Posts about Smart Growth

At-large, Clark Ray and Shadow Senator Michael D. Brown are both challenging incumbent Phil Mendelson. I really appreciate Mr. Ray's strong defense of Smart Growth, streetcars and more, though he didn't really bring these issues to the forefront until recently. Also, despite talking with him a few times and asking questions on a TV debate, I haven't come away with a really strong case for where he would show definitive leadership in controversial situations.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mendelson is a smart, capable, and honest councilmember who's been strong on the environment and a staunch defender of civil liberties and champion of same-sex marriage. His civil liberty stances have often led him to oppose crime legislation, and while public safety must be a priority, it's good to have someone asking questions like "is this Constitutional?" to keep the government from overstepping its bounds. But he's also a curmudgeon who tends to oppose changes to the city, like the aforementioned Giant and streetcars moving ahead on any kind of speedy timetable.

The contributors have generally come down on the side of Mr. Mendelson, mostly on the basis of his other good work on many issues outweighing his more obstructionist actions on a few specific points (and on which he has generally lost). Today's Post poll showing Shadow Senator Michael D. Brown in the lead is another good argument to tip the scales. That Mr. Brown has not made any compelling case for being a Councilmember, but most of his support comes from confusion between him and current at-large Councilmember Michael A. Brown.

Unfortunately, the ballot will only say "Michael Brown," a very poor decision by the Board of Elections and Ethics. Therefore, I actually hope Mr. Ray will ultimately encourage his supporters to vote for Mr. Mendelson. It's very likely that there will be a special election soon for the at-large seat held by Kwame Brown, and so Mr. Ray would make a strong contender for that election. (In fact, some have speculated that this was really his game plan all along, and Vincent Orange's too.)

I'll cover the races for Council Chair and Wards 1 and 5 in a subsequent post.

Education
Delegate Sol Gutierrez emphasized that she has a constructive working relationship with the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA) that dates back to her time serving on the Board of Education in the early 1990's. Ana and her three sons all received a quality public education in Montgomery County. She first ran for the school board because she saw that the county was experiencing demographic changes.

When she returned to the county in the early 1980's after living five years in South America, she was dismayed because it appeared that two different school systems were emerging, based on changing demographics. She looked at the available data and noticed that an achievement gap was developing in parts of the county. When the MCEA was informed of the data, they began collaborating together to implement an educational vision.

Ana recalled that the disposition of the Board of Education during her first term and her second term were very different. The Board during her second term "was very anti-union." Ana worked to focus the anti-union sentiments on improving the processes related to teacher development and evaluation. She said, "If we wanted to improve education, we had to work with the teachers.

The MCEA was a good partner, very collaborative and very progressive." They designed a process where teachers would be given ongoing support and training. If a teacher was judged to need performance improvement, they would be given professional development along with a defined timeline for improvement and standardized expectations. While working with the MCEA, she noted "in many ways, they were more forward thinking than the board."

Delegate Sol Gutierrez's education accomplishments at the state level have included the passage of legislation that more accurately defines the graduation rate, years before the federal government did. Her future education initiatives include extending the mandatory attendance age as a means to reduce the drop-out rates among minority students. Such an extension would include provisions for a system of interventions and enrichment classes to support the higher attendance age. She also favors legislation that would track, report, and intervene with primary school students with low attendance. Poor attendance in elementary school is often a precursor of low academic achievement and with dropping out in high school.

Economy
Because Delegate Sol Gutierrez serves on the House Appropriations Committee, she is acutely aware of the critical economic circumstances that the state and country are currently in. One of the country's ongoing economic problems that is holding back recovery is that banks are refusing to lend to small businesses. The large national banks (the Too-Big-to-Fails) all have large non-performing loans on their balance sheets. Therefore, they are reluctant to lend to any commercial entities except the biggest of big business. However, a few small banks took the kind of risks that the Too-Big-to-Fails took. They simply aren't big enough to cover the gap that the anemic national banks left. Ana sees potential for Maryland to create a special fund to incentivize the solvent, more agile, in-state community banks to increase small business lending.

