A Framework Plan for Preservation and Growth in Creswell, Harford County, Maryland
Creators: name: Ali, Bilal
name: Latimer, Sarah
name: MacKereth, Nick
name: Nye, Kari
name: Ottalini, Russ
name: Smith, Jerah
name: Weller, AnnaLinden
Publisher: name: Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS)
Year: 2019
Subjects: National Center for Smart Growth
PALS
Sustainability
Maryland
Harford County
Housing and community development
Urban Studies and Planning
Environmental planning
Green infrastructure
Public works
Economic development
Landscape architecture
Agricultural economy
Land preservation

description: Final project for URSP688D: Recent Developments in Urban Studies; Scenario Planning Workshop (Spring 2019). University of Maryland, College Park.
description: Creswell is a 13,000-acre area (approximately 20 square miles) in Harford County that lies between the arms of the county’s longstanding Development Envelope (DE). The Development Envelope forms an inverted ‘T’ that connects Bel Air to I-95 via the MD Route 24 corridor to I-95, and then runs south of I-95 along the length of the county. The Creswell area lies in the northeastern corner of this T, between Bel Air and Aberdeen (Figure ES-1). Creswell is a fine-grained mixture of farms, large lot homes, forested areas, and parks, as Figure ES-2 shows. HarfordNEXT, the county’s 2016 Masterplan, designated Creswell as a study area. The proposed study was to focus on current and future infrastructure needs in Creswell, especially for transportation. HarfordNEXT calls for a comprehensive analysis of facilities needed to serve the area and asserts that future development must be compatible with the preservation of Creswell’s rural character. This mandate is the basis for the present study, conducted under the auspices of the University of Maryland’s PALS program in the spring semester of 2019. The HarfordNEXT language about the Creswell study is also the basis for five of this report’s goals: Conserve Farming; Protect the Environment; Preserve Rural Character; Minimize Traffic Impacts; Maintain Adequate Infrastructure. In addition to these goals, the team added two others: Provide Additional Housing; Ensure Positive Fiscal Impact. Our choice of adding the housing goal is detailed below. We assumed that positive fiscal impact is always a goal, but one that needed testing. Harford County, like most of Maryland’s central counties, adopted their rural zoning and rural–urban boundary in the late 1970s. Like the rest of those counties, Harford has not much expanded these boundaries since. However, a growing Washington-Baltimore region, 40 years of ongoing housing demand, and a self-limited housing supply has, predictably, produced accelerating housing costs. Harford County estimates that its present supply of residential projects and land will accommodate about 14,000 more homes—enough to provide housing for the next 14 years or so at the county’s assumed rate of housing growth. The other central Maryland counties have even less capacity. Baltimore County has 13 years of housing supply left. Anne Arundel and Howard have five and six years left, respectively, and Montgomery has 17 years to go. The remaining housing capacity in the above listing refers to building on “greenfield” sites as opposed to new growth through redevelopment. But urban redevelopment requires market pressures sufficient to justify this slow and costly route to provide more housing. Counties that are part of the dynamic job growth of the DC region, like Montgomery, Anne Arundel and Howard have stronger prospects of being able to support redevelopment than those like Harford, northeast of the slow-growing Baltimore region. But even in the DC related counties, redevelopment has not yet taken off. This study therefore discounts it as a source of significant future growth, especially since Harford’s housing prices are still significantly lower than the other counties facing buildout, as Figure ES-3 shows. This same figure, however, also, also shows Harford as being the only county with increasing housing values, suggesting the future escalation of county housing costs. Of course, the county could simply choose “not to grow” in any significant way. We tested the impacts of this “trend” or “business as usual” scenario in Creswell. We found that because of general background traffic growth, congestion becomes considerably worse by 2040, even with planned improvements; schools reach their student capacity limits and require either expansion or addition; and the Fire and Emergency Medical Services available to Creswell residents, already below the County’s goal for response times, will continue to be insufficient. Rural character, a prized attribute of Creswell, will be much compromised by current trends. Further, while a fiscal surplus would be realized by building out the remaining housing capacity at the current zoning of 750 homes in Creswell, this surplus would be relatively small (1% of the current total county budget) and not enough to make a significant difference to county levels of service overall. These findings are important because they highlight current and future deficiencies that need to be addressed, as per the Creswell study mandate. They were also sufficiently negative enough to persuade us to continue with an examination of housing growth options. The County could add housing in various ways. One obvious option is to add more homes within the Development Envelope rather than expand it into Creswell or some other area. We tested this option by identifying all vacant or underdeveloped parcels in the DE and assuming that they would be upzoned to the next denser zoning district. We discovered that this strategy could yield about 5,000 new homes at best—not enough to put a dent in the long-term housing need identified. Moreover, this strategy would require additional and costly sewer and water capacity expansions, and would stress schools and other services, not to mention the difficulties inherent in gaining community support for densifying parcels in neighborhoods that are largely low-density, single-family R-1 districts. Another expansion option might be along the Route 152 corridor. The County’s response to our suggestion was that this was not a feasible option. Accordingly, we focused on the Creswell study area, per the HarfordNEXT mandate, and brainstormed five different expansion options and assessed them against the eight goals listed earlier. Only one of our expansion options—which we called Selective Transfer of Development Rights—fared well enough in this evaluation to warrant further examination. We first analyzed man-made and natural constraints and opportunities in the region. Figure ES-4 summarizes the man-made constraints. These include a patchwork of permanent easements on farmland, large parks, existing rural residential subdivisions, the large quarry area in the center of the area, and some nonresidential districts at the two I-95 interchanges. These constraints left a very fragmented area available to consider for development. Compounding these man-made constraints are a range of important environmental constraints. Summarized in Figure ES-5, these cover various kinds of farmland, including prime and nonprime farming soils, forested areas, and watershed boundaries, which are important for sewer