Rethink College Park

Based on the proceedings at the Purple Line meeting last night, we demand that the University retract its request for the reconsideration of the Stadium Drive alignment (which they themselves allowed to be dropped long ago). This request is a waste of public funds and demonstrates their continuing disregard for the MTA’s planning process. The University must work more cooperatively with MTA and their ongoing refusal to allow the East Campus developer to meet with MTA planners is completely incomprehensible. Their approach to the Purple Line goes against everything the community should expect of a upstanding public institution. Our faith in them is badly shaken by this debacle and to continue this make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach will only further degrade the University’s reputation.

We’ve been to few public meetings as productive as MD Transit Administration’s (MTA) Purple Line Focus group meeting last night. For the first time, the vast majority of the stakeholders for the College Park portion of the project were in one place at one time to hear one message from the MTA. That message was that the MTA strongly prefers routing the Purple Line along Campus Drive with a stop in front of the Student Union over UMD’s newly proposed alternative on North Campus along Stadium Drive. Unlike the several top-level university officials present (all with the same ridiculously simplistic talking points in hand) the MTA project team had a coherent and strong argument to route the transit project in the most accessible location. Their arguments very closely matched those we made yesterday in the Diamondback.

—> VIEW THE MTA’S SLIDES (PDFs)—#1 and #2

The single biggest concern for University officials seems to be whether the transitway would act as a barrier to pedestrian movement across Campus Drive. This argument fell short at the meeting when it was explained that peak pedestrian activity occurs every 15 minutes during regular school days (with the change of classes) and that since two trains (one in each direction) will come every 12 minutes during peak hours, many times trains won’t even be crossing campus during peak pedestrian times. To further debunk pedestrian concerns, the MTA pointed out that the current situation, with unrestricted automobile access, is far more dangerous for pedestrians. With the closure of the road to automobiles (planned anyway in the Campus Master Plan) and the replacement of several bus lines by the Purple Line, how is it that a light rail traveling at 10-12 mph across campus more dangerous than the status quo?

The second major line of argument from the university is that Stadium Drive is relatively close and that transit riders will not be greatly inconvenienced by the extra walk. This argument certainly overlooks the fact that Stadium Drive is largely disconnected from central campus by sports practice fields that already make walking to classes from underclassmen dorms on North Campus an unbelievable chore. If the University is so sure Stadium Drive is convenient perhaps they should start moving every single Shuttle UM route off Campus Drive to that roadway. Their suggestion to shift the Purple Line north to Stadium Drive is equally preposterous! To be effective, transit must go where people are and where they need to be, not relegated to the side.

An interesting discussion was sparked by RTCP Co-editor Rob Goodspeed during the Q&A. When he asked about the supposed need for a 130 ft Right-of-way (50 ft for the Purple Line supposedly) within the East Campus project, the MTA responded “We don’t know where that came from.” A discussion ensued between Richard Perlmutter from the East Campus Development team and MTA. It turns out the 130 ft Right-of-way was completely bogus (as well as the developer’s claim that that alignment would impinge on the engineering fields). Therefore there is now not one legitimate reason to route the project around rather than through the East Campus Development. Rob was vindicated,

Today our response to Dr. Mote’s op-ed where he advocates for a non-central campus Purple Line is running in the Diamondback. We highly encourage everyone to attend the Purple Line focus group meeting today at 7 p.m. in the University Visitor Center.

>> “Purple Push“, Diamondback, 10/29

We were pleased to read university President Dan Mote’s Oct. 25 editorial titled “Support for the right location,” in which he ended nearly six months of his administration’s silence on the proposed Purple Line. The university administration now deems a street level (at-grade) campus crossing of the proposed rail line as inevitable for cost reasons. This new position is exactly what we and other student leaders advocated for in an April 25 letter to Mote urging him to accept the realities of federal funding requirements. Now that the tunneling issue is behind us, we can focus on finding the best at-grade campus crossing.

