Dr. Glenn Moglen, an associate research scientist at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has developed a website that can assist engineers and others in performing watershed analyses in Maryland.

GISHydro is a GIS-based program that contains the data and analysis tools to study any watershed in the state of Maryland. Users may download the stand-alone GISHydro software or link to the web version of GISHydro. The program is capable of assembling data and extracting watershed characteristics and organization for creating hydrologic models. The primary purpose of the GISHydro program is to assist engineers in performing watershed analyses in Maryland, especially to support transportation design projects.

The GISHydro project has been funded by the Maryland State Highway Administration, the Maryland Department of the Environment, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and, more recently, by the Delaware Department of Transportation.

Gerrit-Jan Knaap, executive director of the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, and Dan Nees, director of the Environmental Finance Center, have announced that the two University of Maryland research and technical assistance centers will join forces, effective February 1, 2007. This merger will allow the two centers to work collaboratively on issues such as land use planning, natural resource preservation and urban growth issues.

A large cross section of Marylanders who participated in an innovative exercise to envision the state's future growth placed more new jobs and housing within existing towns and cities, protected open land and green spaces, and asked for better public transit to help their daily commutes.

Their vision for Maryland, expressed through Reality Check Plus, is very different from the current development pattern, from forecasts of how future development will occur, and from what current zoning would allow.

For more information on the training module please click here.

For more information on the Center's China Program, please click here.

Executive Director and Professor Dr. Gerrit Knaap and doctoral candidate Arnab Chakraborty recently completed their third successive year of teaching at the Institute for Housing Studies at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The land policy module is part of a core course in the Master in Urban Management and Development program and is co-sponsored by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, Cambridge, MA.

The module covered topics including property rights, growth issues, urban sprawl and smart growth measures in the United States, introduction to urban economics, spatial analytical methods and GIS. The students successfully completed an exercise on regional analysis for the Baltimore Washington region and had an opportunity to participate in the popular Reality Check game. The program, one of the most diverse of its kind, had students from more than 20 countries.

For more information on the forthcoming Urban Land Policy and Implementation module at IHS in May 2006 please click here.

For information on the Institute for Housing Studies at Erasmus University please click here.

Building on experience gained through participation in last February’s regional Reality Check growth visioning exercise in Washington, D.C., the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education led a Reality Check exercise on November 17th that focused the growth headed for Fredericksburg, Virginia, and surrounding counties.

Interest in holding a Reality Check event for the Fredericksburg area, which included the surrounding counties of Stafford, Spotsylvania, Caroline and King George, was sparked by Bob Hagan, chairman of the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors. Hagan got the idea when he participated in the Washington Reality Check event.

The Fredericksburg event, held at the Riverside Conference Facility, attracted approximately 150 elected leaders, businessmen, developers, environmentalists, government officials and others. Their task was to decide where in their region an estimated 200,000 new residents and 125,000 new jobs projected for the region over the next 25 years should go.

The National Center for Smart Growth project team was led by Arnab Chakraborty, a doctoral candidate in the University of Maryland’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a research assistant at the Center. In addition to collecting data and preparing the base map for the exercise, Chakraborty also pulled together a team made up mostly of University of Maryland graduate assistants who served as computer operators during the exercise to help analyze results of the event.

The operators included Doan Nguyen, Jung Ho Shin, Jason Eversole, Chris Dorney, Amy Neugebauer, Megan McElroy, Sue Edwards, Kathy McKaig-Rak, Wade Gough, Lars Bromley, Jubi Headley, Anton Jerve, Ted Stevens, Dave Traggorth, Neha Bhatt, Jennifer Mueller, Carolina Burnier, and Gulsah Akar. Smart Growth Center’s Associate Director John Frece synthesized and presented the general principles and Executive Director Dr. Gerrit Knaap presented the final summary of results.

The event was sponsored by the Fredericksburg Regional Chamber of Commerce with support from the Urban Land Institute and the Smart Growth Alliance.

To see a PowerPoint file containing pictures from the event, click here.

A new study involving Smart Growth researcher Antonio Bento has shown that urban form and planning have significant impacts on travel behavior, even in the auto-dependent U.S. Planners can impact travel behavior, the vehicle miles traveled, and car ownership rates through promoting higher density land uses, providing housing near employment centers, and focusing more on mass transit.

