Members of the county council want to see more daycare facilities in downtown Silver Spring. But is kid space the same thing as public space?
An Apr 22 zoning change says it is. (The same zoning change also allows the future Fillmore music venue to qualify as public space.) The council was unanimous in approving the whole package, but the eight members were split down the middle when it came to daycare’s role as public space.
“It’s privatized space, walled off from the public. But a public-use space should reflect what a public-use space is,” council member Marc Elrich (D-At large) said before the vote. “It sets a bad precedence.”
On the other side of the coin, council member Nancy Floreen (D-At large) argued that daycare in an urban setting gave everyone a break. If parents didn’t have to bounce from home to their kids’ daycare site to work, traffic and pollution wouldn’t be so bad, she said.
“We need to have these facilities available where we want our county residents to go,” Floreen told her colleagues. Ultimately, the county’s planning board would decide whether daycare worked for a particular project, she added.
And planning board commissioners have previously said they support more kid care in Silver Spring’s central business district. In April, the board gave Discovery Communications a collective thumbs up to convert a sliver of its public garden along Wayne Avenue into a playground for its private daycare facility.
Council member Phil Andrews (D-District 3) wasn’t singing the same tune.
“It’s a private use,” Andrews argued. “The outdoor area of a private daycare isn’t a public space, event though it’s considered a public good.”
So what’s the big deal with public spaces like gardens, urban plazas and now daycare centers? The county requires developers to throw public space into their projects, though how much depends on the individual project’s size, Glenn Kreger, chief of community-based planning with the planning department, explained.
The higher a building goes (or the denser a project is), the more public space it must cough up, Kreger told The Penguin. Developers who don’t have enough real estate to build sweet public space can drop coin into an amenity fund, which will finance public space elsewhere in the central business district, he said.
Developers also have to kick out public facilities and amenities that address a public need, Kreger said. Most often, that’s streetscaping, but it can include daycare, he added. The amount of public facilities and amenities a project has to offer isn’t carved in granite.
“It’s unusual to have public-use space reserved for private, commercial use,” Jeff Zyontz, the county council’s legal eagle, told his clients before their vote.
Lead photo courtesy of Flickr user Russell D Egan.
August 21, 2008
2 Comments at "Space: Kickin’ it with the kiddies"
I don’t have kids, but from what I’ve seen, Silver Spring doesn’t have much in the way of child daycare. Regardless of whether it’s a public space or not, daycare construction is something that the council should encourage as a means of providing smart growth. It’s probably a mistake to get too hung up on “public space” vs “public good”.
It appears that we are opening the doors to having more “businesses” claim to be public spaces now that the Fillmore and daycare centers can be considered public spaces. If a developer comes along and wants to put a McDonald’s in it’s building and the McDonald’s has a kiddie playground on the premises, can the McDonald’s now be considered public space?
I thought public spaces were supposed to be free. It appears I was wrong.
btw- Is the Discovery building ever going to open up that “public garden”? It continues to be locked up every time I pass by it.
Holler back.