Maryland Scenario Project

For up-to-date project documents and materials, please follow this link:
Phase I
Workshop 1 (03/26/2007) Documents and Materials
Workshop 2 (04/30/2007) Documents and Materials
Workshop 3 (05/23/2007) Documents and Materials

Phase II
Workshop 4 (09/19/2007) Documents and Materials

There is broad agreement that Maryland is subject to market, demographic, political, and policy forces that will encourage and allow it to grow. That growth of people, jobs, and buildings has economic benefits for current and future residents and businesses. But it also has effects, many of which are negative, on environmental quality, mobility, cost of living, and many other aspects of quality of life in the state of Maryland.

Many of the problems of growth and development are regional in nature, but most of the capacity to deal with the problem is local. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (e.g., the Baltimore Metropolitan Council) can take a regional view, but their focus is transportation; they lack implementing and enforcement authority in the area of land development, economic development, and environmental quality; and they cover only a small percentage of Maryland's land area.

The state increasingly confronts issues and decisions of statewide significance: traffic congestion in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, rapid development in Southern Maryland and the Eastern Shore, and economic revitalization in Western Maryland. What would happen if further BRAC decisions continued to distribute jobs to the far corners of the state, if a second bridge connected Maryland's Eastern and Western Shores, or if commuter rail were connected and extensive between the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas?

REALITY CHECK AND PLUS

The National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education has been working for the past two years to engage the public in a dialog about the future growth of the state. Where and how will the substantial growth expected for the state over the next 20 to 50 years be accommodated?

The effort began with Reality Check Plus, a statewide public participation exercise conducted in May and June, 2006. In that exercise, the Center partnered with 1000 Friends of Maryland and the Urban Land Institute to convene nearly 850 Maryland residents, in four locations across the state, to express a vision for the future of the state using LEGOs(R) on a map. (See www.realitycheckmaryland.org for a copy of the report Today's Vision, Tomorrow's Reality, September 2006.)

But Reality Check Plus was just an initial step of a larger and longer program for research and engagement. For the next steps the partnership has been reorganized into a coalition referred to as PLUS: Partnership for Land Use Success. The principals in that coalition are the Center, the Home Builders Association of Maryland, 1000 Friends of Maryland, the Maryland Municipal League, the Citizens Planning and Housing Association, and the Greater Baltimore Urban League. PLUS sees the technical work described in this document as part of a larger effort to get agreement on direction for growth and on state and local policy to move it in that direction.

Reality Check Plus identified how participants around the state desired growth to occur. But it only conducted a cursory evaluation of how likely that pattern would be. What forces support and constrain the desired pattern? What other patterns are likely? Which might public policy be able to influence? How and how much? Those are the questions this project will address.

For more information, please refer to Maryland Scenario Project Summary