Rethink College Park

244 posts, 898 comments, and basically a year of serious postings. And what a year it has been! RTCP’s staff gets a little upset when good posts get buried. Just because they are old doesn’t make them any less important. So we decided to go back and dig up our ten best. Here they are in no particular order:

1) “Shopping for Low Lying Fruit” - 10/9/06. Eric Fidler rethinks to Pocomoke building, proposes an adaptive reuse into a grocery store (complete with incredible renderings) and exchanges blows with non other than John Porcari himself.

2) “10 East Campus Talking Points” - 11/1/06, reposted (with pictures) 5/1/07. David Daddio combines feedback from the RTCP staff to give our specific recommendations for East Campus. The points are as relevant today as they were in November (especially the part about keeping the public process transparent and meaningful).

3) “Mazza Grandmarc Student Housing Project Languishes” - 2/14/07. David Daddio discovers (as much as you can discover a $60 million project) the ill-fated Mazza Grad Student housing project, thus setting off a long chain of press coverage running up to the project’s eventual approval. Somehow it also led to a forced “compromise” on state legislation.

4) “Airport Regulations Stall Northgate Project” - 5/9/07. After a long series of phone calls and an alphabet soup of government terms, Rob Goodspeed sheds some light onto why the biggest project approved in CP hadn’t (and still hasn’t) started construction.

5) Special election survey 1 and survey 2 - 1/5/07. Rob Goodspeed gets every city special election candidate to tell all (after plenty of prodding).

6) “Greenbelt Station Proposal Now Includes Four 18-Story Tower” - 2/17/07. Rob Goodspeed discovers the true meaning of “Not in MY Backyard” on a cold morning in February.

7) “Historic District Considered Near Downtown” - 10/5/06. Rob Goodspeed unravels the Old Town Historic District saga.

8) “Talking Seriously About the Purple Line” - 5/11/07. David Daddio brings the University’s position on the Purple Line out in the open and uses his days as a lowly intern to tear it apart.

9) “Reconstructing Route 1” 2/2/07. Eric Fidler figures out what the deal is with the Route 1 reconstruction plans.

10) “Smart Growth, Student Housing, and Transportation - What Does it All Mean?” - 5/22/07. David Daddio explains why student housing is the salvation of College Park (even if no one making decisions chooses to open their eyes and see it).

A condominium project first proposed in December 2006 by area developer Otis Warren is moving forward, and this time it seems possible it will be developed with students in mind. The project, located at 8400 Baltimore Avenue, will contain 300 residential units, 14,000 square feet of retail, and a 4-story 421 space parking garage. These are the same numbers from when we posted a very rough rendering in February. According to our sources, although the city has a number of complaints regarding aesthetics, they supported the concept that it could become student housing at their meeting earlier this month. If built, the building could result in as many as 900 to 1,000 student beds. The condo market has softened significantly in recent months and many projects in the Washington region have moved from condos to rental units.

Issues raised during the city’s consideration of the detailed site plan at their meeting earlier this August included the infamous rules about whether the building’s facade had enough brick, the fact that the proposed building’s lot coverage exceeds the maximum and is set back 8 feet farther than the build-to line, and quibbling about the applicant’s traffic and parking exemption calculations.

We think this project illustrates one of the biggest problems with the M-U-I overlay zone: the excessive parking requirement. Cities as diverse as Ithica, New York, San Francisco, and Arlington County, Virginia have had the courage to question the parking dogma and build buildings with no — or very little — parking, especially when located near transit. Rental housing near the university on Route One should contain less parking than the zone currently requires.

The Prince George’s County Planning Board Hearing on the plan has been scheduled September 20th.

With the school year approaching, activity is picking up around here. With major projects rolling down the pipeline and decisions being made about the East Campus Project, it promises to be a busy fall. In addition to reading the site, how can you stay in touch with Rethink College Park?

1. Join the email list. We use it very rarely - only when there’s something important to announce. It’s usually only one or two messages a month:

2. Join our Facebook group - we recently switched from a Maryland-only group to a “global” one, so anyone can join who is on the website.

3. Use our RSS feed to track us in Bloglines, My Yahoo or Google Homepage.

Starting August 25, 2007, the Department of Transportation Services is offering expanded weekend service on Route 104 to the College Park Metro from central campus beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday mornings. One of the major complaints of bus riders within the campus community was the lack of weekend bus service from campus to College Park Metro Station on the Green Line. Buses would not leave Stamp Student Union on Saturday and Sunday mornings until after 12:00 noon.

With the extra hours of bus service, students will now be able to travel to DC for jobs or weekend activities via the Shuttle-UM bus and Metrorail earlier than previously made possible. Likewise, those wishing to visit College Park traveling from elsewhere in the DC Metro area on weekend mornings can now do so. Rethink College Park applauds the move as a way for DOTS to better facilitate access between campus and Downtown DC during the weekend morning hours. The full Fall 2007 schedule for the route can be found here. (PDF)

In addition to the Shuttle-UM Route 104, several other public bus lines run along Campus Drive to the Metro Station. The Metrobus (red, white, and blue buses) Routes C8, J4, F8, and the County’s TheBus Route 17 all provide service. Particularly during evenings or weekends, one of these buses may come before the Shuttle-UM bus. Metrobus costs $1.25, or $.35 with a transfer (automatic with a SmarTrip Card) and TheRide costs $.75. This is the best map we could find of the routes, if riding a route for the first time you can double-check with the driver to ensure you’re on the right bus. Links to all these transit services are always under “transit” on the right side of the page.