Unfortunately, rather than supporting the Maryland Transit Administration’s (MTA) preferred alignment on Campus Drive with a stop in front of the Stamp Student Union, Mote is now advocating for an at-grade route on North Campus along Stadium Drive. The MTA already considered and dropped that alignment some years back, and Mote’s new position continues to work against a multi-year, multi-million dollar public planning process. Much of his reasoning for opposing the Campus Drive alignment is based on an unsupportable knee-jerk reaction and demonstrates a continuing lack of coordination with MTA:

1. Mote claims campus plans call for Campus Drive to become a “major pedestrian walking mall” and that turning the road into a “dedicated transit way” would go against the university Master Plan’s stated goal of promoting “unimpeded [pedestrian] movement across campus.” Mote should have provided the full sentence from the Master Plan: “reduce the number of automobiles on campus and eliminate vehicle congestion to the extent possible while promoting unimpeded movement across the campus.” To rephrase: We want to move people, not cars. Indeed, the Master Plan does call for closing Campus Drive to cars, but not for a pedestrian walking mall as Mote suggests. The purpose of the planned closure is to better facilitate busses, which currently have trouble traversing the heavily congested roadway. The Purple Line would go one step further by replacing several bus lines that currently compete with pedestrians on the road.

2. Mote has legitimate concerns about light rail and pedestrian compatibility along the Purple Line, but personal views are not a substitute for careful study. There are dozens of examples nationally and internationally, including on other college campuses, where light rail succeeds in heavily pedestrian environments without safety concerns. Many of these projects are in far more densely populated areas with as many or more pedestrian crossings per day. The MTA has already produced studies and campus renderings to make this case and they need proper consideration. Similarly, we also believe the best Purple Line route for East Campus development is MTA’s preferred alternative through, not around, that project.

3. Mote expresses concern over potential aesthetic impacts to the campus were the project to go along Campus Drive. He cites overhead wires, the prospect of a fence and the destruction of the “M” circle as several reasons to locate the project in a less prominent part of the campus. The importance of these aesthetic concerns pale in comparison to the benefits of a more central Purple Line stop, but they are still worth addressing. A federally funded project of this nature would bring millions of dollars to the university in the form of streetscape improvements and mitigation funds. We can expect to see new sidewalks, signalized crosswalks, street treatments, landscaping and maybe even a bikeway running along the transitway. Were a fence to be necessary along any portion of the right-of-way, it would be a short one designed to discourage non-crosswalk pedestrian crossings. MTA mitigation plans already call for moving the “M” circle slightly to accommodate the Purple Line.

The Purple Line is the greatest single opportunity to correct the mistake of putting the Metro Green Line more than a mile from the center of campus. That decision, made in the late 1970s and shaped largely by misplaced (and backroom) opposition by top university administrators at the time, was hugely detrimental to the university community. Our only concern is that the university administration is now compounding past mistakes with present ones. To do so without full comprehension of what they are doing is the worst kind of irony.

We encourage everyone with a stake in these decisions to attend the MTA’s Purple Line focus group meeting tonight at 7 p.m. in the university visitor center and become engaged in a broader campus conversation about the best way to route the project.

The Maryland Transit Administration will present information this Monday about where the Purple Line could go on campus when the light rail link is constructed between Bethesda and New Carrollton. The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 29 in the University Visitor Center. We strongly encourage everyone interested in the future of the Purple Line to attend.

The meeting comes amid increased conversation about the proper location of the train in relation to East Campus and the larger campus. After months of insisting the trains should travel under Campus along Campus Drive as a tunnel, President Dan Mote has come out with a new, forceful position in an article in the Diamondback yesterday: he strongly supports the line at street level (at-grade), but along the university’s newly invented alignment that uses stadium Stadium Drive instead of stopping in front of the Student Union. Readers will remember that together with other student leaders, we pressured the administration last spring to re-think their insistence on an infeasible tunnel and champion the project. While we’re glad Mote has accepted the inevitability of an at-grade alignment, we think Mote’s recent column distorts both the character of Light Rail technology and the campus master plan (which in fact argues Campus Drive should contain public transit). Among the misconceptions and thinly supported opinions the article contains is the allegation it cannot bisect East Campus because it requires a 130-foot right of way.

During a detailed presentation to the East Campus Steering Committee on Monday, I showed how Light Rail technology could fit into streets as narrow as 35 feet. Indeed, Salt Lake City has built a system on streets with four lanes of traffic and two 10-foot sidewalks on a right-of-way just over 100 feet.

