A proposed change to the county’s zoning laws may not do enough to discourage developers from building “ineffective” public-use spaces, argues Silver Spring’s citizens advisory board.
Current zoning law allows developers to convert 20 percent of a project’s footprint into public-use space, in exchange for the opportunity to construct a larger building.
Above: Discovery Communications constructed this gated garden along Wayne Avenue, plus an open plaza at Wayne and Georgia avenues. In exchange, the county allowed them to build a larger building.
“On large projects, that works very well to create a high-quality public space,” Mark Bombaugh, a resident member of the advisory board’s commercial and economic development committee, told the advisory board at its monthly meeting Monday night.
“The problem now is that that standard is being applied to very small lots,” Bombaugh said. What results are alleys “dressed up as public space” and unusually wide sidewalks, like the one outside The Crescent condominiums, he added.
Above: The developer of a project at 8700 Georgia Ave (left) wants to offer an alley as public-use space. Wayne Avenue’s Crescent condominium (right) has a widened sidewalk as its public-use space.
To avoid the creation of “pocket parks”, the county council has proposed a change to the zoning law. The change would give developers the option to pay into a capital improvements fund, instead of assigning 20 percent of its footprint to public space.
The problem, the advisory board says, is that there is no incentive for developers to choose the payout option. According to Bombaugh, recouping that 20 percent of the footprint does not allow a developer to increase the building’s overall square footage.
For example, a project with a 20,000 square-foot footprint could surrender 4,000 square feet (20 percent) for public-use space in exchange for a larger building. That would leave a 16,000 square-foot footprint on which to build.
After the planning department crunches the numbers and considers the public-use space, it might allow the developer to construct a 60,000 square-foot building.
However, the proposed zoning change would not allow the project to exceed that 60,000 square-foot volume, even if its developer chooses to keep the entire 20,000 square-foot footprint in exchange for a monetary contribution.
“The system is broken,” board member Darian Unger told his colleagues. “The ZTA [zoning text amendment] tries to fix it, but it’s not going to.”
Updated Sep 12, 2007, at 8:25 a.m.
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If the 20% doesn’t reach some minimum “usable and practical” public space, the ONLY option should be to pay into the fund. That will both prevent these useless pocket parks as well as benefiting the community when the fund has enough to pay for significant improvements. However, the payment should NOT be so large as to provide ANY incentive to just build shorter buildings in the urban-zoned CBD. This option should be a no-brainer for developers to build truely urban buildings in the urban district.
Public spaces need to be inviting. This past weekend I hung out in a pocket park behind my sister’s condo building in Manhattan. I went there to smoke a cigar, upon pain of death should I light up in her apartment.
The park was small, but it had benches all around and trees and shrubs, and it was filled with squirrels and birds. It was a great place to just hang out, unlike the dreadful and sterile pocket parks featured in this article.