Ye Olde Roland Park Country Club
August 20, 2008
The lordly New York Times has caught wind of the debate in Roland Park over the sale of 17 acres of open space belonging to the Roland Park Country Club to Keswick Multi-Care Center, a company that wants to build a 300-unit eldercare facility with a 400-space parking garage underneath it.
Many Roland Park residents are upset because the sale signals the loss of publicly-used green space to development, and because they say there already sufficient facilities for retirees in the neighborhood.
But the Times couches the dispute largely in terms of what Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the urban planner who designed Roland Park in the late 1800s “to interrupt this city’s concrete sprawl with an oasis of big sky and lush fields,” would have wanted for the neighborhood.
Lifelong-resident Kathy Hudson is quoted as saying, “This is not what the residents or Olmsted had in mind in designing this community,” while 85-year old retirement home denizen Jack Bremermann countered, “It is hard to say what Olmsted would have wanted…but I feel pretty confident that he probably would have some way for elderly people to be a part of the full community.”
Some further research into Olmsted’s life revealed that most of his career was spent working for the preservation of national parks, not planned communities. One account claimed that he valued “the concept of neighborhood-centered development, the differentiation of streets by function, the importance of common open recreational spaces, and the need for continuing maintenance and aesthetic oversight to preserve the quality of the community,” but also, vaguely, that he embraced the idea of “the interrelationship of people and their environment.”
It’s safe to say the jury’s still out on WWFLOD (What Would Frederick Law Olmsted Do?), but isn’t it sort of silly to be quibbling over the speculative desires of a man who died in 1957? Wouldn’t the upset residents of Roland Park, who are likely to lose this battle—it’s a private land deal, essentially, and the community’s Civic League can’t afford to buy the land, so the city is likely to approve the sale—be better served talking about the needs of the community in the here and now, rather than century-old history of their affluent, idyllic neighborhood?
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
Sphere: Related ContentHarbor East construction update
August 19, 2008
On a walk today through Harbor East with H&S Properties Development president Michael Beatty and assistant development manager Christopher Janian, we made time to take a look at the progress over at the Four Seasons / Legg Mason Tower site, which is rising from the ground at a breakneck pace. The above photo montage was put together by Daily Record photographer Rich Dennison using shots he took from the rooftop garage at 720 Aliceanna St., the same building where H&S is based.
Beatty told us that his company is spending $5 million each month, and that 300 excavators are on site working every day. Those numbers, he said, will rise to $20 million and 1,000 as the 1.8 million-square-foot structure continues to grow. It certainly looked busy, with dozens of work crews in fluorescent green vests swarming over the site, hammering at metal, moving rebar and steel and riding around in go-cart-like concrete-smoothing vehicles.
The two phases of the Harbor East expansion, which will include a new headquarters building for money manager Legg Mason and Baltimore’s first five-star hotel, with some pricey luxury condos on top, are expected to be done in 2009 and 2010, respectively.
One interesting thing that Janian mentioned was that the crews are adding one story every eight days to the proposed 24-story Legg tower. He added that the crews stagger the construction of new floors between the north and south sides of the building, so that the concrete is poured for the next story on the southern half of the structure before all the work on the northern half is completed — so the process appears to be going slightly faster than it actually is.
Oh, and that cool, robotic-looking, N-shaped gizmo on top? That’s what pours the concrete into the mold and makes the floor what it is.
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
Sphere: Related ContentAnother week, another crane collapse.
August 15, 2008
This time, it’s at a shipyard outside of Boston.
Crane accidents have been in the news quite a bit lately. First in New York, then in Miami, and locally in Annapolis.
Recently, the state has been talking more about strengthening its oversight of crane use, and Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation officials are touting some new rules they proposed to do that at the Maryland Association of Counties conference this week.
Ron DeJuliis, the state commissioner of labor and industry, said in an interview Friday that he believes the new regulations, which could be in effect by the end of the year, will be some of the strongest in the country.
He said 15 states regulate crane use (Maryland is not among them), but none regulate the riggers who put them together or the signal folks who help operators navigate the machines. DeJuliis said almost all accidents happen when cranes are being put together or dismantled.
Maryland’s new regulations, which must be reviewed by a panel of state lawmakers, would regulate operators, signalers, riggers and people who are being trained.
DeJuliis — formerly a crane operator himself — said he began weighing new safety rules since he became commissioner in February 2007, but he kicked the process into high gear after the New York disaster, and prior to the crash in Annapolis.
ANDY ROSEN, Business Writer
Sphere: Related ContentWill city taxes really stop returning suburbanites?
August 8, 2008
In May, while in Las Vegas on assignment for The Daily Record I happened to interview C. William “Bill” Struever, the successful developer who heads the Baltimore company Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, who was there for a conference. We chatted about many things, including the state of the economy and the price of oil, and one memorable thing he said to me was this:
Clearly, these are uncertain times, but I think there’s a very helpful aspect of $120-a-barrel oil, which is the end of this destructive and wasteful fascination with suburbs and cars.
This idea resurfaced in my mind as I read two cover stories recently, one in The Washington Post and another in The New Republic. Both dealt with what academics, demographers and developers have known for years, what the Post calls “suburban migration” and TNR calls “demographic inversion”—affluent people are moving back to major U.S. cities in high numbers and pricing low-income city folks out of neighborhoods that have typically been associated with poverty, crime and urban decay.
The Post pins this almost exclusively on high gas prices, which it says are now the number two financial concern for American families, while TNR points to the retail, transit and cultural amenities that are returning to cities and attracting young professionals to live downtown.
I was trying to think of how this trend applies to Baltimore, and what the city can do to accommodate returning suburban exiles. Certainly, neighborhoods like Canton, Fells Point and Federal Hill have benefited from yuppies’ renewed interest, and many more areas stand to gain as well.
There has also been a lot of chatter lately about how to attract businesses and residents back to the city, and a lot of it involves building a more comprehensive mass transit system and lowering property taxes. Baltimore has a property tax rate nearly double that of surrounding suburbs. Some believe that high taxes have crippled Baltimore’s ability to attract and keep businesses headquartered in our town.
But if what these publications and Bill Struever say is true, why worry about the tax rate at all?
If the people and businesses are coming back to the city for reasons that have nothing to do with property taxes, why not keep property taxes sky-high, and really build the city’s tax base? That way, we’ll have more money in the general fund to improve infrastructure and mass transit, to provide social services to rich and poor alike and to concentrate on large-scale public works. Why not welcome reformed suburbanites with open arms and ask them to open their wallets?
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
Sphere: Related ContentReservoir run dry
July 22, 2008
The Washington Post led its business section today with a front-page story about the foreclosure crisis and how it affects gentrifying urban neighborhoods like Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill. The article centers on a debate in Congress over $4 billion in emergency aid to bail out homeowners such as those in the central Baltimore neighborhood, whose investments presumably would have changed the area for the better.
Baltimore Housing commissioner Paul Graziano is quoted criticizing the current presidential administration, saying, “They don’t understand the market dynamics here at all…We can let the market adjust and see the last seven or eight years of investment go down the tubes. Or we can intervene now to reclaim this inventory and protect these neighborhoods.” Read more
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