President Mote’s strategy of privately determining where he believes the line should go and entering the public forum demanding we support the “right” location makes a mockery of good leadership. The university is a large, complex institution with thousands of people who rely heavily on transit. The “right” location can only be determined through a robust dialogue with engineers based on hard facts about the true width, noise, and trade-offs required by various locations on campus. We will continue to address the full nature of the impact of the project on campus and advocate for solutions that maximize the benefit to the University and the region.

It has been about 6 months since the issue of student housing really exploded in College Park and anyone (ourselves included) would have had a hard time predicting what has taken place since that time. What started off with hundreds of rising seniors losing their on-campus housing in April has progressed - or regressed rather - to over a thousand students potentially losing housing next school year (now with rising juniors thrown into the mix).

During the school facilities fee waiver controversy last year, when local leaders were proposing a massive cut to an incentive for the construction of privately owned student housing projects in the city, we proclaimed that there was “No End in Sight” to the housing crunch. At the same time we harshly criticized leaders for trying to limit the incentive to the Knox Box and Northgate Area - areas of the city which development seemed like a distant dream and non-student housing free-for-all respectively. These days, the Knox Box redevelopment is moving along ever so slowly, but Janet Firth has made a couple big moves since April. The Northgate area at the time was already almost completely proposed for luxury hotels and high end condominiums. The condo market flopped, the support for a TIF for Mark Vogel’s Hilton Hotel project evaporated, and nearly every other project in the area is now marred by financial/regulatory difficulties that make low and mid-rise rental/designated student housing a nearly forgone conclusion. Developers are literally falling over themselves to propose student housing after all the fuss last spring. Many of these projects we are compelled to keep under our hat for the time being, but we count 7 potential or proposed projects without even including East Campus, a Knox Box redevelopment, or any on-campus housing.

The University is proposing some token student housing on South Campus, but we think the importance of on-campus housing is being far overplayed by the Diamondback. Indeed, public-private partnerships like South Campus Commons are riddled with problems and make for especially poor forms of urbanism because they seperate students from present and future activity centers. We aren’t denying the need more traditional dormitories for underclassmen. One hasn’t been built in decades. That being said, a substantial increase in private off-campus housing could bring vacancy rates up from abysmally low levels and bring rents all over College Park back within reach. All this could be achieved without any financial contribution from UMD.

The Diamondback should stop perpetuating the myth that the root cause of the housing crunch is an increase in the UMD’s enrollment. To do so is the most inaccurate, simplistic, and irresponsible form of journalism that they have yet bestowed upon College Park. The housing crunch is fundamentally driven by a change in preferences among students (especially freshmen). People are opting for on-campus housing only because they are increasingly choosing to live closer to campus and the only decent, affordable housing is on-campus. How can enrollment be the deciding factor in the housing crunch if it has stayed roughly constant for the past 20 years?

Senator Rosapepe’s continuing bull in a china shop politics in regards to this matter is only damaging relationships, causing confusion, and accomplishing nothing. The University cannot fully build its way out of this problem and have enough land to achieve its academic mission for the next 150 years. Despite the senator’s continued insistence that land is the limiting factor for private student housing projects, the city is awash in developable land and developers are finally stepping forward knowing student housing projects can succeed off campus. To legislate our way out of this mess without careful consideration of the situation is to legislate Route 1 into another 15 years of big plans and no action.

The Hilton Hotel is out and a mixed use 700 bed (250 parking space) student housing project is in. Mark Vogel’s architect easily lived up to their last work (pictured just below) for the site when the developer proposed this project to the city council earlier this month. According to a Diamondback article, Vogel plans to have a solid sit down restaurant on the ground floor. The city was receptive to the designs although they voiced a strong desire for LEED certification for the project. The parking ratio seems very appropriate for such a close location to campus and the type of tenant…

The Hilton project failed after county support for Tax Increment Financing (TIF) evaporated. Presumably this was because the county is expecting to use multipe TIFs for East Campus - a project which is widely expected to have it’s own hotel within a stone’s throw of Vogel’s project site.

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 by a “student focus group” between graduate and undergraduate students and university officials.

While we have published several items related to the project, I thought it was time for a summary of some of the news that has been discussed at these meetings. Most of the supporting documents have been posted to the East Campus website, and offer a variety of additional information.