National Center for Smart Growth researchers Carolyn Voorhees and Kelly Clifton have undertaken a study of out-of-school physical activity levels of high school students. The key questions are how much social, personal, or phsyical aspects of the students' environments impact their levels of physical activity. This study is important due to the growing number of overweight teens and is based on the notion that part of this trend is due to reduced physical activity amongst adolescents.

The National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education will play a prominent role in developing and implementing a new national project designed to educate and assist the nation's governors on issues related to land use and community design. The new Governors' Institute on Community Design, formally announced at an event in Washington, D.C., on July 12th, is a project funded jointly by the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Development and implementation of the project will be largely conducted by the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, a unit within the national organization, Smart Growth America, and the University of Maryland’s National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education in cooperation with NEA and EPA. "This is a good way to share some of the most effective strategies and other pioneering efforts in land use management with the chief executives of states that are trying to do more in this area," said Gerrit Knaap, executive director of the National Center for Smart Growth. “The University of Maryland is proud to be part of this new national effort.?

In the last week of May and the first three weeks of June 2006, the National Center for Smart Growth, 1000 Friends of Maryland and the Baltimore District Council of the Urban Land Institute jointly staged four regional growth visioning exercises around the state of Maryland called "Reality Check Plus." Hundreds of participants at events on the Eastern Shore, in Western Maryland, Central Maryland and Southern Maryland were asked to envision where the growth in jobs and residents projected to come to their respective regions by 2030 should be located.

These four events are the focus of a new article written by NCSG Executive Director Gerrit-Jan Knaap and 1000 Friends Executive Director Dru Schmidt-Perkins appearing in Land Lines, the newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The Cambridge, Mass.,-based Lincoln Institute is a financial support of the Reality Check Plus effort. The article, entitled "Smart Growth in Maryland: Facing a New Reality," can be found at: http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/pub-detail.asp?id=1136

College Park, Md. (April 27, 2006) -- Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances (APFOs) in Maryland are being applied in ways that often deflect development away from the very areas designated for growth, contrary to both the state's Smart Growth land use policy and the underlying intent of the ordinances, according to a new report by the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.

The study, which examined the implementation and effects of APFOs in 12 Maryland counties and the relationship between APFOs and Maryland’s Smart Growth policy, concluded that APFOs sometimes have been inappropriately used, contain school capacity standards and regulations that vary greatly across jurisdictions, and often result in unintended consequences. To read the full press release, please click here.

The full report can be obtained by clicking here. There are also three National Center for Smart Growth working papers investigating APFOs in Maryland:

1) The Effects of Moratoria on Residential Development: Evidence from Harford, Howard, and Montgomery Counties: By Antonio Bento

2) Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances in Maryland: An Analysis of their Implementation and Effects on Residential Development in the Washington Metropolitan Area: By Jim Cohen

Maryland, already the fifth most densely populated state in the nation, is rapidly becoming more crowded. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that Maryland’s population will grow by 1.5 million people and 500,000 jobs by 2030 ?just 24 years from now.

Where will all the 1.5 million new residents live and work? How do we accommodate these new residents and jobs in ways that will expand our economy but protect our environment? These critical questions and others will be explored as part of a series of four regional events known as Reality Check Plus that will take place across Maryland during May / June 2006.

Researchers from the National Center for Smart Growth presented their findings regarding the extant and impact of local moratoriums on development in Maryland's priority funding areas at the 2005 Maryland Conference on Growth.

Moratoriums on growth are put into place through adequate public facilities ordinances (APFOs) which require that existing public infrastructure (e.g. schools, water lines, etc....) are able to accommodate demand from new developments: a governing body can deny a new development if infrastructure is deemed insufficient. One concern is whether moratoria are occuring in priority funding areas; state-designated growth zones where infrastructure improvement funds are directed.

The Smart Growth researchers found there is evidence APFOs could be backfiring leading to higher housing prices and development being pushed away from priority funding areas into areas meant to be preserved. Listed below are links to the Powerpoint presentations given by Smart Growth researchers at the conference:

Adequate Public Facilities Ordinances in Maryland: Prevelance, Practice, and Policy Effects

A Framework for Evaluating the Impacts of Moratorium on Residential Development