Last year, Gov. Parris N. Glendening of Maryland gave one of the best speeches I have ever heard about ways to effect urban redevelopment.
When introducing his "Smart Growth" initiative, the governor openly lamented his state's historic growth pattern. He speculated that, without intervention, Maryland would become "a beautiful memory that his children will never share."
He pointed out how the federal government has implemented policies that have encouraged urban sprawl and how -- if left unchanged -- those policies will lead to the demise of our open spaces.
Smart Growth is a concept where a state would no longer use taxpayer dollars to promote sprawl or the "abandonment" of cities. Rather, public funds would only be used to revitalize existing communities and preserve open space.
| Smart Growth is a concept where a state would no longer use taxpayer dollars to promote sprawl or the "abandonment" of cities. Rather, public funds would only be used to revitalize existing communities and preserve open space. |
The governor not only outlined incentives that would target the redevelopment of urban areas, but went one important step further. He outlined what he called disincentives that would discourage the development of "greenfields," or undeveloped areas.
I consider this to be a revolutionary idea that I believe will eventually become commonplace. By making it state policy to discourage particular types of economic development, the governor has made a bold and exciting first step, and forged a path that many other governors are beginning to follow. It seems to be catching on.
Companies, therefore, need to adapt. After all, corporate America has been the driving force in the acceleration of urban sprawl. Now is the time to reverse that trend. Companies must rethink their own expansion policies in order to comply with the new Smart Growth way of thinking.
Until now, their reluctance to invest in the inner city has been understandable. With the specter of environmental contamination, many companies have stayed away from inner city sites in fear of the enormous liability issues. Fortunately, those liability issues are quickly being addressed by state legislatures across the country, in favor of redevelopment.
Realistically, no tax credit or abatement could compare to the devastating costs of finding latent groundwater contamination at a later date, and companies know this.
Now that real liability protection is being put in place, in conjunction with lucrative incentives that encourage targeted development, the groundwork for a massive revitalization of the inner city is almost underway.
With land preservation becoming more and more prevalent for so many political reasons, I predict that companies will soon be considering sites that they would have never even looked at only five years ago.
Eventually, developing a "brownfield" will be so much less expensive than developing a greenfield that inner cities will once again become viable places to live and work. Considering that unemployment continues to be the most pervasive in our inner cities, the creation of jobs close to where unemployed people live will turn out to be the nation's best solution to welfare and its only solution to urban sprawl.
It's now up to companies to take the next step and do their part. Smart Growth is a policy whose time has come.
You can read Gov. Glendening's full address at http://www.gov.state. md.us/gov/speech/html/brooksg1.html.
John Skowronski is director of proactive incentive programs at Mintax, an East Brunswick, N.J., economic development firm specializing in incentives.
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