FROM THE burgeoning metropolitan areas of Baltimore and Washington to the rural Eastern Shore, the 2002 elections brought renewed attention to Smart Growth and the issues Maryland is addressing with its innovative response to urban sprawl.
As this debate continues into a new political era, it is important to reiterate what the Smart Growth initiative is all about and recommit to the goals we set five years ago as we embarked on these reforms.
The need to recast our development patterns is as urgent as ever. For at least half a century, Americans have been moving farther and farther from established cities and towns, and Maryland is no exception. In the last three decades of the 20th century, our population increased by 37 percent while the amount of land we developed to accommodate all of those people grew more than three times as fast, at 124 percent.
The most obvious consequence of all this spreading out has been an alarming loss of green space to subdivisions and strip malls. But there have been other harmful impacts.
The extra driving has created severe air quality problems, including 17 code red days last summer during which people were advised to limit outdoor activity. The concrete and asphalt crisscrossing our landscape are dumping more polluted runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. Older communities are struggling with boarded-up buildings, crumbling roads and schools and pockets of concentrated poverty.
No city has suffered more from this trend than Baltimore, which lost about one-third of its population over the past 50 years.
Smart Growth, adopted as a series of laws in 1997, is a comprehensive effort to reverse this trend. It is not, as critics and cynics sometimes argue, a "no growth" or "slow growth" agenda. Nor is it an anti-suburb, anti-auto movement.
Maryland's Smart Growth policies and programs were built around the recognition that growth is inevitable -- and vital for a healthy economy. The aim is to provide more choice in housing and transportation, not less. But equally important, Smart Growth acknowledges that the state can no longer afford to support development anywhere and everywhere, at any cost.
Maryland chose not to take away local land-use authority, a move that has had mixed results elsewhere in the country. Instead, we are using fiscal policy and incentives to steer development to places where infrastructure is already in place or planned.
Today, state agencies will not fund new highways, sewer plants and other growth-related needs outside existing communities and designated growth areas.
At the same time, we have created a raft of incentives to encourage growth in these priority funding areas, from tax credits rewarding job creation and historic preservation to neighborhood business loans. We also have dramatically increased funding to protect the state's best farmland and critical natural areas.
With the full force of the state's $22 billion budget behind it, Smart Growth is having an impact. Consider what's happening in Baltimore, where new Census estimates show the steep population decline may be coming to an end.
In 2000 and 2001 alone, the city attracted about $135 million in private investment in commercial rehabs tied to the state's historic preservation tax credit. The American Can Co., Tide Point and Montgomery Park projects, in particular, relied heavily on tax credits, brownfield cleanup assistance and other state support. Each brought significant employment back to formerly abandoned buildings, with a combined total of about 2,650 jobs so far.
Another heartening story is unfolding in the city's west side, a historic gem that had suffered years of abandonment and blight but today is bustling with redevelopment, including Bank of America's Centerpoint, a 394-unit apartment and retail project. It was only a year ago that the area's first major historic tax credit project, the Atrium apartments, was completed with the renovation of the 1924 Hecht Co. department store.
Outside Baltimore, smaller cities and suburban communities from Westminster to Dundalk are using state grants and other assistance to bolster revitalization efforts. And rural areas are better protected from sprawl, with more than $30 million approved in recent years to preserve thousands of acres of farms and ecologically important land in the region.
Clearly, we have come a long way in five years, with similar trends taking hold in every corner of the state. But as we contemplate the future of Smart Growth in Maryland, we must continue to raise our expectations, while being patient about results.
Development patterns are a long-term phenomenon shaped by the complex interplay of public policy and private enterprise. We have a decision-making framework that is fiscally responsible and realistic about market forces. Going forward, we need to build on it. The health of our economy, our environment and every Maryland community is at stake.
Parris N. Glendening is governor of Maryland.