Because of the ongoing Great Recession, Ana is also pushing for major revisions to established economic projection methodologies. I agree completely. Many economic systems behave differently when an economy is in a liquidity trap. Under normal economic circumstances, if the Federal Reserve maintained (effectively) zero percent interest rates for two years, we would experience very high inflation. The fact that this hasn't happened further bolsters the need to revise inflation and budgetary projection methodologies to incorporate current conditions, along with irregular business growth and investment behaviors.

Purple Line
When I asked Ana how she came to be a champion of the Purple Line, she replied, "The Purple Line embodies what I understand to be social justice." Just like the Metro, it will provide quality transit for all, regardless of socio-economic status. "I understand what it's like for a single parent to have to get up at 5am to catch a bus, then catch another bus to get to work on time… while a child has to wait for a school bus alone." She continued, "We have a two-tiered transportation system right now. The Purple Line will be a major step in creating a high-quality transportation system for all."

Ana also recognizes that the Purple Line will be among the most efficient and competitive light rail project in the United States. When it comes to cost-per-rider metrics, the project scores very well, mainly due to high expected ridership.

She also emphasizes the environmental benefits of smart growth, such as focusing new growth around transit stations inside the beltway rather than bulldozing thousands of acres of old growth forest to create new car-dependent exurban subdivisions.

Our experiences around the Washington region have taught us that opening a Metro station has the potential to completely change the local economic systems, provided that the government and landowners take advantage of their infrastructure investment. However, the Gazette article shows that the investment in transit is not being leveraged:

With a new high-end apartment and condominium complex being built on Layhill Road, the raising of Georgia Avenue over Randolph Road and the move of the fire station to the Glenmont Metro, where a new, 12-floor parking garage is being built, residents are holding out hope that a sparkling new shopping center could be just a few years away.

One can't emphasize enough that an elevated highway and a walkable neighborhood in the same space are mutually exclusive things. If you only plan for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. That is just as true in Glenmont as it is anywhere else.

The landowners of the Glenmont Shopping Center appear to be far less business savvy and enlightened than the coalition of landowners who cooperated to plan for the recently passed White Flint Sector Plan that envisions a new human-scale town. It appears from the article, that there is none of that kind of cooperation going on in Glenmont:

Karen Durbin, the manager of Arcade Florist, has been selling flowers to shoppers since 1969. When asked how the shopping center has evolved over the years, she laughed as a co-worker slowly dropped a thumbs-down.

"The problem here is that there's a lot of different landlords, and they don't cohesively get together, Durbin said. "...Major renovations? The only thing I ever see them do is work on the parking lot."

As more and more new projects are completed in the immediate area that leverage their proximity to the Metro, the Glenmont Shopping Center will become more and more of a weight around the neck of revitalization.

If the shopping center gets a street grid as a result of a suburban-to-urban retrofit, there will be more connectivity with the surrounding small streets like in the White Flint Sector Plan. People living within walking distance of amenities in a new mixed-use development adjacent to the Metro will contribute to reversing the whirlpool of induced demand.

If the demand for road space could be better managed, Montgomery County wouldn't have to build the overpass for Randolph road over Georgia Avenue. (Sadly, the county DOT's Level of Service traffic metrics will always recommend building more roads.) The county would get tax revenue from redevelopment because walkable urbanism has more billable floor space per unit land area, and also a smaller road bill. I wonder why no one thought of it, despite the fact that it has already been done within Montgomery County in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and soon White Flint.

Montgomery is very lucky that the landowners in the White Flint Sector Plan area are forward-thinking enough to cooperate to improve environmental sustainability while increasing their long term profits. Clearly, the county is not as lucky in Glenmont. I have never met the landowners of the Glenmont Shopping Center. I do not know how they view their commercial rental property. However, I do know that any profit-seeking private business is motivated by improvements to their own bottom line. They stand to make a fortune in either redeveloping their property as a mixed-use town or by selling it to someone who will. The article in the Gazette demonstrates a lack of vision in the area. However, the county needs to provide zoning and planning support to make something happen.

