A Charming Metropolis
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
Sometimes I imagine that the vicious territoriality residents of this or that place occasionally display when comparing their home enclave to another is a sign of something positive, a rootedness and sense of belonging, maybe, to the neighborhood or city or state one calls home. If that’s the case, then residents of the cities of Baltimore and Washington must be some rooted and belonging sons of bitches, because rarely does the vitriol fly more fiercely than when the relationship between the two is discussed.
Let me pause a moment, here, to establish my Baltimore bona fides (and try to inoculate myself from the comment flames to follow). My mother grew up in a West Baltimore suburb, inside I-695 and a stone’s throw from downtown, where my grandparents continued to live until I entered my 20s. I’ve seen the Os play in Memorial Stadium, and for much of my early life, Washington was just the monuments you saw from the Beltway as you skirted the city on your way north.
While I ultimately chose to settle in the District, I don’t have much time for shouting matches on either side of the argument. Both cities are over two centuries old. Both grew rapidly into the middle of the 20th century only to suffer depopulation to the suburbs and accompanying urban decay. Both sit at the center of large and growing metropolitan areas. Both center cities have, to varying degrees, enjoyed some revitalization. Both have long and rich histories, distinct cultural touchstones, a common argot, and so on. Both have, to a great extent, lost their relevance as distinct cities, surrounded as they are by miles of growing sprawl which tangles its way between Baltimore and Washington and Annapolis and Richmond and everywhere, laughing at things like jurisdictional boundaries.
Consider this: both Baltimore and Washington claim fewer than one million people, yet the Washington metropolitan area is home to over 5 million souls, the Baltimore metro area holds nearly 3 million, and in 2004, the combined metroplex crested the 8 million person mark. By the 2010 census, 9 million will be within reach.
Between 2000 and 2006, the Washington metro area added half a million people and the Baltimore area added over 100,000. Of those 100,000, however, nearly half settled in Howard and Anne Arundel Counties, which abut both Baltimore County (and, for Anne Arundel, a little bit of Baltimore City) and the Washington metro area. Of the workers who live in Howard and Anne Arundel Counties but work elsewhere, more commute to the Washington area than to the Baltimore area. While the centers of each metro area might feel fairly distinct, the economic regions they inhabit are meshing tighter and tighter between the two and expanding outward. Eventually, the Baltimore-Washington metroplex will eat all of the state of Maryland. It’s already much of the way there.
Against this background comes the modest ad campaign, mentioned here earlier this week, seeking to attract Washingtonians to Baltimore city, based primarily, it seems, on the lower cost of space. Despite the considerable overlap between the metro areas (MARC carries approximately 20,000 riders between the metro areas each day, and many more drive between the counties involved) the cities at the heart of the region don’t themselves exchange that many people. In 2000, according to Census worker flow files, only about 3,000 residents of Baltimore City traveled to the District to work, and fewer than 1,000 made the reverse journey. While the metro areas squish together, the respective poles stay apart.
Picture taken by The Skipping Hippy.
Which is too bad, if you ask me. Baltimore City is about the same distance from downtown Washington as the growing suburbs of Loudoun, Prince William, and Stafford Counties (and closer than the booming exurban communities of far Western and Eastern Maryland and West Virginia), but where settlement around Stafford is sure to be sprawling and auto dependent, housing in Baltimore is dense, walkable, and favored by proximity to city buses, light rail, and commuter rail service. Where Prince William County groans under the addition of 100,000 new residents, Baltimore could swallow that number without a burp, using housing stock, street grids, and infrastructure made to support large numbers of people. Fairfax County’s developers are spending billions to create walkable town centers, the better to hold hundreds of thousands of new Fairfaxians, based on urban design patterns that define Baltimore, as they define many older cities which grew to prominence before the heyday of the automobile. From Baltimore west to Frederick, Hagerstown, and Cumberland, south to Fredericksburg and Richmond, and north again to Annapolis, lovely old downtowns throughout the region are frequently underpopulated relative to their best days, but built densely and often with direct rail access to centers of economic activity around Washington.
This all prompts me to ask a question: why do we not attempt to focus new, sprawling development into town centers that could use new life, and that are prepared to handle urban densities? Rather than encouraging the slow creep of low density, auto-centric growth that eats up unused land and replaces it with suburban uniformity, why not try to channel growth into areas struggling to find a tax base, but rich in building stock and infrastructure?
At its heart, such a strategy would mean a large investment in the rehabilitation and expansion of a regional rail network. Many rail lines between these cities already exist and with minor improvements and increased service they could begin to shape development patterns appropriately. One of the great advantages of rail, largely unexplored in the United States, is the potential for far greater speeds than can be attained on highways. Even modest improvements, increasing average rail speeds to 100 mph, could completely alter the way residents of the mid Atlantic region live and work. At that speed, to say nothing of attainable and much greater velocities available to travelers in Europe and Asia, it would be quicker to get from Baltimore to Union Station than from Bethesda. It would be easier to travel from central Richmond to downtown D.C. than it would be to drive from Woodbridge.
Growth along these lines would not mean merely the transformation of these old cities into bedroom communities. Migration of people into the Washington suburbs has brought with it job growth, turning Fairfax, Montgomery, and Prince George’s Counties into vibrant employment centers. And the alternative to such an arrangement isn’t that those places remain left peacefully alone. Instead, traditional suburban growth would ultimately find its way to their doorsteps, bringing with it the difficulties of congestion and strained infrastructure, along with continued stunted growth in the urban centers. Of course, urban centers like Baltimore and Richmond suffer from problems of crime, poor schools, and dilapidated building stock just as parts of Washington do. But these are solvable problems, and their solutions would be hastened by increases in the residential population and tax base.
The whole of the region, stretching from Southern Pennsylvania to Richmond, and West Virginia to the Eastern Shore, faces transformation under the continued expansion of the metropolitan areas at its heart. We can continue as we have done for decades, allowing the growth to continue in all directions in a growing web that consumes most available land, or we can attempt to direct growth into towns that can handle it, with densities that encourage sustainable development, and with transportation linkages that minimize the extent to which new residents mean new car trips. Personally, I don’t care who thinks their city center is the greatest. I would love to see them all thrive in a connected and distributed metropolis, that improves lives for workers and commuters and holds off the appetite of the sprawl that might otherwise eat the mid Atlantic.