Posts about Kentlands

What do teenagers need? The ability to get around without a driver's license, for starters. A 15-year-old who can get around town on foot, on transit, or by bike or skateboard isn't just a convenience for their parents, who don't have to shuttle them around after school. They're given the tools for their own independence and self-discovery.

So the ideal place for a teenager is probably a neighborhood with sidewalks and bike lanes, ample public transit, and one which has schools, shops, and hangouts located within close range to home. That sounds a lot like Takoma Park, Bethesda, or below-the-Beltway Silver Spring. Rockville, with its new town center and excellent bike network, isn't far behind.

Scott Doyon at the PlaceShakers blog also notes that these places give kids the valuable opportunity to make mistakes:

For a child, having increasing opportunities to navigate the world around them, explore, invent, fall down, scrape knees, make decisions, screw up, get into—and solve—conflicts and, ultimately, achieve a sense of personal identity and self-sufficiency is a good thing. The right thing.

Kids talking on a stoop in Kentlands. Photo by the author.

The first time I was allowed to go anywhere by myself was at age 8, when my family lived in Georgian Towers in downtown Silver Spring. I was only taking the elevator from our apartment to the lobby, but I was so excited I screamed the whole way down. Pretty soon, I could walk to my friends' apartments, across the street to Woodside Park, around the corner to 7-Eleven, and so on. This ended a few years later when we moved to Calverton, where there's very little within walking distance. But I still knew that I had the power to do things on my own.

My 12-year-old brother, meanwhile, has spent his entire life in Calverton. When he's not at school, he's at home playing video games, but I've noticed he doesn't have a close group of friends because they don't live nearby. Last year, I took him to walk with my former boss, Councilmember Leventhal in a parade in Kentlands, one of Montgomery County's few truly walkable neighborhoods.

"Isn't this great, Tyler?" I asked as I took him around Kentlands' Main Street, where we could see kids ducking into shops and hanging out in a little green. "Kids your age who live in this neighborhood can walk to school, to friends' houses, and to the movies! Wouldn't you like that?"

Tyler looked at me like I'd said the sky was green. "Why would I want to walk?" he replied. "Mom and Dad can just drive me there."

Outside Blair High School on University Boulevard. Kids who have to walk in a place like this likely can't wait to drive. Photo by the author.

As a result, I tend to see most of the issues I write about, from better bike trails and infill development to skateparks and curfews, from the perspective of kids like my brother. I don't just think that good urbanism can make better communities. I think it makes better kids: confident, independent, and more aware of the world around them.

We talk about how urban neighborhoods are drawing young adults and senior citizens alike. But they have a lot to offer kids and teenagers, as well. That's the great part about good urbanism: it can work for everyone, regardless of age or situation.

Three proposed realignments shown in green, red, and yellow.

The first two realignments, those shown in green and yellow, would more directly serve dense, walkable, mixed-use developments. The green one would move to run through the center and densest part of Crown Farm, a massive TOD-to-be. The yellow alignment would provide a station at Kentlands, the famous New Urbanist development.

The red alignment will more directly serve the so-called Science City. Although that won't be a particularly walkable destination, it is dense with jobs and will provide a significant boost in expected ridership.

All together, these three changes are expected to increase ridership from somewhere between 21,000-30,000 daily (depending on mode and other factors) to between 29,000-42,000 daily, at a cost of about $100 million on top of the estimates for the original alignment. That's such a phenomenally good deal that it would set the Corridor Cities Transitway as one of the most cost-effective projects in the pipeline in the entire country, therefore positioning it excellently to receive federal funds.

MTA should adopt all three realignments. Each one improves transit access to important destinations over the original route, and each improves Maryland's chances of receiving federal funds.

When I was eleven, my family moved from an apartment in a then-declining Silver Spring, an inner suburb of D.C., to that archetypal split-level house on a cul-de-sac many miles away.

I was chagrined to find that there just wasn't much to do out here. I was a skinny, brainy child who had no discernible social skills but loved drawing and architecture, and I was terribly bored in my new home. But while my friends dove into music or sports or science fiction, I found you, in the pages of a magazine in my local grocery store advertising "America's New Traditional Neighborhoods."

