"Mall people" and Montgomery County's downtowns

Development

"Mall people" and Montgomery County's downtowns

by David Alpert • July 2, 2008 10:57 am

Imagine, DC reimagines Langley Park with a stronger street grid, a transit center for the Purple Line and buses. Could Langley Park, like Silver Spring, transform from a depressed, sprawly, and mostly low-income set of strip malls into a desirable and more diverse destination?

Rockville Town Square.

On the other hand, maybe Downtown Silver Spring isn't quite the model we want to emulate. Closely related to yesterday's neighborhood retail discussion, Just Up the Pike talks about why every walkable "downtown" in Montgomery County (like Rockville Town Square or Downtown Silver Spring) is like a mall.

In Rockville, outside of the immediate Town Square area, it's single-family homes for miles around. Only mall stores will draw people from a huge radius, and only stores that draw so many people can pay the rents required to construct a brand-new town center. White Oak Shopping Center manages to sustain independently-owned and neighborhood-serving stores, JUTP explains, thanks to greater residential density around the center. But as White Oak is lower-income and higher-crime, Rockville isn't going to start emulating White Oak real soon.

Over time, perhaps the areas adjacent to these regional "downtowns" will become denser, adding to the potential customer base for the area and enabling smaller and more locally-serving stores to survive. But those plans run afoul of residents in those adjacent neighborhoods, who will use political organizing and historic preservation laws to fight them, as at Falkland Chase.

"Town centers" are a good step toward smarter growth, but they're not going to create real neighborhoods unless we allow them to become kernels seeding larger, walkable cities. Then we can build whole townhouses or large apartments for families, studios for recent college graduates, and everything in between. The alternative—more and more residential sprawl and colossal gasoline bills—is a road to ruin, not to mention a sure recipe for nothing but chain-filled malls.

4 comments — Share	— tags: density, historic preservation, Maryland, Montgomery, retail, Rockville, Silver Spring

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Comments

As I'm sure you and readers of this blog well understand, it's not just about density around the suburban retail centers. I think downtown Silver Spring is actually quite dense -- perhaps even more so than say, Mount Pleasant -- with lots of high-rise apartment buildings within a 1/2 mile of the shopping center. But a 1/2 mile away in the suburbs isn't the same as 1/2 mile away in a city neighborhood, because in Silver Spring with roads like East-West Highway and Colesville Road, the walk is unpleasant and possibly unsafe (although there are sidewalks). I'm not sure how they could improve the situation there.

by Lauren on Jul 2, 2008 6:31 pm

I would like to point out that downtown Silver Spring has a lot more to it than Silver Plaza. Venture down Georgia and Fenton streets and you have a very walkable area (forget the fact that Georgia Avenue is six lanes wide) full of diverse restaurants, shops, and services. My mother lives on East-West Highway and can walk to two grocery stores, a diner, a couple clothing stores, and a slew of coffee shops. I'm not saying Silver Spring is perfect, but the only "Mall" area is between those two blocks of Ellsworth. And at least that area does a good job of getting people to explore the other walkable areas.

by Dave Murphy on Jul 2, 2008 7:37 pm

The problem is one of scale. And impact. The best part of Silver Spring is the area outside of the new part. Great restaurants, local businesses. But the newer parts dwarf that. And look ridiculous next to those wide streets.

Instead of turning things over to one or two developers to master plan the whole thing, build a bunch of "luxury" apartments and condos and attract a bunch of chain stores (to justify their upfront costs), we need to turn master planning over to the city. To rezone for density, but also zone for more insertion into available spaces, filling parking lots and underutilized spaces with buildings with smaller footprints and more reasonable heights. At the same time, effort needs to be put into the streetscape -- narrowing roads, planting trees, and adding more crosswalks.

There also needs to be a preference to existing uses and current tenants. Silver Spring is soulless in its newest forms. Just as Arlington killed what was interesting and unique about it by over building. And building too much and too big at one time.

Just plopping down some huge development at once, negatively affects the character of the neighborhood, and prevents the kinds of slow evolution that make interesting and unique urban environments.

by Christopher on Jul 4, 2008 2:38 pm

I am a hue fan of the "fake downtown." You have to start somewhere, no?

by Aaron on Jul 10, 2008 2:59 pm