An Exercise in Community Building
Making complex governance accessible to anyone in the community? And for free?!
The Howard County department of Planning and Zoning offers a 5-week class called the PlanHoward Academy. It is hosted at Howard Community College, and addresses the following topics:
- Introduction to Planning
- Planning & Zoning
- Zoning & Land Development
- Development Review & Enforcement
- Responsible Growth & Informed Citizenry
It has won several awards for how well it engages the community and presents complex topics like zoning and land use.
I think the best part about it is that it is free for anyone in the county to take. It did require an application, but I think they just want a diverse group of people to participate, and the application just asked why someone wants to take the class.
As of this posting, there has only been one session, but I highly recommend it for anyone in HoCo who is wanting to understand their community more.
Session One
The first class was a lot of introductory information about what is Howard County, how much of it is already developed, and where we want to focus development (the primary subject of HoCo By Design, the county’s 10 year plan being approved by the County Council this year).
Demographics and Land Use
The first of the two presentations was about the makeup of Howard County. Being somewhat new to the county (lived here for 10 months at time of writing), I was unaware that HoCo is a majority-minority county. It was also interesting to see we make up about 4% of the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area population.
The really interesting piece was the population growth. Around 1960, HoCo population began a drastic increase. This was when development of Columbia, a planned community, began. The growth has increased since, but is expected to stagnate in the next 20 years because we are running out of land to develop into housing. The western half of the county is rural and most of the land is permanently preserved and cannot be developed. The eastern half of the county, which includes Ellicott City, Columbia, Elkridge, etc., is running out of empty land to develop. The county will not be able to develop land into housing at the same historical rates, so they expect population growth to slow.
HoCo By Design
The second presentation was about HoCo By Design, which is Howard County’s 10 year plan. This year, it is up to the County Council to provide amendments and approve the plan for implementation. The 10 year plan is basically a goal setting document to inform policy-making over the next 10 years. My understanding is that it does not describe precise actions to take in different communities, but rather describes general places to target and ideas to implement over the next 10 years.
The primary areas for proposed redevelopment are Columbia and Elkridge along Route 1. There was a particularly striking image of Columbia before any recent development (basically one large parking lot) and an image to plan for in the future with significantly higher density, even when compared to Columbia today.
I was expecting to hear a lot of the usual American planning ideas like “build lots of single family homes”, “protect current spaces”, etc. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the focus on a “missing middle housing” and goals to build mixed-use communities in the target areas. I am excited to actually read the full plan (it will take a while its a mere 700 pages).
Group Activity
The final event of the night was a group activity. The goal of the activity was to work together to come up with a general redevelopment plan for Columbia Gateway. Currently, Columbia Gateway is a business/office park built in the 80s. There is very little housing, and no real amenities to speak of.
We were put into groups of 5 and each assigned a role: Transit, Business, Housing,Amenities, and Mediator. Everyone except the mediator was given 3 objectives to prioritize High, Medium, and Low. Then we were told to share our priorities and the Mediator was to help guide the discussion to move one objective out of the group’s High down to Medium and another objective out of Medium and down to low.
I think this was an excellent exercise to show the difficulty of planning for a real community. Not everything can be a top priority, even though it all should be. My group ended with affordable multi-family housing, bus transit, and education facilities as our top 3 priorities. One of the most interesting debate topics we had was that “education facility” didn’t have to mean a traditional K-12 school. It could be a branch of the community college or some other community education center.
Conclusion
As I said above, it has only been one session so far, but I highly recommend this class to anyone who lives in Howard County. I expect to either update this post, or make others after each of the sessions depending on how much I have to say about them.
I think community planning and zoning is one of the most important topics for people to care about in their local political environment. They are two of the key spaces where material change can be brought about in our communities, and we must learn about them to be able to create the best environment for ourselves and our neighbors as possible.