Can a New Town from the Seventies Become a Model TOD?

Owings Mills is one of two Baltimore County "New Towns" conceived as early as 1972 to accommodate growth so that the county's northern rural areas can be protected. Owings Mills is connected to Baltimore City via a freeway and a subway line running in the outer area in the median of the freeway. The train ride is 20 minutes. By car it can take significantly longer, especially during rush hour.

The Owings Mills area continues to grow. With about 160,000 residents living in the 5 mile orbit of the train station and about 65,000 work places, this would be one Maryland's largest towns if it were incorporated or really function as a town. This article discusses the prospect for becoming a town and having a town center.

 Rather stealthily the much discussed Owings Mills "town center" and transit oriented development (TOD) is taking shape behind the two massive 3,000 vehicle garages which have been the most visible parts from I-795 forming the backdrop of the Metro Station for some time. They have been the objects of some derision both for their architecture and the irony of beginning transit oriented land use by accommodating the automobile.  Behind those monuments to the American lifestyle, though, there is much more to see now even though access by car or on foot remains awkward. (See also the picture tour below this article).

According to the developer 75% of 232 units are leased to date (Photo: ArchPlan)

Last week the David Brown development company issued a press release pointing to their progress. I went to investigate if Owings Mills had finally become a model for town center development and TOD. Last time I had been here I had taken my bike on the train and had found out how truly terrible this greater environment is for a bicyclist (I had biked to the public television station some miles away, thoughstill in Owings Mills). This time, on a hot and sunny Sunday morning I eased the car to the curb of the new "main street" and stepped out into the sound of mall music playing all along the street, a unforgivable misstep for a developer who wants to create millions of square-feet of urbanity in just a few years and has to battle the impression of synthetic pretension sui generis. 

The building of cities, towns or just towncenters takes time. Even though this particular project was many years in the making -an entire new main street type development rising within a year or so-, complete with stores, apartments, a library, a community college and soon also offices can seem as sudden as whipped cream springing from a can.

The developers says that 232 of a planned 1,700 apartments are built and 75% occupied, 56,000 square feet of retail are complete and some stores are up and running as well, many are still vacant. When all is said and done, there will be 1.2 million sf of office space and 300,000 sf of retail plus a hotel.

So far the future main street is still only lined by one row of buildings oozing the heavy scent of newness. The first 200,000 sf office building will be the start for the other side, construction began recently with steel framing taking shape.

As it was with the new town of Reston, instant urbanism is hard to achieve and in both cases the sense of a real urban place is hampered by the fact that the new mixed use development is disconnected and isolated not only from the surrounding residential developments but from everything, really, even from the nearby dying mall. Only the transit is right next door, but its location in the median of an interstate is not suited to lend a sense of place to the setting.

The old Owings Mills Mall, an industrial park and Reisterstown Road are each separated from each other in largely
non walkable car dominated environments, a far cry from a real town center

The isolation of the town center and this whole "new town", really, is testament to bad DNA that actively resists being a real town as the aerial images abundantly demonstrate. The DNA says 1972 through and through, conceived during the height of the orgy of automobility and born into the first oil crisis. Converting Owings Mills into a true urban center or city is as hard as turning a Walmart into a symphony center or a burger into Boeuf Bourguignon.

The site is in the worst kind of sprawl — bisected by major transportation infrastructure, and with nothing to connect to. The Walk Score is 35, and that score is elevated by an adjacent regional mall. The average block size in the area is 78 acres. (Robert Steuteville in Better Towns and Cities, 2013)

This is both a pity and would have been unnecessary with a bit more planning. It is easy to imagine how different it could have been without all the giant car oriented spaces, parking lots, freeway style roadways and ramps all around and without the strict segregation of uses that was the hallmark of seventies planning. The big idea of a "town center" back then was giant mall. That mall was Baltimore County's best for a while but at this time it has become a member of the legion of failed malls nationwide. Also visible on the aerial photo, the mall is an inward looking affair turning its back to the new TOD area adjacent to the subway station. This reflects the landholdings of particular development companies and their ailing relations between them, barely tampered by anything that resembles an ordering public plan.

It is hard to identify the many pockets of development with their curvy streets and dead ends as a part of a town or a master-planned community, the  patterns are much more reminiscent of suburban subdivisions built as demand arises 

For the time being, this new in vitro experiment of high density mixed use called Metro Center is the best that can be achieved, even though the high cost of replacing a sea of surface parking (the park & ride lot) with two high-rise garages increased development cost so much that it required large public subsidies and tax increment financing to get off the ground and gave us those two ugly garages as galleon figures and gateway to the development as seen from the Interstate and from the transit station.

Traditional town: a dense core surrounded by open space,  Gettysburg, PA

In spite of being a partner in the plan, and in spite of these obvious difficulties, Baltimore County government doesn't believe that putting all eggs in one basket would be the right way to achieve a new town with an urban feel.