Two issues were discussed at the previous (October 8th) meeting about transportation. First, several members of the committee strongly opposed vehicular connections between Old Town and the East Campus project. As I described in a previous post, I believe these streets should be open and strategies used elsewhere to control traffic would alleviate resident’s fears. Second, Foulger-Pratt announced they wanted to design the project choosing the Paint Branch Alignment for the Purple Line. The Maryland Transit Administration’s preferred light rail route is straight through the project, the location that makes the most sense from a planning point of view. The route through the project has been assumed in all the discussions previous to this month. We strongly feel the reasons cited by Foulger-Pratt are not satisfactory and will present a full description of why after Monday’s meeting.

Here’s a summary of some of the most germane issues discussed. All of this is subject to change.

City Demands
The “city” (it is unknown who precisely this means) has submitted a letter with requirements for the project to the University and the developer. This document has not been made public, making it difficult for us to evaluate the nature of the requests. It seems clear the project will need some type of public financing (such as a TIF) and will need city approval and support.

Parking
The parking garages will be embedded within blocks where possible. While they had released graphics showing precise numbers of spaces, they declined to discuss them at last week’s meeting saying they wanted to wait until the traffic study had been completed. The developers are negotiating with county officials about the scope of the traffic study they will complete.

Housing
Specifically for graduate students, the project will include 75 units of 2 bedroom graduate housing priced at $900 per person, and 75 units containing five bedrooms that will rent at $650 per person. This is similar to was it required by the RFP. In total, the project will contain roughly 2,000 units of housing, all rental, although not designed specifically for undergraduates. This housing will be priced at “market rate.”

Retail Mix
The “anchor tenants” at the project include roughly 175,000 square feet of retail. They are a movie theater (now perhaps replaced by the Birchmere Theater), a gym, book store, and grocery store. The preferred grocer mentioned is Whole Foods. There will also be a childcare center for children under 3 years old. Other tenants will include a variety of restaurants, neighborhood retail, and destination retail. There will be no bars in the project.

Other Considerations
The project will be under the jurisdiction of the UMD police. The developer has committed to a LEED Silver standard, although hedged about whether they would commit to applying to the USGBC for the official certification.

As the East Campus Redevelopment Project moves through the public participation process, it is valuable to look at how other universities have integrated mixed-use facilities into their campuses. This is the second post in that series.

In August of 2003, Georgia Tech completed the much anticipated Technology Square project. This redevelopment effort was in keeping with Georgia Tech’s motto: “Progress and Service.” This campus expansion marked a paradigm shift in the way that Georgia Tech saw itself physically within the greater Atlanta community.

Historical Perspective
In the 1950s the Georgia Department of Highways constructed a six-lane freeway through the center of the city. This freeway, which would eventually carry Interstates 75 and 85, became a barrier between Tech and the dense urban neighborhood of Midtown to the east. It caused the neighborhoods on both sides to accelerate their decline in status. This decline had started with the construction of Techwood Homes, America’s first public housing project, just south of the Georgia Tech campus in 1937. Due to the barrier that the Interstate posed to both automotive and pedestrian traffic moving east-west through Atlanta, Georgia Tech’s campus expanded westward becoming, essentially, a suburban campus located in an urban environment. With the surrounding neighborhoods continuing to decline through the 1960s and 1970s, Georgia Tech cut itself off from the surrounding cityscape with tall fences and an inward orientation. The widening of the Interstate to 15 lanes in the mid-1980s worsened the division even though the Midtown neighborhood was finally beginning to become a sought-after address.

The opening of Tech Square in time for Fall Semester classes in 2003 was the first time in five decades that Georgia Tech had expanded to the east, and this shift was more than geographic; it was symbolic. By turning abandoned buildings and surface parking lots into hip sidewalk cafes and classroom space, Georgia Tech was breaking through the barriers surrounding it and committing itself to the redevelopment of Atlanta.

The Project
The Tech Square project is centered on Fifth Street, which is a major campus artery bisecting campus into northern and southern halves. It stretches for two blocks from the Interstate toward Midtown, ending at West Peachtree Street. It is linked to the main campus by an improved Fifth Street with wide sidewalks, bus stop turnouts, and bike lanes. The Georgia Department of Transportation completed work on the new Fifth Street bridge in the Winter of 2006-07, creating a new park above the Interstate on either side of Fifth. The Tech Trolley was instituted to link the main campus with Tech Square, and service on the route continues to the Midtown MARTA (Metro-type subway) Station. These shuttles run every 8 minutes throughout the day.

