We could have had a "central park" too....

A major Washington Post article yesterday highlights how Columbia, MD, the region's other major planned community, is planning to bring a central park to its downtown area.  In an article, "A plan to bring play to Columbia, MD", reporters
Dan Beyers and Jonathan O’Connell quote Michael McCall, president of the Inner Arbor Trust, a group working to refashion Columbia's Symphony Woods into something more, as follows:

“Employers follow employees and employees follow lifestyle,” McCall said. “We have excellent schools and one of the country’s leading library systems, but we need to broaden upon that to satisfy the needs of the 30-year-old professional who is in high demand.”

Wow!  What a refreshing view of what makes a community successful:  "Employers follow employees and employees follow lifestyle."

In Reston, the developer-dominated Reston Task Force position has been and continues to be to build as much office space as can be stuffed into Reston's station areas, even as the demand for office space per worker plummets.  Instead of a substantial central park in North Town Center (RCA has consistently proposed 20 acres or larger) as a major attraction for both families and businesses to settle in Town Center, the current draft plan calls for seven acres of town green --only two more acres of park land than current exist there.

More broadly, developers are trying to limit the allocation of land in areas they develop.  Until the next-to-last draft of the master plan, the draft plan called for a "minimum" of 20 percent open space.  The developer-led effort degraded that standard to a "goal," which is likely rarely, if ever, to be met.  So much for lifestyle and quality of life. 

So instead of employers following employees who are following lifestyle, Reston is looking at developers pushing employment into Reston's station areas in the expectation (in direct opposition to the evidence) that employees will follow no matter the lifestyle.  The closest comparison to this approach is Arlington's Crystal City, chock-o'-block full of office buildings with new efforts to stuff residential buildings into the area even in the absence of substantial open space.

Click here to read the Post's full article.  

And, by the way, we need to work on developing "one of the country's leading library systems."  Thanks to the efforts of a few dozen committed citizens, we have stopped the hemorrhaging, but now the County needs to correct the flawed thinking and budgeting of a half-dozen years to bring the County's libraries up to reasonable standards, much less "leading" standards.