Baltimore City’s Planning Department has released a draft comprehensive plan for the city. It is 349 pages long and well-designed in a graphic sense, and it deals with many of the things that Baltimore City does. (You can read it all, or a summary, at https://www.planourbaltimore.com/.)
The good news is that it doesn’t recommend any significant changes to Bolton Hill – not any changes at all, as far as I can tell. More good news: it endorses the recommendation of Live Baltimore and the Baltimore Development Corporation that the city should grow by an average of 7,000 net new households over the next five years.
This is a big deal. Most people think that Baltimore is doomed to decline, but the Live Baltimore study was done by the best market research analysts in the country, and it is buoyantly optimistic. The latest figures from the U.S. Bureau of the Census support that optimism. Between 2017 and 2022, the city grew by 17,500 households. That’s 7.5% of all the households in the city.
There’s some bad news, however. Although the plan doesn’t recommend any nasty changes to Bolton Hill, it also doesn’t recommend that the planning department stop doing something bad that it has been doing for several years. The department is on a kick of increasing density. This is mostly because trends in city planning are set in cities where there’s a big pinch in housing costs. Since the cheapest way of increasing density is to allow people to subdivide houses, Baltimore’s planning department is all in favor of that.
Bolton Hill is the last place in the world to monkey with the ratio of single-family houses to multi-family houses. We’ve got it right, and other neighborhoods should learn from us. What does it mean to get this right? Well, for starters, 70% of our three-story houses are single-family, almost all of them with owner-occupants. This is why the neighborhood is well-maintained, and why there’s a steady stream of volunteers for Arts in the Parks, Festival on the Hill, the garden club, the pool and even BHCA itself.
But two out of every three households in our three-story houses are renters. And our renters, two-thirds of our households, give us youth, energy, and diversity.
Wait a minute, I hear you saying, How can this be? The answer is that each of our rental houses has a lot of apartments. I strongly recommend to BHCA’s leadership that we engage the Planning Department directly to maintain the status quo. We have the best status quo in town.
Otherwise, the draft comprehensive plan is not required reading. Despite its impressive name, it isn’t comprehensive, and it isn’t a plan. A true comprehensive plan for a city would set some common goals and tell you what the various city departments are going to do to achieve them.
You won’t find this in our city’s draft comprehensive plan, which is basically just a laundry list of the things that various municipal departments are already doing. There’s no evidence that the planners tried to edit what other departments submitted. Nor is there any evidence that they tried to influence what the other departments want to do. In Baltimore, our Planning Department and Planning Commission don’t have the authority to tell other city departments what to do. The only big thing we have authorized our Planning Department to do is to create and maintain a zoning ordinance. While this is far from trivial, it is only one element of what an ordinary comprehensive plan should address.
The most obvious omission is planning for transportation. The relation between land use and transportation isn’t rocket science. If we want people to use land, we should make sure they can get to it, preferably without annoying the rest of us or damaging the environment. Most zoning issues in neighborhoods like ours are really transportation issues, because they all come down to parking.
For all I know the Department of Transportation has its own plan but, dollars to donuts, it isn’t coordinated with the Planning Department’s comprehensive plan. Perhaps that’s why Baltimore’s biggest and densest developments, Harbor East and Baltimore Peninsula, have nowhere nearly enough public transit. It’s why they have monstrous parking garages and cause, or threaten to cause, ridiculous traffic tie-ups.
— Charlie Duff lives on Lanvale St. He is a newly retired developer and planner and an authority on Baltimore’s architecture and development.
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