Developers are profit-seeking businesses just like any other. It is up to the citizenry, through its elected officials in government, to set up a business environment that incentivizes developers to do the right thing. The landowners in White Flint had to jump through hoops to do the right thing. The status quo will not produce more transit-oriented, sustainable, human-scale towns. We can do better than dreaming of a more sparkly 1960's era strip mall flanked by a Metro station on one side and an overpass on the other. That's just putting lipstick on a pig. The opportunity costs are too high to waste the investment of the Glenmont Metro station.

The FTA's New Starts program receives a very small fraction of the federal transportation budget, which mostly consists of gas tax receipts. The gas tax was conceived as a mechanism to have motorists pay for road costs. A car owner has to buy gasoline in order to use the roads. As more roads were built, more motorists drove more miles. The government then used the higher gas tax receipts to build more roads, causing higher gas tax receipts, etc. It was a very intelligent system when it was conceived. The gas tax's purpose was to provide funding for roads. It was never meant to provide construction money for transit. As long as transit funding is connected to the gas tax, its construction will remain anemic.

Transportation infrastructure (including roads) is not a profitable endeavor in the United States, except for some purely freight uses. The only time in history it was profitable was between the Civil War and World War II. A company would build a streetcar or subway line from a city center to land that was too remote to be worth anything to someone who commuted to work on foot. When streetcar service began, the value of the land surrounding the stations greatly increased because it was then connected to the city center. The streetcar builder would then sell the greatly appreciated land and make a profit. While our remote places are now dozens of miles more remote than they were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, new transit infrastructure can still dramatically increase property values.

The creation of the gas tax was a clever way to repurpose some of the economic activity created by new road infrastructure towards funding roads. Similarly, a better way to fund new transit infrastructure would be to capture some of the new economic activity created by transit. It worked a century ago when done by private companies. It will work in the near future when done by the citizenry through its elected government. In Arlington County, Virginia, 33% of all tax receipts are collected in the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, which takes up only 8% of the county's land area. The positive difference in tax receipts between what the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor now generates compared to what the dying strip malls that used to line the corridor would be generating is immeasurable.

We should set aside a small fraction of all tax receipts from new transit-oriented development into a Transit Trust Fund. There will be more transit-oriented development as more transit is constructed. Tax receipts from new transit-oriented development that go into the Transit Trust Fund would then be used to build more transit. The new transit would then generate more transit-oriented development, further adding to the fund. It will create a positive feedback loop and a snowball effect similar to how the gas tax once filled the Highway Trust Fund. Just as all levels of government were once incentivized to build more roads to increase gas tax receipts so they would have more road money, government would then be incentivized to build a starter transit line so they could increase the money in the Transit Trust Fund, and so on.

Once the Transit Trust Fund becomes large enough, the federal government could start offering to contribute some large fraction of the construction costs towards building transit projects, subject to well-defined metrics. Back in the 20th century, the federal government provided 90% of the funding for the construction of Interstate Highways. Unsurprisingly, lots of Interstates were built over three decades. It is probably not realistic to expect the federal government to be so generous with new transit projects in the near future. A vastly different fiscal situation, combined with higher materials and labor costs implies a different construction timeline. The first decade would be much slower as the fund fills up from the first tax receipts from the first projects that are currently being planned.

Transit-oriented development that has already been built should NOT be subject to the Transit Trust Fund. Most local and state governments around the country are in trying fiscal situations because of the ongoing Great Recession. I doubt that most could afford even the small fraction of tax receipts that would go into the Transit Trust Fund. Rather, I propose that new transit-oriented developments around new transit stations should pay into the Transit Trust Fund. There should be no subtraction from any local government's already tight budget.