Last night, university officials and their development partner Foulger-Pratt/Argo Investment launched what will be a comprehensive public input process for the East Campus project, the University’s plan to create 2,000 units of student market rate housing (Including designated graduate student housing), 400,000 square feet of retail including a grocery store, hotel, and office building along Route One. Here’s how the process has been organized:

• An East Campus Community Steering Committee has been created. Although we do not have a list of the steering committee members, they include representatives from College Park’s civic associations, the city, county government, and elected officials. To our knowledge there are only three students on the committee.
• In a series of 4 (possibly 5) Steering Committee public meetings, community members will hear and have a chance to comment on almost all facets of the project.
• Separately, SGA President Andrew Friedson has organized a Student Advisory Committee with a variety of student representatives. They will meet with University officials on the same days as the steering committee.

Here is the schedule of Steering Committee public meetings. All meetings will take place from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. in Marie Mount Room 0100. The topics discussed will include Uses and Market Feasibility, Transportation and Parking, Financing and Land Use, Discussion and Conclusion. We are awaiting the exact schedule.

September 4 - Existing Site, Relocations, Environmental Stewardship
September 20 - Uses and Market Feasibility
October 8 - Transportation and parking
October 22 - Economic Impact, Financing, Land Use and Design
October 29 - Overall consensus building and conclusion

Several additional details about the project were revealed yesterday. The plans revealed last spring have remained largely unchanged, however it seems the university will need extensive cooperation from city officials (including possibly financing). The moderator of the meeting was noted Washington attorney Robert Peck, who admitted he had been retained by the university to craft last year’s Request for Proposals. Peck’s long resume includes stints as Sen. Patrick Moynihan’s chief of staff, heading the General Service Administration’s Public Buildings Service under President Clinton, and time as president of the Washington Board of Trade. Also, University officials hope to stick to the schedule discussed last year: finalize the project design by the end of the year, break ground on relocating existing facilities next spring, and open the first housing by Fall 2010.

The images come from the presentation Foulger-Pratt/Argo Investment has been giving at community meetings. Over the summer they have posted several slides including a list of the retail tenants already contacted about coming to the project. We strongly encourage community members to review the slides closely.

RTCP Editor Rob Goodspeed just posted an insightful and sweeping article about the future of urban planning and how blogs like this could help facilitate a robust broad-based public dialogue to bring about true urban change. The article is posted to Planetizan - a blog which Rob contributes to monthly. The post is a must read:

“City Building the American Way“

A new website designed to assess the walkability of neighborhoods has been causing a buzz on the web lately. Designed to calculate “the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc” the site combines data gleaned from Google into one easy-to-understand score ranging from 0 to 100. Under 20 is “driving only,” around 50 has “some walkable locations” and over 90 is a “walker’s paradise.”

Plugging in a few addresses, it seems College Park’s scores range quite widely by neighborhood but none are very good. The University View got 52, City Hall 77, and South Commons 66. Some quick searching shows other well-known college towns generally rate much higher, often at or near 100. My old address in Ann Arbor got 98. Also, Silver Spring, Bethesda, Georgetown, and Dupont Circle all receive scores near 100.

What is your home’s walk score?

> WalkScore.com

In this article we draw attention back to a concern aired in a previous post. Many citizens have spoken up for the Cafritz’s to keep their property undeveloped, or to not pursue changing existing zoning to accommodate mixed use. Up to the second (previous) round of meetings at the end of June, the development team had not adequately addressed these concerns to the public at large. However at the latest meetings those concerns were addressed head-on by the development team.

The Cafritz’s acknowledged that not everyone in the community supports development that is mixed-use. In explaining their choice for mixed-use over other development styles, they claim that they have received more positive than negative support for their mixed-use project. They purport that their development will abate an under-served market.

To demonstrate that the Riverdale and surrounding area market is under-served, the development team cited these comparative statistics from the Washington Post: In DC there are 24 square feet of retail space per capita, and one grocer per 9,700 people. In Riverdale there are 15.8 square feet of retail space per capita and one grocer per 18,000 people. Riverdale’s figures are less than half the national average and are clearly deficient when compared to DC. Cafritz Property development would conceivably close that gap by some amount by serving the local market. All concerned parties will not be appeased by the Cafritz’s answer for mixed-use development. But we commend the developer nonetheless for stepping up and explaining their reasons this time around.

It is worthwhile to note that comparing the Riverdale area to DC and national market averages assumes that DC and the nation as a whole are efficiently served by their retail markets. For example, are DC’s 24 square feet of retail space per capita all truly necessary? Could better planning reduce that figure while maintaining or even improving DC’s consumer utility from its retail market? Such planning is necessary in today’s age of urban sprawl, abandoned strip malls, and vanishing green space.