The development itself includes a new campus for the College of Management, the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, the Economic Development Institute, the Georgia Tech Bookstore, and a privately-owned office building. The entire area, which currently takes up three square blocks, includes street-level retail and is now one of the busiest parts of campus. This expansion of campus has proven popular not only with students, but also with office workers in nearby Midtown skyscrapers and local condo-dwellers.

Most shocking from an Atlanta perspective is the project’s pedestrian friendliness. Tech Square won the prestigious “Golden Shoe” award for pedestrian design in 2003. Wide sidewalks exist throughout the project, which also includes on-street parking and bike lanes. A large parking deck is wrapped by buildings to disguise it from the street. This deck will eventually allow for the demolition of older decks on the main campus.

Another part of the paradigm shift which has been signified by Tech Square is Georgia Tech’s commitment to the environment. Starting with the College of Management Building, all new construction on the Georgia Tech campus will be LEED certified. By reconnecting and redeveloping the surrounding neighborhood, Georgia Tech has begun to encourage walking and transit ridership (the nearest MARTA subway station, North Avenue, is only two blocks away at Third Street). Tech has also begun to incorporate urban-style campus elements to its traditional suburban feel (despite being only two miles from the city center). The LEED certification is just the most quantitative example of this new commitment. Georgia Tech has long prided itself on being a leader in the community, and with Tech Square, it has made a large step forward.

Missed Opportunities
Perhaps the biggest flaw of the project was the lack of housing. While the Hotel and College of Management keep the area busy during the day and into the evening, most shops close by 10 p.m. and afterwards the district is quite still. Tech could have kept Tech Square alive later and worked on its housing crunch by constructing dormitories on Fifth. Instead, the Institute chose to move the residential center of campus further south by purchasing the Georgia State University Village across North Avenue from Tech. There is still one parcel which has not been developed, and it could be residential in nature when construction occurs, but no plans have yet been made.

Why it Matters to Maryland
Technology Square is quite different from the proposed East Campus redevelopment in many aspects, but it also has many similarities. The biggest similarity is the demonstration of the University’s commitment to the community. College Park has long been host to UM, but this project has the potential to show that both parties realize how bound their futures are in each other. The East Campus redevelopment, like Tech Square, will help to reconnect the University symbolically and physically with the city of College Park. It will also provide a stronger physical link with the Metro station just as Tech Square did with MARTA. Most importantly, the East Campus redevelopment will bring students to College Park who otherwise wouldn’t have been there, and it will bring citizens of College Park to campus who otherwise would have never had the opportunity to interact with the campus. This project is about more than redevelopment; it’s about reconnecting two communities with a commitment to prosper together.

(Fawna Xiao of the University of Maryland is ready for the next round of visitors at the 2007 Solar Decathlon on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 15. The Maryland team took second place in the architecture portion of the competition. Credit: Kaye Evans-Lutterodt/Solar Decathlon)

The U.S. Department of Energy inaugurated its biennial Solar Decathlon on Friday, bringing online a neighborhood of twenty solar-powered houses on the National Mall. The University of Maryland School of Architecture’s entry, the LEAFHouse (interior pictured above), already picked up second place in the architecture contest, which compared the houses on firmness, utility, and delight. (Ironically, though the competition highlights new technology, the architectural criteria are derived from three ancient Roman architecture principles).

The decathlon will judge the houses in nine more categories, the results of which will be tabulated on Friday, October 19. A quick tour of the house today proved that environmentally conscious architecture can also be beautiful.

Though the school’s 2005 entry was sadly scrapped after the competition, we certainly hope this year’s superb entry will return home to College Park intact for for public display and enjoyment.

Website: Department of Energy Solar Decathlon
Schedule: The Solar Decathlon houses are open for public tours through Saturday:

• 11 am - 3 pm on weekdays (all houses will be closed Wednesday).
• 10 am - 5 pm on Saturday.

Location: On the National Mall, south of the Museum of Natural History, north of the Smithsonian Castle.
Metro: Smithsonian