The expansion of our road network in the 20th century provided lots of construction contracts, in addition to more economic activity related to building cars and car-dependent sprawl. The Transit Trust Fund would similarly provide decades of transit construction contracts, in addition to more economic activity related to building transit vehicles and transit-oriented development. The former was a novel idea in the mid-20th century. While we now understand that its model of land use is unsustainable, it provided a backbone for economic growth for decades. While the details of the Transit Trust Fund would have to be ironed out in the political process, the model would work on the local, state and/or federal levels. The Transit Trust Fund would incorporate the most successful infrastructure funding strategies of the 20th century and put them towards a sustainable 21st century template for decades-long economic growth.

Gray is also very excited for the potential of "downtown Ward 7," the corner of Minnesota Avenue and Benning Road, to become a walkable hub for the surrounding neighborhoods (complete with streetcars!) His approach and that of Mayor Fenty may differ a bit only in implementation: Gray's approach is to plan then act, while Fenty's Office of the Deputy Mayor seems far more focused in simply closing real estate deals.

Sometimes getting the deal done moves the ball forward more than a plan, but when buildings last for 50 years or more, moving hastily can lock in bad design for a generation. In Ward 7, the Donatelli development at the northwest corner of Minnesota and Benning has shaped up to be a real disappointment even in ways that have little to do with the economy. DMPED chose Donatelli's plan despite community consensus around another bid. DMPED also plunked a parking lot down at 5th and I and totally blew it with the Tenley Library.

On development, Gray's approach will be to create a good plan and hear out all the opponents before moving ahead, while Fenty's approach has been to move ahead without any plans or much listening. Here, both approaches have merit, and I'd give a small edge to Gray's. Perhaps some bold planning and community engagement could have resulted in improvements along the Wisconsin Avenue corridor, where recent development has more often produced a boring low-scale bank rather than anything transformative.

But as one Smart Growth proponent recently pointed out, we are fortunate. We have two candidates who have made a clear commitment to many parts of a Smart Growth vision. They'd implement it with different styles and might focus on different elements, but four years from now, there will be more housing opportunities near commercial corridors and Metro stations regardless of who is Mayor.

Fenty and Gray share a lot of other policy ideas as well. Education reform? Fenty's for it. Gray's for it.

Next: But what about streetcars?

Chris talked about the voluntary public campaign finance legislation that continues to be considered in the General Assembly. A compromise was struck last year which would significantly increase the contribution limits for those who decide to stay in the private funding system. He said that in some respects this compromise would actually make the situation worse since it would allow those who stay in the private system to raise even larger sums of money from lobbyists and political action committees. This compromise would ensure continued special interest control over the legislative process since most if not all of the representatives who control the legislative process would stay in the private system. Chris called the compromise a "cynical bone thrown to first-time candidates."

I pointed out that many challenging candidates employ a strategy of painting themselves as an outsider in a campaign against "the establishment." "How would you keep from falling into the mindset of 'the establishment' that you care currently criticizing?" I asked. Chris pointed out that he has capped his contribution limit at $500. He also emphasized that he is not accepting donations from businesses, political action committees, and Maryland registered lobbyists. Chris said that this will enable him to maintain his independence and passion for innovation in the General Assembly.

District 20 has been a long-time axis for Purple Line support, both among its elected officials and among its voters. Chris emphasized he would be a champion for the Purple Line as an essential part of his smart growth platform. He expressed, "We need to reorient how we think about transportation and planning. We need an efficient [intra-regional] train that is more convenient than driving and also provides economic incentives to use transit." From the conversation, I inferred that Chris understands that planning and transportation go hand-in-hand. If you don't have human-scale walkable urban places to connect, transit can't be more efficient and convenient than a private automobile.

As part of his platform of bolstering a clean energy economy, Chris feels that an important first step would be to put more emphasis on the existing Maryland Clean Energy Center. Ironically, it is currently in car-dependent western Rockville, miles from the Red Line. It was put there because the office space was donated.

