A hard-hat-clad Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. revved up a Bobcat on Wednesday and plowed through the abandoned pharmacy counter in a long-shuttered Giant Foods on Liberty Road. Community members and county workers cheered the beginning of demolition to create the Liberty Center, a 39,000-square-foot building that will house a branch of the Community College of Baltimore County and offices of the county's workforce development and social services departments. The moment was both a reminder of progress Mr. Smith's administration has made through its commitment to improving the much-maligned Liberty Road corridor and of the challenges his successor will face.
By the time Mr. Smith took office in 2002, Randallstown residents had been complaining for years that the dingy expanse of aging strip malls and fast-food joints that lined Liberty Road almost continuously from the Beltway to the Carroll County line gave a false impression of their community. To look at things, you'd have no idea that the median household income there is higher than in Owings Mills, homeownership rates are higher than Catonsville's and about the same as Towson's, housing values are higher than in Reisterstown, and the percentage of adults with post-secondary education is higher than in Perry Hall. It's a stable community of middle-class families, most of whom happen to be African-American. Whether race has anything to do with it is unclear, but the commercial strip that is Randallstown's face to the world looked like nobody had bothered to invest a dime since the 1960s.
What residents were asking for doesn't sound like much. They wanted some big box stores and some sit-down, national chain restaurants — something like a Chili's or a TGI Friday's. It's fashionable to decry the big box stores and chain restaurants that make one suburb look like the next from one end of the nation to the other. But things have always looked a little different in Randallstown. Decry all you want the homogenizing effects of corporate America, but what if you started to feel like corporate America didn't even think you were good enough to homogenize?
Mr. Smith concentrated the earliest efforts in his plan to bring "renaissance" to the county's older communities on the east side, but Randallstown came soon after. As he had in Dundalk, Mr. Smith brought in a team of urban designers to work with community members in an intensive effort to reimagine their community. Some of the ideas they came up with were radical — say, running a granite median down Liberty Road and transforming the intersection of Liberty and Old Court roads into a high-density town center. But the urgent message from the community was more modest. Some 400 people showed up at Randallstown High School for a public meeting as part of the process, and as county Community Conservation Director Mary Harvey remembers it, about 399 of them asked for a community center.
It took nearly six years, but they got it. Tucked away behind a senior center near the intersection of Liberty Road and Brenbrook Drive is a $13 million, 58,000-square-foot community center, the largest in the county. When it comes to deciding between making something cheap or making it good, Baltimore County usually tends toward cheap, but not in this case. The community center is a spotless, modern building featuring a gym, indoor track, swimming pool, theater, computer lab and meeting rooms. It's used from morning to night.
Meanwhile, Mr. Smith and his economic development team started attending the International Shopping Center Convention in Las Vegas and aggressively pitching Randallstown. The message, Mr. Smith said, was that what people thought they knew about Randallstown didn't reflect the reality, and he had statistics to prove it. His first big coup: A Home Depot moved into an abandoned K-Mart next to the site of the new community center. Better yet, Wal-Mart has plans to build a 160,000-square-foot store on the other side of the street in the Liberty Plaza shopping center, a project that has been held up by concerns over who will be liable for some pollutants left behind on the site years ago by a dry cleaner.
The chain restaurant issue was a more complicated problem. Not only did the county have to do the same sales job it did for the Wal-Marts of the world, but it also had to contend with antiquated liquor laws that hinder economic development. No restaurant chain or individual can have more than three liquor licenses in Baltimore County. That meant they looked first to places like Owings Mills, Towson and White Marsh, making Liberty Road a tough sell. But in what for many Randallstown residents could mark the most welcome sign of the corridor's changing fortunes, the restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday plans to build a restaurant near the northwest corner of Liberty and Brenbrook. The restaurant chain is waiting for the Wal-Mart to come, but the county has been trying to convince the chain that the location will be a success whether it benefits from the traffic generated by the retailer or not, and that's surely true. Randallstown residents have long griped about having to drive to Owings Mills to spend their money.
There are other positive signs as well. Northwest Hospital just opened a new Class A office building on its campus off of Old Court Road, expanding what is the biggest employment base in the community. Several of the shopping centers along Liberty Road have gotten facelifts in recent years and, despite the recession, commercial vacancies along the corridor are no worse than the county average — and better than Towson or Owings Mills. Finally, the new branch of CCBC at the Liberty Center, which will focus on training students for careers in the building trades and health care, will not only provide benefits for the immediate community but will also help make it a destination for people from other areas, something Liberty Road has never been. If you don't live there, chances are you've had no reason to visit.
But as much as the county's takeover of that abandoned Giant was greeted as good news, it is also a reminder of the substantial obstacles the Liberty Road corridor still faces. A county building might be a good fit for the location — a similar use has worked well for the former site of a Caldor on York Road just north of the city line and has sparked some new development nearby, including a Panera, Chipotle, Pei Wei Asian Diner and a pair of drugstores. But it was not the first choice of the commercial real estate company that owns and manages the center. After Giant closed, the center's owners were unable to find another retail tenant that was interested in a building of that size, shape and configuration.
Similar problems bedevil redevelopment up and down the corridor, the legacy of short-sighted zoning decisions decades ago. The shopping centers sit on narrow lots, and they are often divided among multiple owners, many of them out-of-town real estate trusts, making the assembly of suitable parcels for modern development next to impossible. That partially explains why the improvements that have come to Randallstown are somewhat hidden — neither of the two nicest new buildings in the area, the community center and the new Northwest Hospital office building, is visible from York Road. It took some convincing to get Home Depot into its location for the same reason. The Liberty Center building won't face Liberty Road either.
Former County Executive C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger tried to solve the problem by including parcels along Liberty Road in a condemnation-for-redevelopment plan more than a decade ago. But another part of his proposal sparked fierce resistance on the county's east side, and it was defeated at referendum, throwing out the plan for Liberty Road, too. Since then, the idea of condemnation has been a political nonstarter in Baltimore County. The economic development department is trying a softer approach, bringing together businesses and property owners voluntarily to talk about ideas for jointly redeveloping a 50-acre area around the intersection of Liberty and Old Court roads.
It's a noble effort, and, along with the Liberty Center, is a testament to the Smith administration's commitment to the area. But it's also a bit of a long shot. Despite the progress Randallstown has made over the last eight years, it still hasn't reached its potential. As much as Mr. Smith has focused on Liberty Road, his successor is going to have to take an even more direct role if the quality of the amenities in that community is ever going to truly match the expectations of the people who live there.