Development
"Mall people" and Montgomery County's downtowns
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
David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater. 
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by Lauren on Jul 2, 2008 6:31 pm • link • report
by Dave Murphy on Jul 2, 2008 7:37 pm • link • report
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 • link • report
by Aaron on Jul 10, 2008 2:59 pm • link • report
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