Instead, always eager to appease powerful friends, council members and administration actively promoted and allowed large developments right at the fringe of both new towns in the County diminishing the impact of what one would want to be the vibrant town centers of White Marsh and Owings Mills.

At White Marsh it is the much embattled new outlet center that distracts from the original commercial core and in Owings Mills it is the gigantic Solo Cup redevelopment, a huge mixed use center rising along Reisterstown Road, not even half a mile away from the TOD. In spite of some nods to new urbanism, the Solo Cup development is really just another strip mall, far set back from the street within a sea of surface parking, just made up in the latest fashion.

The new town of Reston, VA: A slowly growing town center on a road grid

The issue here is maybe less the one of competition but the fact that high density in a suitable space (the Owings Mills TOD) is not offset with preserving or creating open space in another.

Instead, Owings Mills grows at the fringes bleeding into historic Reisterstown and into the woods and meadows that comprised the landscape 50 years ago. This sprawling suburban style development lacks the system of trails and walkways that made the new town of Columbia, MD, conceived at the same, time walkable from day one. It also lacks the originally planned lake, a critical place-making device in Columbia.

It is possible that Owings Mills may grow into being a real town one day, but if it does, it has to do that by fighting its own DNA, just like Tysons Corner, VA.

For now, it is only a model for a private, public partnership between the developer, MTA, and County and for turning wasteful surface commuter parking into high density mixed use development. (The initial request for proposals was issued by MDOT/MTA in 2000). In that it is still rather unique in the Baltimore region.

However, to achieve true urban form, genetic engineering from of a detailed Owings Mills masterplan would be in order. A plan and new code for the long-term strategy of re-inventing Owings Mills from a car centric suburb to a city in its own rights.


Klaus Philipsen, FAIA


Related articles on this blog about reinventing the suburbs:
Reinventing the suburbs: Towson, MD

What the New Town of Columbia can Teach us

LINKS
Howard S. Brown press release
BBJ article about Owings Mills 9/4/15)
Owings Mills History
Op-ed piece in the SUN about Owings Mills
Better Cities and Towns article about Owings Mills
Recommendations of the Transit-Oriented Development Roundtable to the Maryland Sustainable Growth Commission

Here a picture tour through "Metro Center" at Owings Mills:

A plaza in front of the Community College building is still sparsely used. To the right of it one of the 8 level garages
(Photo: ArchPlan)

Rendering and reality are becoming more alike after ground was broken on an additional office building
(Photo: ArchPlan)

a view along the line of completed apartment buildings with ground level retail shows the level
of attention given to the pedestrian experience even though it isn't really an urban one, not
least for the piped in mall music uniformly sounding out of speakers hidden in the planters. (Photo: ArchPlan)

Leasing office and entrance to one apartment building (Photo: ArchPlan)

First signs of life, a birthday party outside of a pizza restaurant

Facades and details follow the usual prescriptions but are pleasant and varied enough to avoid
monotony or make the long block overwhelming even though more architectural variety would be desirable
and more urban (Photo: ArchPlan)

The rubble presumably shows the remnants of what used to be a sea of parking which was replaced with those large garages
and their rather hilarious pilasters sticking up way beyond the top deck or what ordinarily would be a cornice line
(Photo: ArchPlan)

The plaza in front of the County community college and library is a principally desirable move with a design
that is somewhat curious since it suggests a central location when it actually sits in a corner at an intersection which probably would be better with a corner building

This is what is left of Solo Cup on Reistertown Road and will become the place for a mixed use shopping center that

will have a larger footprint than the TOD with much less density. This redevelopment and its proximity to the "town center"

was much debated but the Planning Department deemed it compliant with the County masterplan.

(Photo: ArchPlan)

Project fact sheet as listed by KLNB:

Painters Mill Road @ I-795Owings Mills, MD 

NOW LEASING TO UPSCALE RESTAURANTS & RETAILERS

The Metro Centre is a 46.8 acre transit-oriented mixed use project located on Painters Mill Road which, upon completion, will include:

• Retail: 300,000± square feet with 117,000 square feet delivered in the first phase

• Office: 1.3 million square feet

• Private Residences: 1,700 upscale units

• Hotel: 250 rooms

• College Campus: 80,000 square feet; CCBC expects enrollment of 10,000 students

• State of the Art Library: 40,000 square feet (largest in Baltimore County); Baltimore County Public Library expects 40,000 visitors per month

• Metro Station: To remain and be incorporated into the project, over 5,000 riders board daily at Metro Centre with over 55,000 riders total

• Parking: Multiple garages hosting in excess of 11,000 spaces

• Project has direct highway (I-795) ingress and egress

• Highly visible garage signage opportunities on I-795 for key tenants

• Traffic Counts: I-795 - 119,475 ADT