The Best Reason to Support Bill 7-12: Protected Open Space Would Actually Show Up on a Map That You and I Could Access

Ever visited the County’s “My Neighborhood” GIS mapping site?  There is a wealth of information there about zoning (including current CZMP issues), environmental, civic/ governmental and historical conditions on land throughout the County, but very little information about protected open space within the County’s growth boundary, also known as the Urban Rural Demarcation Line (URDL), shown in the map at right.  Councilmen Marks and Quirk have introduced Bill 7-12, which would change all that by creating an overlay zoning district that would be applied to parcels owned by NeighborSpace and by homeowners associations.  If there was ever a place where a map showing open space could be needed more than it is here in Baltimore County, I’m stumped to say where that might be.  Let me explain.

First, 90% of the County’s 805,000 plus residents live within the URDL on just 1/3 of the County’s total land area.  What’s more, most of the neighborhoods there were built before regulations existed to require developers to set aside open space; ergo, there’s very little of it, which is a major reason why there is a land trust like NeighborSpace working to protect it.

Second, open space, particularly where it's contiguous to, or part of, a park, has been shown to provide significant health benefits for nearby residents.  What’s more, a recent report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that green spaces have significant economic pay-offs:  "The existence of a park within 1,500 feet of a home increased its sale price by between $845 and $2,262.  Additionally, as parks increased in size, their impact on property values increased significantly."  If you were planning to buy a home within the URDL, wouldn’t you want to know which homes and neighborhoods had contiguous open space?

Third, and building on my second reason for wanting to see this bill pass, is the fact that, with knowledge of the location of homeowners association parcels, NeighborSpace could seek to acquire complementary land and to work to create small parks and gardens where the condition of the land and the will of the local community indicated that such improvement was warranted and sustainable. NeighborSpace has already begun to work with partners on the development of small parks on some of its parcels with the assistance of the Morgan State University Graduate Program in Landscape Architecture, which has volunteered to provide design services for at least one such park per year. 

Open space is a terrible thing to waste, especially in an area like ours where it is in such short supply.  If you care about this issue, let your council person know.  If you’d like to stay on top of what we’re doing at NeighborSpace, please use this brief form to let me know.

Is there a better descriptor of a sustainable community than its walkability?

On January 31, lawyer, environmentalist, and blogger Kaid Benfield wrote his 1000^th blog post (all in 4 yrs time) for the Natural Resources Defense Council.  He started the article “A gallery of walkability” this way: “I’m not sure there is any one word that describes my concept of a sustainable community place more than walkability. At least when it comes to describing the physical aspects of a place. Is it safe, comfortable, and enjoyable to walk in?  Does it have an abundance of places to walk to and from?  Is it human-scaled?  If the answer is yes, chances are that it also has many of the characteristics that smart growth and urbanist planners strive to achieve:  density, mixed uses, connectivity, appropriate traffic management, street frontages, opportunity for physical activity, and so on.” Take a look at Kaid’s photographs, which seem to underscore how comfortable and enjoyable walking must be in the places he cites as exemplars.  Yes, most of them are cities, not suburbs, but can we learn from them? Absolutely!

The website Walkscore.com assigns a “walkability score” to cities and towns in the U.S. to help individuals evaluate the livability of their communities. The scoring algorithm calculates a score by mapping out the walking distance to amenities in 9 different categories: grocery, restaurants, shopping, coffee, banks, parks, schools, books, entertainment. Categories are weighted according to their importance, and the distance to a location, counts, and weights determine a base score. After this initial normalization, an address may receive a penalty for having poor pedestrian friendliness metrics, such as having long blocks or low intersection density. The scores range from 0 to 100 with the following ranges of walkability:

 

 Source:  www2.walkscore.com

For fun, I looked up the walkability scores for the County’s first-tier suburbs, so-called because (1) at least half of their housing stock was built before 1970; and/or (2) they share a boundary with Baltimore City. These are primarily the areas in which NeighborSpace works to conserve land. Thirty-eight percent of them fall into the “somewhat walkable” category, albeit many of them just barely, with the balance ranking as “car-dependent.”

Landsdown	58
Towson	57
Parkville	53
Dundalk	53
Arbutus	53
Edgemere	52
Catonsville	46
Overlea	46
Pikesville	45
Rosedale	44
Woodlawn	43
Middle River	43
Essex	43
Lochearn	38
Lutherville	37
Hampton	6

Another expert on this topic is Dan Burden, Executive Director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute.  The video that is the subject of this link, Planning for People, captures work he did in the town of Brattleboro, VT last fall evaluating how to re-orient movement about the town from a system dominated by cars to one where pedestrians have more of a fighting chance. This is important for a number of different reasons, but, perhaps the most important one is that studies show that where people walk more, they are healthier. The video goes on to show specific steps for improving bicycle infrastructure and sidewalk connectivity. It has particular relevance to Baltimore County, which has a remarkably high percentage of older residents relative to other political jurisdictions statewide, given that much of the work was facilitated with the older residents of Brattleboro in mind by the Vermont Chapter of AARP.

