Arguments about development on the coast have obviously been going on for a long, long time and I'm new here, having just moved from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. And while I was there I witnessed a great deal of development. Here is what I saw:
I rented an apartment in Germantown, just north of Rockville. Germantown, once upon a time, was nothing more than a train stop in the midst of rolling farmland. When I got there, it still had large tracts of fields and retained some of its rural flavor. Four years later, after I bought a house a few miles away, I would return to my old neighborhood, and promptly get lost.
|
|
Where there used to be a field there now stretched a shopping plaza. Next to it, there is another shopping plaza, this one with a set of movie screens. Two minutes down the road from that plaza, was of course, the "big box" plaza with Sam's Club, Target, and all the rest. Mixed in among these bland shopping "destinations" were row upon row of beige, light-yellow, and light-blue townhouses. There were thousands and thousands of them. A sea of cheaply built "clone homes."
I'd get lost again heading south from there on Great Seneca Highway. I'd turn into the wrong plaza because the plazas all looked the same. Was the one I wanted the one with the McDonald's or the one without? It was hard to remember.
Continuing on a few minutes more, you come to The Kentlands. This is a trophy to the "New Urbanism" movement, where houses are built close together not to maximize units per acre but to encourage the building of friendships and neighborly relations.
You're supposed to walk there, passing friends who are relaxing on the ubiquitous front porches. The houses are all attractive there and no clone homes in sight. They've got large houses and small, townhouses and apartments, and shopping right there on Main Street. They've got a strict building approval process that would make Coastsiders blink. ("Tell me again, Mr. Boville, about your selection of font for that sign...")
It's a development you want to love. It's a good idea, well executed. And I might love it, someday. It needs to grow, to become more natural.
Most developers are in it for the short term. Their relationship with the neighborhood ends with the driving of the last nail and the sale of the last house. The Kentlands attempts to recreate a time and place in America. It is a place with character; it's where neighbors know their neighbors. Places where people can live and not just commute from there.
The Kentlands tries hard to be a place that is actually a place.
They want to be, in fact, a place very much like the Coastside. That might be a surprising thought to some - that others might seek to strive for what has occurred naturally here. But that is the key. We have something valuable here.
When I first moved to Maryland, I
cheerfully asked a fellow shopper in the grocery store check-out line, "How do you like living here?" I was trying to make small talk. Her answer surprised me: "It is," she said, "the most soulless place I've ever lived."
Will the same be said about the Coastside in 20 years?
Darin Boville now lives in Montara.
w