Governor Glendening on the benefits of Maryland’s Smart Growth
November 9th, 2009By Sara Wolfson
It’s been more than 10 years since former Maryland Governor Parris Glendening — president of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute here at Smart Growth America — enacted his historic smart growth initiatives and threw Maryland into the national spotlight. After a recent Washington Post article assessing the impact of the smart growth laws (with a wildly inaccurate headline, based on the actual study’s findings), Governor Glendening responded with a letter pointing out the benefits of the smart growth program, and how Maryland could continue to improve it:
The Nov. 2 Metro article “Study calls Md. smart growth a flop” leads to an inescapable conclusion: We in Maryland need to do more — more to create walkable neighborhoods, more to give people transportation choices, more to save tax money and more to protect the Chesapeake Bay.
But the misleading headline did a disservice. What the study really found is that the policies I instituted as governor haven’t been enough. It’s true: Maryland’s work is not done. Our laws and programs should be updated as we learn what works best. But the study doesn’t call the Maryland programs a “flop.”
Despite the need to improve and strengthen the policies, smart growth has done a great deal for Maryland. It placed the social services building right in downtown Easton and aided the University of Maryland’s efforts to revitalize Hagerstown. It permanently preserved 400,000 acres. And it helped revitalize places such as Silver Spring, Hyattsville and Baltimore, adding thousands of homes to transit-accessible neighborhoods. Because the study looked only at single-family homes, it couldn’t report any of these benefits.
Today, it’s more important than ever that government policies don’t promote sprawl but instead help communities meet the demand for more convenient, affordable neighborhoods. And improving the smart-growth program should be a key part of Maryland’s plans.
Richard Hall, the Maryland secretary of planning, writes that Maryland is working hard to fully realize Governor Glendening’s plans. “No doubt we have smart-growth challenges that we need to address together,” he said. “We are developing a State Growth Plan for this purpose. Maryland’s commitment to, and innovation in, smart growth remain strong.”
December 15th, 2009 at 8:08 am
Governor Glendening’s defense of Maryland’s Smart Growth and Neighborhood Conservation Initiatives is right on target. While the Washington Post headline is what got the Governor’s attention, in this case it is not the Post that got things wrong. They simply read an article written by the National Center for Smart Growth, Education and Research that clearly says that smart growth in Maryland has failed. In my opinion the fault for all of this lies at the State level. The National Center simply repeats statements the State has made for years, and have repeated in the last few months even as they tout last year’s ‘most significant planning legislation in a decade.’ They use a language of failure to justify taking what they see as ‘the necessary next steps’. The Maryland Department of Planning and the National Center have been out there for so long saying that smart growth has failed, that the conclusion is now accepted as fact. They will be hard pressed to react to repeated citations of the National Center’s article which uniformly interpret its finding just as the Post did.
Instead of citing misleading, and often inaccurate statistics about land consumption, the State SHOULD be saying something like this:
“Look. We can show in downtown and existing community revitalization activity across the state that “Smart Growth and Neighborhood Revitalization” (the whole initiative) has succeeded. We can even show that compared to the trends over the past decade in neighboring states that Maryland has actually mitigated the effects of a booming residential housing market (The Knaap study uses data through 2007) and therefore the parcel data shows a degree of success rather than failure. But we need to do more. We need to focus new infrastructure investment to support development and redevelopment in appropriate areas (a statement actually made in the Knaap article). We haven’t failed but we need to do more and do things in different ways.”