COLUMBIA, Md. (AP) — Tract housing, white picket fences and two-car garages may not define the suburbs for too much longer.
In suburban Maryland town centers, such as Columbia, Towson and R0ckville, developers are showing a distinct preference for mixed-use projects that provide residents easy access to nearby retail and office spaces. The changes in design are being driven by millennials who prefer a more urban lifestyle and baby boomers who view these kinds of developments as cheaper and easier to age in.
“I think we’re seeing the Gen Xers and millennials coming into the workforce, and many of them prefer to live without cars, so what they’re doing is choosing urban environments that have amenities that don’t require them to get into a car like a suburban lifestyle would do, and drive to work,” said Matthew Bell, an architecture professor at University of Maryland and a principal at Washington-based Perkins Eastman Architects.
“I also think, at the other end of the generational spectrum, there are the empty nesters who are no longer wanting to live in very large suburban houses, because the kids are gone, and they want to move down into places where they can live without having two cars, maybe one car, and also has the same kind of amenities.”
As a result of shifting preferences, suburban centers throughout Maryland are moving toward implementing design plans that embrace more density and mixed-use development.
In 2010, the Howard County Council approved a 30-year master plan and zoning for downtown Columbia aimed at redeveloping an area the Rouse Co. shaped in the 1960s as an attempt to bring order to the suburban sprawl dominating development trends of the time.
Now, The Howard Hughes Corp., the lead developer for the Downtown Columbia Master Plan, envisions adding up to 5,500 new residential units, 4.3 million square feet of commercial office space and 1.25 million square feet of retail space.
There are several projects already underway, such as the Metropolitan Downtown Columbia, a 380-unit luxury apartment complex with 14,000 square feet of retail. The project, which broke ground in February 2013, was the first project underway as part of the Downtown Columbia Plan and is expected to be complete in the late fall.
In July, LPP Investors LLC broke ground on the Little Patuxent Square mixed-use development that will include 12,000 square feet of retail space, 160-luxury apartments and 135,000 square feet of Class A office space, the first new office space built downtown in more than a decade. Last month, Whole Foods opened in Columbia in the Frank Gehry-designed former Rouse Co. headquarters following a $25 million renovation.
Mark Thompson, Howard County’s director of downtown redevelopment, said the county views the plan to reshape downtown Columbia as a critical component to the jurisdiction’s economic development plans. He said that redeveloping the downtown area will be crucial in keeping the area economically vibrant and maintaining a high-quality of life.
“It’s a very critical element of our economic development for the future because this is where the growth now is going to be focused, a large part of the county’s growth will be focused in downtown Columbia, as well as some other targeted areas,” Thompson said. “But in terms of scale . it’s a very large ambitious plan.”
Another suburban area pursuing a more urban environment is Towson. There are currently about 2,600 apartments and townhomes recently completed or in the pipeline near the county seat, and there’s been about $800 million in private investment downtown in the last five years.
During that same time period a dozen major projects broke ground or entered the planning stages. Those include the $85 million Towson Square and $300 million Towson Row mixed-use project. The Evergreene Cos. LLC also unveiled earlier this year plans for the Towson Mews, a project featuring 35-luxury townhomes.
When the concept for the Mews was unveiled, Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz touted the very non-traditional suburban benefits of the development, such as being able to walk to nearby businesses and not having to mow the lawn.
“Downtown Towson is fast becoming the place to find townhomes and luxury apartments within walking distance of world-class shopping, restaurants and entertainment,” Kamenetz said at the time.
The trend toward more urbanized suburbs has been even more pronounced in the Washington suburbs.
Areas like Rockville have undergone massive renovations that have leaned heavily on urban style mixed-use redevelopment. Rockville Town Square, for instance, features 644 residential units, 180,000 square feet of retail on 12.5 acres of land only two blocks from a Metro stop.
Bethesda, often mentioned as the model for Towson’s aspirations, may be the most urbanized of the suburban communities. It has several more developments like The Bainbridge Project, a 17-story mixed use development with 200 residential units and 7,700 square feet of retail, on the way.
Although there will always be a certain segment of the market that will want traditional suburban homes, the shift in development is expected to be a trend that will last. Bell said it’s hard to prognosticate but that he believes fundamental changes in American life may have changed the way suburbs are developed for the foreseeable future.
“I think the sort of heyday of the suburbs, which were fundamentally built upon cheap gas and cheap energy and fairly uncongested highways, is over. Energy now either costs a lot in terms of oil from the Middle East or extracting it from the ground in terms of fracking or whatnot,” Bell said. “But the days of cheap energy are over, and I don’t think we’ll see in our lifetimes a suburban movement the way we saw in the decades after World War II.”
Michael Runnels, an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland’s Sellinger School of Business who studies urban development, agreed that there has been a shift in the way Americans want to live.
“I think pre-9/11 there was this conception that we’re all effective islands here, that we can all be fairly narcissistic and unattached from one another, and just do our own thing in our closed moral and intellectual universes. I think post-9/11 this notion of an interconnected world, the notion we all rise and fall together, has been seared into the consciousness, particularly of this generation, and I think this greater urbanization is a manifestation of that,” Runnels said.
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Information from: The Daily Record of Baltimore, http://www.mddailyrecord.com
