, all of the Commons buildings, Knox Towers, Graduate Gardens, Calvert Hills, and all of College Park east of the railroad tracks.

Read our District 3 candidate survey

District 3 votes at City Hall

District 4: Denton and Cambridge Communities (But not the Ellicott Community), the Knox Boxes, the Courtyards, and the areas Northwest of campus including Crystal Springs and College Park Woods.

Read our District 4 candidate survey

District 4 votes at Davis Hall

On a separate, but not unrelated note, we’ve been informed that three-term College Park Mayor Stephan Brayman has given a surprise endorsement of UMD Student Nick Aragón for District 4. Aragón, 25, showed an impressive grasp of the issues at a recent Candidates Forum according to Brayman. Read the Mayor’s full endorsement here.

While there is no quick-fix for community redevelopment, community beautification through art is relatively simple. The only ingredients are cheap materials such as paint and the spark of a creative mind. Let us take into account the current state of affairs in downtown College Park aesthetics.

The horizon is bland, squat, and nearly uniform. From the vantage point sitting on the bench in front of Noodles and Boston Market facing north, a strip mall of just three stores stews in an awkward parking lot devoid of logical design. From the left they are College Park Bicycles, Kimi & Phil’s China Café (which is so unsavory that I ate there once and never returned) and 7-Eleven. Abutting this federation of mediocrity is, of course, Santa Fe Café. There is a reinforced vinyl banner strung up on one of the unused terraces, half of which is a Bud Light logo, the other the phrase “WELCOME BACK STUDENTS.” Further to the east is a retail bank, Bentley’s, and a spate of grub joints.

In the center of this panorama is the one aesthetic anomaly in downtown College Park. It is a towering trompe l’oeil painted façade of a building, attached unceremoniously to the side of an actual building. The mural is odd – it would seem to be the upper portion of a neo-Georgian brick home. Complete with three flat chimneys and five green attic windows, the center of this faux home is crowned by a hexagonal spire that juts above the building and is propped up from behind. The base of the spire is rimmed with miniature balustrades and what are perhaps baroque portals. It is supposed to be a belfry but it has no bell. Not even a painted one. It is the tallest point in downtown College Park and would be tallest point in the entire town were it not for the Memorial Chapel looming in the distance. The painted façade represents College Park in many ways – its disjointed attempt to look authentic and functional when in fact it is a messy pastiche of frippery. The painted bell tower without a bell could not be a more appropriately hollow symbol.

The implementation of better public art would mean a lot more to our community than painting a bell inside that fake tower. Good public art provides a common point of reference. It can unite a localized region while endowing it with something attractive, something compelling. There is hope for College Park art yet. My personal favorite mural in CP is tucked away on a wall inside alumni-owned California Tortilla. Painted by UMD students Graham Garvie and Matt Mayer, the work cleverly promotes CalTort while playing up Maryland’s reputation. It conveys the diversity of our campus through the common point of reference of our mascot.

Reviewing the public art of College Park it would seem there is no shortage of places for new work like the CalTort mural: in or around new projects along Route 1, the underpass along Paint Branch under the railroad tracks, or even incorporated into the new parking garage or city hall now being planned.

Photo credit Flickr user Loke Sonne

When prospective national businesses look to a region and decide where to open shop, they consider many factors including taxes and rent. However, businesses that cater to sophisticated consumers will often consider a town’s education attainment level, too. What do these businesses see when they consider College Park? They see a town that is above the national and regional averages in educational attainment, but which still lags behind many of its neighbors.

We harvested demographic data from the 2000 U.S. Census and graphed them below. Since each number is a percentage of adults 25-years-old and older, the College Park figures exclude the vast majority of the student body. University Park, a popular bedroom community for faculty situated just south of campus, resembles Bethesda and McLean more than College Park.

A 460-unit project (including 30 town homes) is currently proposed for Riverdale Park right adjacent to the City of College Park. The project would take the place of the former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) building between Lafayette Avenue and Tuckerman Street known as the “Golub Property”. The Gazette reported on the project in November and few additional details have emerged since then. UMD originally sold the 13.5 acres to the developer - apparently with the stipulation that the university retain 50 of the units to recruit and house grad students.

Although roughly half a mile from the College Park Metro Station the project is tucked in a rather odd spot and as it’s currently being considered will contain 800 parking spaces. We urge local and county leaders to ease parking requirements for projects such as this in order to encourage residents to find alternatives to driving. Furthermore, we believe the project underscores the necessity of developing M-Square with a strong pedestrian character. As M-Square is currently planned we doubt many residents of the new project would enjoy walking along River Road to the Metro. Furthermore, it seems logical to connect the project to the nearby terminus of the College Park Trolley Trail at Albion Road so the residents can easily walk to campus and downtown College Park. This would probably entail an at-grade crossing of the MARC track.

>>Detailed “zoomable” map of the area.

(SEE FULL SIZE GRAPH)

A brief analysis of College Park’s age distribution the other week revealed that UMD has easily the youngest college town of it’s peer schools. This brought about a deeper question: what exactly is a “College Town”? This question produces a vague answer - a place where a “college or university and the cultures it creates exert a dominant influence over the character of the community.” Using this definition we decided to eliminate large cities and state capitals with universities in this analysis.

One commenter pointed out in our last post that CP’s population is miniscule (25,000) compared to Chapel Hill (52,000), Urbana-Champaigne (110,000), Ann Arbor (114,000), and Berkeley (102,000). Basically, it’s clear that you can place college towns on a continuum whereby a university can be an increasingly less important player in the community (either because of the large size of the town or small size of the college).

This time we compared CP to 19 other “college towns” and came up with the chart you see above. These towns range in population from 17,000 to 114,000 but still average about twice (50,000) College Park’s population. Not only did we find that College Park’s population has an unusually high percentage of undergraduate aged people (very roughly we’ll say its about 45% undergrad), but we had great difficulty finding another major university (and similar sized, discrete political unit/a.k.a. town) tucked into a major metro area. Apparently other states placed their land-grant universities a little further off the beaten path than Maryland did.

We do like a point PG County Councilmen Eric Olson made on our first iteration of this: virtually every other town on the chart has a second spike around the graduate student age range. College Park just can’t hold on to grad students.

A separate study using 59 towns found that 18-24 year olds averaged about 30% of the population of those towns in the year 2000. College Park was more like 50%.

>>See Our Excel Sheet: College Town Age Comparison