Maryland planning for less sprawl

Listen to this article

OCEAN CITY — Maryland is crafting a plan to curtail the construction of sprawling suburban subdivisions and concentrate future growth in areas of the state that are already developed.

State officials expect the first-of-its-kind land-use plan, called Plan Maryland, to be finished in summer or fall of 2011. It will encourage “smart growth” to somewhat ease the demand for new infrastructure and capital projects, and encourage better use of the state’s existing urban areas, planning officials said.

“The days of big subdivisions with hundreds of units being built in cornfields, I think those days are mostly over for Maryland,” Department of Planning’s secretary, Richard E. Hall, said after briefing local government officials at the Maryland Association of Counties conference.

Without the plan, 550,000 acres of farmland, forests and other green spaces would be developed by 2030, according to state estimates. The plan would shrink that by about two-thirds, to 180,000 acres of new development, and keep much of the projected sprawl from Southern Maryland, the Eastern Shore and the northern stretches of Baltimore, Carroll and Harford counties.

Working with counties and municipalities that have land-use authority, the state’s plan could call for higher-density zoning in areas targeted for growth — a necessity if 1 million expected new state residents are to find places to live in existing developed areas — and assign lower-density limits to spaces that planners want to keep green. Planning officials said the plan could offer incentives to local governments that stick to their own land-use plans, rather than altering them at the behest of developers.

The plan could also include targeted capital improvements for growth areas to spur development. Many of the growth zones will overlap with “priority funding areas.” State spending on highways, sewers, economic development assistance, and leases or construction of new offices is directed toward those areas under 1997 smart growth legislation.

Kathleen M. Maloney, a lobbyist for the Home Builders Association of Maryland, said Plan Maryland could help the state better address infrastructure upgrades needed to comply with pollution regulations soon to be released by the Environmental Protection Agency. But, she added, developers worry that local governments won’t buy into the plan, leaving developers stuck in between county regulations and the state’s overarching plan.

“The balloon gets squeezed from both ends because the state says ‘we don’t want to see sprawl, we don’t want to pay for sprawl,’” Maloney said. “And the county is saying ‘we don’t want to approve these dense developments because people don’t want to see them in their backyards, and they won’t vote us back into office.’”

Concentrating private development dollars in those areas could help the state better use its limited funds to fix roads and sewers and maintain schools, Hall said. He used Baltimore as an example: The city was home to more than 900,000 people in 1950, but has lost about one-third of those residents in the 60 years since, and the state has had to keep pace with development farther and farther into the suburbs.

“Big lots out in rural areas, you have the demand for new roads, new schools, leaving old roads and old schools behind and underused,” Hall said.

The state expects to add more than 1 million residents in the next two decades. And with them will come 400,000 new homes and 600,000 new jobs, according to the planning department.

The land-use plan will seek to keep residents close to where they work, and keep both residential and commercial development close to mass transit. In the past 30 years, average commute times have risen as new developments gobbled lands deeper into the suburban counties.

“We think from an economic development perspective, having businesses spread all over the place, not close to their work force — we think it will help us in that area, too,” Hall said.