His political career began in 1972, when he was elected to theHyattsvilleCity Council.
Two years later, he was elected to thePrince George’s CountyCouncil.
Explain what smart growth is and what it isnt.
Smart growth is about creating and supporting communities that offer people choices in transportation, housing and employment opportunities.
It makes a point of supporting existing communities while not subsidizing sprawl.
Specifically, it’s walkable communities, mixed-use, and the availability of transit.
This is nothing new.
For most of mankind’s existence, we lived and worked in the same place.
We gradually segregated places and activities to the point that people became absolutely dependent on the automobile.
It makes no sense at all.
Most cities get smart growth.
Literally, it can be a crossroads community, five homes and two major roads.
But for large cities they get it.
One of the things we have to work very hard at is that they dont get ittoomuch.
By that, we mean there is a tendency sometimes to go in and just tear everything down.
It was a different environment.
I dont believe that most people at that time had thought it through.
I did vote fairly consistently for a pattern that is the problem: sprawl and development.
I first started to get it when I was county executive.
I remember seeing one of the first subdivisions going into a rural and agricultural area.
We decided to start working with the state and planning departments to make it a continuous agriculture area.
The whole system was stacked against doing so.
If you’re a businessperson, you’re looking at the bottom line.
Back then, that was a real challenge.
Today it’s the reverse.
The Price of Sprawl
Sprawling development costs American commuters about $1,400 per person a year.
(Source:CityLab)
3.
What led you, at the time, to making the issue one of your priorities?
Whats been the impact of that legislation, and similar efforts in other states?
When I was in college I went to Florida State University in Tallahassee.
As I worked my way through my various degrees, I could see a change.
The area was being developed.
Now, you go out 50 miles into the Everglades and it’s all developed.
I could see that the Everglades was being filled in, that it was being paved over.
When I ran for governor of Maryland, I wanted to focus on the environment and the Chesapeake Bay.
I went to my advisors and we realized that what happens on the land affects the water.
We had to change what was happening on the land.
We had to protect the open space.
The most important thing was to stop the sprawl.
Then, we said, “OK, how do you do it?”
It’s easiest to draw a development boundary.
Oregon and Washington states did this back in the 1950s.
But you couldnt do that on the East Coast in the 1990s.
So what we did was to go through and look at the policies.
We developed laws and policies in the state to support reinvestment of existing spaces and not to subsidize sprawl.
For example, in Maryland, the state pays about 50 percent in school construction money.
When we started, about 80 percent of funding was going into school construction in the newer communities.
But there are so many different areas of economic development.
Businesses would come in and want a tax incentive.
Will there be nearby activities?
Will members of the family be able to visit?
Is there access to transit?
When you start to do that, there’s a huge change in where facilities and communities are built.
By the time it was all done, we were incentivizing growth in existing communities.
You could still build.
You could still get approvals.
You still see sprawl going on.
But the state was no longer going to pay for it.
First off, think about the changing nature of our population.
Instead, more and more older adults want to do two things: age-in-place and remain active.
People continue to work.
I’m in my seventies.
I dont see myself going someplace and retiring.
How does that relate to smart growth?
Seniors want to live in a walkable community and have access to transit.
The second part is the millennials.
There are actually more millennials than baby boomers.
At the height of baby boom, the number was about 70 million.
The projection is about 90 million millennials.
With the younger generation, a curious thing happened.
They dont want suburban living.
They’ll work hard.
My son, Raymond, is in thirties.
He and his wife might go out to dinner and they have dozens and dozens of restaurant choices.
This was not based on race, but income.
The poorer you were, the further out you had to move.
The further you moved, the further you were from the jobs.
Working families will sometimes spend up to a third of their disposable income on transportation to get to work.
That isnt solving a problem.
That’s making it worse.
We are finding in state after state that changing the built environment is a solution.
Or, are you taking them away?
Looking ahead, what challenges do proponents of smart growth-related policies face?
What do you want to see happen regarding land use and development issues?
The challenges are from all different perspectives.
There are organizations out there whose main focus is strong anti-smart growth.
They often say we want to make everyone live in Manhattan.
This is absolutely not the case.
But, that ideology has taken hold.
TheResearch Trianglein North Carolina is a good example.
The area has become world famous because of the resources of the universities there.
But any interaction with the university required having a car.
If you look at the pictures of this, you see massive asphalt parking lots.
Now companies are leaving because they can’t attract the millennials to work there.
People don’t want to be automobile-dependent.
The businesses also support a transit line that will connect the three universities with the research park.
But you do have this ideological difference.
In the beginning, we explained smart growth because of the environment and the Chesapeake Bay.
What’s happened is that over the years we’ve had to change the language of smart growth.
We’ve expanded it.
Now, we dont start off talking about environmental issues at all.
We start off talking about prosperity.
How do you best bring jobs?
We talk about how smart growth is cost-effective.
For instance, you’re free to build aLEED energy-efficient buildingand that’s good.
Think about what that means for society if all those new buildings are far more energy-efficient.
I have knownMaryland’s current governor, Larry Hogan, for probably 30 or more years.
We differ politically but I called him after he won the election to talk about issues.
Our conversation emphasizes how to use the language of smart growth.
So I talked to him about the Purple Line and what it will do in those issue areas.
University people went to him and said, “The university of the future cant be isolated.”
To Larry Hogan’s credit, he got it, and he approved the construction of the Purple Line.
And, two:Do something.
Don’t talk about plans or five-year studies.
I visited Fort Wayne, Indiana.
A year later, they invited me back because they had redeveloped a single city street.
It was very nice, with restaurants and outdoor seating.
People in the community were seeing it and using it.
It wasn’t a study.
It was a start.
Mitchelle Stephenson is a freelance writer living in Maryland.