There was a place, the article said, just a half-hour from my house called Kentlands, where a kid my age could go to see friends, to go fishing in a lake, and to see a movie without his parents driving him or worrying that he'd get mugged on the street. He could just ride his bike there. I was immediately hooked.

After I first read about Kentlands, I learned why it worked. Shops and schools were within walking distance. A grid of narrow streets dispersed traffic. Homes were closer together, but more importantly, there were different kinds of homes closer together, in different price ranges, so ideally anyone could live there. It was basically the neighborhood our family had given up on, but new. In high school, I'd finally go to Kentlands and interview a resident for a class project and at fifteen, it felt like meeting a celebrity.

I'm twenty-two now, and I've been to Kentlands many times since. But I've been to architecture school, and I've learned about Rome and Paris, and visited New York and San Francisco. At least twice a week I go into downtown Washington, D.C. and I eat and drink and have fun with my friends. Afterwards, we go home to Maryland and Virginia, often to our parents' houses where we still live because, I'd learn, we couldn't afford much else.

A lot of things helped Washington emerge from decades of urban decay, but I would argue Kentlands is one of them. Like you say, my generation loves the city - and it's because we learned to while hanging out in Kentlands' Market Square on a Friday night. Or, in my case, going to one of the many town centers that sprouted up across Montgomery County and the D.C. area, whether directly or indirectly inspired by Kentlands.

Those of us who spent our teenage years in the new downtowns of Bethesda or Silver Spring now go to Dupont Circle or Georgetown. We're helping to revitalize other parts of the city, like H Street and Petworth, that have suffered from disinvestment. Not only are these neighborhoods coming back to life, but they're quickly becoming too sought-after for me to live in. Even downtown Silver Spring, my old neighborhood, is out of my reach.

I know now that a city isn't just about riding your bike to the movies. But that's all Kentlands can provide. It never fulfilled its promise to become a diverse community. Despite having everything from one-room granny flats to million-dollar mansions, it's still a homogeneous, affluent, predominantly white place. And now, twenty years later, much of D.C. is starting to look like Kentlands.

When I was so anxious to find the world that lay beyond my cul-de-sac, you showed me how to find it. I do love my city desperately, and one day when I have the means I'd love to move there and invest and contribute to it. Yet according to you, I don't deserve to.

Greenbelt, Maryland

Our first stop was in Greenbelt, Maryland, the largest of the three garden-city inspired towns built during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Agricultural economist Rexford Guy Tugwell convinced the president that settling a displaced rural population into new towns outside of major cities was more preferable to a back-to-the-land approach, and the U.S. Redevelopment Administration was created for him. While Tugwell originally conceived of 3,000 distinct mostly self-sufficient communities around the country, congressional wrangling, legal battles, and a ticking clock whittled this down to just three. Greenbelt, with the help of avid personal support from Eleanor Roosevelt, was the most complete.

One of many playgrounds tucked between apartments and townhomes.

The town is designed in a crescent shape around a central community and business area, which is within walking distance of all dwellings. Many of the businesses are still functioning as community co-ops, although the federal government has long since left the picture. On the cold Saturday we visited, the New Deal Cafe and the Co-op grocery store seemed to be doing brisk business. The Community Center, originally the town school, contains a whole floor of artist studios, gathering places for seniors, an adjacent library, a gymnasium, and a small museum. We got the impression that this still serves as the communal heart of the town.

Pedestrian underpasses are used to connect this central area with the trail systems weaving throughout the superblocks of surrounding residences. The planners were certainly intent on strictly separating cars from people. Although there is an obvious symmetry and geometric orderliness to the plan, the abundant use of green space and scattered trees still gives it an informal feel. True to the name, natural amenities were an integral part of the plan.

The Community Center feels like an art deco college campus.

Although much of the green belt that originally surrounded the town has been sliced up with major highways or sold off for development, the amount of unprogrammed green space is still unusually high for the area.

