A once in a generation opportunity has presented itself to
Our New Downtown must be economically viable. It must be a place that people want to live and visit, a place that businesses want to locate and a place whose property values will support the highest quality school system, transportation infrastructure, public safety services and social services.
Our New Downtown must be safe. It must generate sufficient tax revenues to pay for a expansion of the Police and Fire Departments that will be needed to ensure public safety. Our New Downtown must be well lit and encourage round-the-clock pedestrian traffic.
Our New Downtown must be Energy Efficient. A pedestrian-friendly philosophy should be adopted. Greater population density should be allowed. Greater population density would make mass transit economically feasible. A large pedestrian population would encourage non-car dependent businesses. Future downtown residents should be able to adopt an automobile-free lifestyle: made possible by our downtown's pedestrian friendliness and excellent mass transit.
Our new Downtown must be clean, healthy and beautiful. We need to dedicate a significant portion of downtown to well designed and maintained parks and public places. We need to ensure a sufficiently economically viable downtown to enable us to maintain our parks and public places.
Our new downtown must be fun, interesting and culturally enriching. In addition to providing for parks and public spaces, we need to ensure the availability of cultural and entertainment facilities including Merriweather-Post, museums, nightclubs and an expanded and improved
Our new downtown must offer a diverse range of housing options. Everything from rental units to privately owned units, from expensive units to affordable units.
What do you want
2 comments:
Very nice post!
It is refreshing to read a reasoned and thoughtful treatise on the Town Center development process. Too much of the conversation has focused on building heights and using Town Center to solve the county's affordable housing challenges.
The key stakeholder in this effort is General Growth Properties. They own the land. They have an obligation to their shareholders to create the highest value from this holding. My experience with them leads me to believe that they thoughts are closely aligned with yours.
Doesn't Town Center already have all of those things?
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