At last, Downtown Columbia nears construction

The late developer James Rouse’s idea of creating an urban center in Columbia, Maryland, may begin to be realized soon — nearly five decades after his town was planned — with the construction of 380 apartments plus ground-floor retail and a public promenade.

A 5- to 6-story building is expected to be underway in early 2013 for the first phase of providing the 1960s “new town” with an urban downtown. Kettler of McLean, Virginia, is the building developer, Howard Hughes Corp. (HHC) the master developer, and the architect and urban designer is Design Collective of Baltimore.

Downtown Columbia, which now consists mostly of a large enclosed mall, is slated to receive up to 13 million square feet of new development. “That includes 5,500 residential units, 5 million square feet of office space, 1 million square feet of retail and 640 hotel rooms,” says the Washington Business Journal.

Rouse’s dream of an urban center was thwarted by zoning that allowed only  commercial development in the heart of the sprawling suburb of 100,000 people, located about 12 miles from Baltimore and 40 miles from DC. In 2005 a charrette sponsored by then-owner Rouse Company (HHC was a subsidiary) arrived at the current plan, which won a Charter Award from the Congress for the New Urbanism in 2006.

General Growth Properties (GGP), a national mall owner, subsequently purchased Rouse, but then filed for bankruptcy in the mortgage crisis of 2008. As GGP emerged from bankruptcy in 2010, HHC was spun off as a separate firm with control of the town center land.

As the economy suffered and ownership changed, the plan moved through the public process, with many stakeholders pushing for affordable housing, arts and cultural programs, sustainable design, and an improved public realm, Matt D’Amico of Design Collective told Better! Cities & Towns. Finally, the project is nearly ready for construction.

Large-scale sprawl repair

The town center consists of the massive mall surrounded by parking and a ring road — all scaled to accelerated automobile traffic. Transforming this to a walkable place will amount to “sprawl repair” on a very large scale. The plan calls for breaking up asphalt superblocks into smaller blocks and forming several “neighborhoods,” the first named Warfield.

Warfield, on the northwest side of the mall, includes about 10 urban blocks, the first of which is to be built by Kettler, which constructed several buildings in new urban Reston Town Center, D’Amico says. The entire first phase includes several blocks with a total of 817 units and 50,000 square feet or retail.
 “The County approved the plan with conditions that all new downtown development help to fund a

Downtown Partnership, an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, phased construction of several new downtown parks, greens, and squares, a complete new ‘sustainable and complete street network,’ separate Design Guidelines for each new Downtown District (Neighborhood), and other considerations,” D’Amico says. The project is LEED Silver and includes walk-up units at ground level in addition to the street-activating retail, he adds.

The building takes up an entire block, but will be visually separated into two halves, notes the Baltimore Sun: “The five-story northern half will house three or four retail tenants on the first level, with frontage toward the mall … The six-story southern half of the building will contain a seven-level parking garage with 675 to 750 spaces, completely surrounded by residential units.

“In between the building and the mall will be a 34,500 square-foot public promenade, featuring a playground with small-scale structures designed to look like artwork,” the Sun reports.

“So far, the public and political support for this has been absolutely overwhelming,” D’Amico notes. “It’s been a pretty interesting several years.”