A recent article from the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri  is closest to my heart among the various sources cited heretofore. The author, an employee of a nonprofit focused on making the city more walkable, laments that “motorists never find themselves suddenly running out of street, only to have it start again 200 feet later” and yet “it is not uncommon for pedestrians to simply run out of sidewalk and be unable to reach their destination.” I live in Parkville and until I put the chart, above, together for this post, I took for granted how easy it is to walk to many things. But a 53 is not a “Walker’s Paradise” on the Walk Score continuum and I can attest to the Missouri columnist’s comments on sidewalks running out.  Here’s a photo of a stretch of Old Harford Rd. I walked recently on my way back to my home in Villa Cresta after dropping my car off at a local car care facility to have new tires installed:

The sidewalk succumbs to a “tilty” and highly unwalkable stretch of macadam that is pitched between the road and a chainlink fence, behind which there is often a gnarly dog. Indeed, the pedestrian path pretty much ended; Old Harford Rd. did not.

I’m absolutely committed to securing more parks and open space within the County’s inner suburbs, but that effort to improve sustainability will be for naught if folks can’t comfortably walk or bike to these areas.  If you’ve got a route that you regularly walk or bike, take a minute to note the challenges you face and respond with them to this post and/or to your elected official, so that we can take the steps necessary to make these paths, and the inner suburbs within our County, safer and more sustainable for everyone.

Achieving Smart Growth Includes Protecting Public Open Space that People Instinctively Love

Stake-holders in the future of smart growth  in Maryland are often at odds with each other. But a recently released compilation of interviews with planners, developers and advocates by the National Center for Smart Growth shows that they agree on one thing: the State's smart growth tools that attempt to channel growth into Priority Funding Areas (PFAs) are  too weak to overcome local opposition and local regulatory barriers. In essence, there is a huge disconnect between State policy and what happens on the ground at the local level. For this reason we are "barely moving the needle on most widely accepted measures of smart growth."

Cited as the greatest hindrances to development inside PFAs are storm water regulations, citizen opposition, and adequate public facility ordinances at the local level.  Citizen opposition was the top-ranked impediment to developing in PFAs cited by advocates and the second top-ranked impediment cited by developers.  What's behind this result?

Kaid Benfield provides an answer in a recent blog post, What Smart Growth Advocates Get Wrong About Density. "We should be advocating density that appeals to more people, that we and future generations can be proud of ... the kinds of places that people instinctively love." According to Benfield, "'smart growth' without green infrastructure, green buildings, parks and great public spaces ... isn't particularly worthy of the name in my opinion."

I wasn't interviewed for the smart growth study, but, had I been asked my opinion, I would have said that Baltimore County is ahead of the pack in trying to give citizens what they want inside its PFA, which, in essence, is the entire area of the County within the URDL. In helping to launch NeighborSpace in 2003, the County made sure that there was an organization in place to sustain, create and protect the the kinds of places Benfield references.  I invite you to take a look at a few of them, particularly Tollgate Wyndham Preserve and Greenbrier Memorial Garden. County Executive Kamenetz has advanced a bond bill in the State legislature that, if passed, would help us begin a park on land we own on Robin Hill Road, acquire new land for public open space elsewhere in the County, and complete our strategic conservation plan.  (I'll have more to say about the bill in coming weeks).

The study makes a number recommendations for realigning State and local policies, many of which turn on local governments weaving PFAs more thoughtfully into their comprehensive planning processes, drawing them more broadly to include non-residential and mixed use projects, and achieving greater flexibility in both defining PFAs and in reducing regulatory restrictions within them in return for reducing growth elsewhere.  To this I would add an admonition from County Councilman Tom Quirk, who said, in the 9/20/2011 edition of the Catonsville Times that "open space and density have to balance each other." To truly achieve smart growth, we must protect public open space and ensure that what we protect are the kinds of places that people will instinctively love.  

Two different approaches to making even the smallest slivers of land count for people

Here at NeighorSpace, we think small is great, not because we suffer from low self esteem, but because the small parcels of land that we protect are important to people.  They're the places where kids play and where people garden and walk their dogs.  Without them, the County's older, inner suburbs, shown in the map at right, would be far less enjoyable places to live.

In our December newsletter, we highlighted the smallest of our small plots, Greenbrier Memorial Garden, weighing in at a whopping 0.03 acres.  If you read the article, or, better yet, visited the site, you have a sense of how nice the garden is.  It's a serene and inviting spot and a true credit to the work of the the Greenbrier Garden Club to memorialize community members who have passed on with a space that is a wonderful enhancement to the Greenbrier Neighborhood.

Even smaller parcels of land are making big impacts.  In Montgomery County, planners are focused on street edges - small slivers of land that tend not to make a very big impression on us, especially if we happen to be passing in a fast-moving car.  But these places, too, are important to people, as they often are part of the gateway to homes, schools and businesses and provide a buffer for those of us on foot.  Montgomery's year-long project has resulted in plans that will beautify this real estate, collect drainage and wastewater, accommodate utilities and provide space for pedestrians and off-road bicyclists.

In New York City, Greenstreets identfies small isolated paved areas, the leftovers of city grid-making (median strips, triangles, cul-de-sacs), and, with the help of the City Transportation Department, deep sixes the pavement and plants flowers, shrubs and trees. And, recently, the early focus on urban greening was expanded to include improvements related to pedestrian and vehicular safety, ecology and stormwater management.  Since its inception 15 years ago, 2,574 paved areas have been transformed into small, pint-size parks and there are plans to create another 40 a year through 2017.

So, we hold our heads high on account of our "small" focus. But let there be no doubt that conserving small sites is huge work. If you can help us with site monitoring (visiting our properties and helping us document their condition periodically) or site improvement (especially if you're an arborist, landscape architect or grading contractor) we would love to connect with you - email me.