He asserted that Maryland has fallen behind the rest of the nation mainly as a result of the Maryland General Assembly not making this issue a priority. We're ahead on smart growth (which says as much about other states cluelessness on the matter as it does about Maryland's success) but behind on placing an emphasis on clean energy. Maryland is fortunate to have a very wide and deep human capital talent pool. We could leverage our proximity to the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a clean energy economy similar as we have leveraged our proximity to the National Institutes of Health to create a robust biotech industry.

Most importantly, we already have a political consensus that creating a clean energy economy is the right direction to take. The creation of the Maryland Clean Energy Center is a physical manifestation of that consensus. Now the center needs significantly more resources to drive Maryland forward in this emerging industry.

Prince George's 15 Metro station areas represent the county's greatest untapped economic development opportunity. In one sense, we all know that, and we've all be saying that for nearly 30 years, ever since the first Metro stations were built in this county in the early 1980s. But tapping into that golden opportunity will take more than words—it will take coordinated, collaborative, and disciplined leadership on the part of our County Executive and County Council. That is why this election is so important.

The 86 square miles of land area inside the Beltway, known as the "Developed Tier," is far larger the than the whole of the District of Columbia (which is only 68 square miles). If properly planned, the inner-Beltway area could accommodate most of the county's growth and development for the next several decades. Yet the lion's share of new development in the county is scattered across the countryside, outside the Beltway, in the areas that we call the "Developing" and "Rural" tiers. This sprawling development obligates taxpayers to support and maintain thousands of miles of costly new roads, public services, and infrastructure. It also undermines our efforts to keep up with backlogged infrastructure improvement needs of existing communities such as fixing roads, installing missing sidewalks and streetlights, and replacing worn out water and sewer pipes. Allowing scattered development across the whole of the county—particularly in areas that are currently green fields—destroys our environment, makes traffic congestion worse, and ultimately leads us down the path of economic ruin.

It's time for sensible solutions that will lead us to a shared and sustainable prosperity. I've collaborated with the Coalition for Smarter Growth, Prince George's Advocates for Community Based Transit, and the Prince George's Green Power Coalition to create a "Smart Growth Platform" (which will be released next month) for candidates, which provides recommendations in detail on how the county can change course and truly commit to investing in our existing communities and leveraging the economic development opportunity of 15 Metro stations. Here are a few key recommendations:

• Embrace the mixed-use transit-oriented development recommendations of Envision Prince George's, which call for directing two-thirds of the county's future growth at and around the existing 15 Metro Stations and in other priority areas inside the Beltway.

• Ensure that walking and bicycling become safe and practical ways to reach transit stops and more of life's everyday destinations.

• Prioritize public works and transportation funding to reinvest in existing communities throughout the county by addressing maintenance, upgrade, and repair backlogs in public services.

• Protect and preserve our precious farmland, open space, and natural preserves by refusing to permit scattered low density development and new "town centers" planted in open fields far from existing Metro stations, transit corridors and established communities.

• Recommit to inclusive housing and workforce policies that allow for a broad economic spectrum of residents to share in the county's growing prosperity.

We need elected leaders who will do more than just talk about the benefits of transit-oriented development. We need them to have the discipline to work together to make it happen. This means that, in addition to aligning the Department of Public Works and Transportation's budgets and procedures with the county's stated land use plans and priorities, the county must also stand firm against developers and other special interest groups who seek to build anything they want, anywhere they want, without regard to the smart growth and transit-oriented development standards that have been outlined in the county's General Plan and the various area master plans.

With the right leadership, Prince George's County could become the jewel and the envy of the Washington Metropolitan Area, with exciting Metro station-centered urban areas, revitalized main streets and commercial corridors, beautiful parks and thriving farms—all while creating jobs and fostering economic prosperity. The citizens of Prince George's County must not sit on the sidelines in this election. Instead, we must vote our values and ensure a new and more prosperous direction for our future.