The nuclear family was the essential building block of the design, not to mention the overall experiment in New Deal social engineering. Almost all of the original residents were young families (this was clearly intentional, since only 900 of 5,000 applicants were admitted). Small playgrounds are located all over, but one gets the sense that the entire town is built as a comprehensive playground for children. The size of the homes was allotted according to family size; apartments for married couples with infants that could be traded up for townhouses as the family grew.

Cars and pedestrians, never the twain shall meet.

Today, the community gives every impression of being incredibly multi-generational. The same goes for racial diversity. Blacks were, sadly, excluded from the first government settlement, but now comprise around 40% of the population. Given the affordable housing options, there is also a reasonably broad range of income levels in the town. Large signs now welcome visitors into the "inclusive community" of Greenbelt.

According to historian Peter Hall, this globally unique experiment in federal planning collapsed under the weight of an ensuing public outcry against socialism. Sure enough, some of the inspirational engravings lining the community center do give off a downright Soviet vibe, even if they are depicting the U.S. Constitution. According to Hall, "There is a slight irony in that it all happened in the United States, which is almost the last country anyone would expect it to happen. And there, it is hardly surprising that it failed."

Although the initial experiment did undoubtedly fail and many of the design decisions were deliberately anti-urban, in many ways the contemporary Greenbelt community seems to have matured into a more complex, if less ideologically pure, expression of some of its original ideals.

Kentlands, Maryland

Building to the sidewalk encloses the street and caters to the pedestrian.

The Kentlands neighborhood is well known among planners and architects as the first true example of New Urbanism in the United States. The entire development follows a colonial style of architecture, reminiscent of Georgetown or Old Town Alexandria, although that, in and of itself, is hardly unusual for contemporary residential development. What set Kentlands apart from the other subdivisions surrounding it is the incorporation of traditional town elements such as a connected street grid, narrow streets, minimal setback and yard sizes, ample sidewalks, a mix of uses (at least in some cases), and scale to encourage walking. Anyone who's read more than two posts on this blog should be pretty familiar with these concepts.

I recall one time hearing Andres Duany, whose architecture firm was behind Kentlands, explain that a neighborhoods need to stew in its juices for a while like a good soup before it reaches its fullest design expression.

A colonial style is clearly evident throughout the neighborhood.

Kentlands has had over 20 years to grow into itself and the maturation shows. Even in the winter, well-placed trees create a perfect natural accent to the fairly dense residential areas. Residents over time start to settle in and lend a place their own character while still staying within the initially conceived order. We were surprised to stumble upon both a Jewish Synagogue and a Mormon church tucked between the homes.

I'm aware of criticisms lodged against places like Kentlands. In fact, being immersed in academia for the time being, I'm very aware of these criticisms. Kentlands was built on a greenfield on the fringes of a metropolitan area with little access to transit. Although the variety of housing options is quite diverse - this is something the neighborhood does well - moderate to lower-income households are still mostly priced out. Marxist geographer David Harvey may have been a little hyperbolic when he declared that it "builds an image of community and a rhetoric of place-based civic pride and consciousness for those who do not need it, while abandoning those that do to their 'underclass' fate."

A vertical mix of uses is challenging to pull off.

When you consider the context, it seems forgivable that the physical form of one development is unable to achieve large-scale social upheaval or the unraveling of regional agglomeration economies. The commercial center of Kentlands actually folds into a conventional regional shopping plaza with giant parking lots lurking behind, which speaks to the current economic realities that still needed to be considered to make it viable in the marketplace. The proper comparison to Kentlands is what would have been there otherwise, not a theoretical utopia or even New Urbanist ideals themselves. Any real world positive and lasting change has to be incremental.

It's also not hard to imagine some of the more trenchant criticisms dissipating in time. The Shady Grove Metro station is only a 4 mile bus ride away. A little tweak in the price points of automobile travel may facilitate a more transit-oriented adaptation in the future. And housing stock typically becomes more affordable in time, which may take the edge off of claims to exclusivity. In a fast-changing world it can be tough to remember that well-built places will last for a century or more. They can only truly be judged in view of the entirety of their lifespans.

Cross-posted at Discovering Urbanism.