planning and should, ideally, stay within gravity-flow sewersheds. Additionally, the majority of landscape elements which are most critical to the much-valued rural character of Creswell cover the majority of the central part of the study area. The environmental constraints map also breaks up the area into smaller subareas, contributing additional fragmentation. This fracturing of Creswell made us look more closely at the development opportunities represented by the limited number of remaining large parcels that were neither in easements nor in the central core of the area. We focused on large parcels of over 100 acres because they offer the best opportunities for integrated, environmentally sensitive developments. These larger blocks can foster continuous green infrastructure, and provide for the large-scale amenities and needs that many small, noncontiguous lots cannot. Figure ES-6 shows the locations of the small number of single parcels over 100 acres in dark red and, in lighter red, other large parcels that could be consolidated into large blocks for integrated, planned development. This map suggested that the transfer of development rights (TDR) framework might be a win-win concept for Creswell. TDR allows the transfer of development rights (one home = one development right) from designated “sending areas” that are then preserved, to designated “receiving areas” that are then able to be developed. If the arithmetic of the TDR concept could produce a strong market for both sellers and buyers of rights, perhaps development in Creswell could be concentrated into specific, less critical parcels, while the remainder of Creswell could be preserved in perpetuity at its current low densities. This is a very different approach to TDR than that which currently exists in Harford County. TDR has a long and largely successful history in Maryland, and there are over 300 examples around the country. Not all of these have been successful, however. Much research has been conducted on what makes for TDR success or failure. Our team reviewed this research and enlisted the advice of the country’s leading TDR experts. Using a land use model that we developed for Creswell via CommunityViz modeling software—a well-established proprietary software package whose owner was a course co-instructor—we tested numerous combinations of sending and receiving areas, varying both their ratios of sending to receiving areas and their densities. We settled on a framework for TDR that incorporated sufficient incentives for the buyer as well as sufficient density increases for both sellers and buyers to make the transactions attractive compared to the current option of developing onsite at one home per ten acres. The development densities envisioned are comparable to low to moderate suburban densities within the Development Envelope today. The distribution of sending and receiving areas in the Framework Plan is shown in Figure ES-7. The range of new homes that could occupy the receiving areas is wide and depends on the areas and densities finally selected for development. This study is not a plan, but a framework for a plan, with many choices still remaining for the County. We estimated the framework’s housing range at between 8,000 and 20,000 new homes. To test the various impacts of denser development in Creswell, we settled on two alternative options to be more fully explored in terms of impacts and implementation—10,000 new homes and 16,000 new homes respectively. This arithmetic plays out on about 2,900 acres of designated sending areas and 3,000 acres of designated receiving areas. The receiving areas would be zoned to match current zoning districts, but their development standards would be much stricter in terms of open space requirements. The net effect of these Open Space Design (OSD) standards would be a relative increase in townhouse developments vs. the current mix of housing countywide, which is dominated by single-family detached homes. Evolving family composition and household sizes have been pushing the market in this direction in the county for the past several years. Such densities, concentrated on particular parcels, would, of course, require public sewer and water. Accordingly, we identified logical sewer alignments to serve the western and eastern edges of the development areas. The increase in density would also require road improvements beyond those currently envisioned and planned by the county. The Framework Plan map shows a new interchange at Aldino-Stepney Road and I-95, which relieves congestion on Route 22 and other roads. The other major new transportation element is the alignment of a new four-lane Creswell Boulevard that connects to the new interchange and then to Shucks Road. The framework plan should also explicitly accommodate the environmental features shown earlier and even enhance them via a strong “green infrastructure” element. This green infrastructure is where a trail system can be planned that connects development and the natural environment to create a unique natural amenity in Harford County. Figure ES-8 – brings all of these elements together in the Framework Plan for Creswell. The combination of the TDR program and the OSD zoning means that two-thirds of Creswell will remain undeveloped as either farmland or forestland. In settling on a range of 10,000 to 16,000 future homes as reasonable for Creswell, we were guided by our extensive testing of the impacts of this scale of development. The CommunityViz land use model referenced earlier allows for quantitative testing of land consumption and other impacts. We also ran a transportation model which provided traffic impacts with and without new and improved roadways. Finally, we applied a fiscal model to the proposed development program to see whether it produced net profits or losses. All these models are tried and tested and were run under the supervision of experts in their field. They were run for 2015 as a baseline, and then for 2040 under our proposed Framework Plan. Figure ES-9, below, summarizes the key impacts of the two alternative development programs developed for Creswell against the seven goals of the study. As a bottom line, the fiscal impacts are particularly noteworthy. The annual net gain equates to 5% and 7% of the County’s overall FY19 budget. These same results translate into a cumulative surplus for the County by 2040 of $453 million for 10,000 homes and $614 million for 16,000 homes, compared with a surplus of $24 million for the Trends situation discussed earlier. These numbers assume the continuation of Harford’s current impact fee rate, which is considerably lower than that of other counties in the region. The framework plans also assume that between 750,000 and one million square feet of commercial development will occur in concert with the residential development. This development adds considerably to the fiscal surplus but even without it, the residential growth pays its way. In terms of implementation of the Framework Plan, we envisioned the western edge of Creswell that is adjacent to the DE being developed first, with the associated new sewer line extended northward to Harford Community College (whose further expansion has long been limited by its lack of public utilities). The development capacity along the west wing is roughly half that of the east wing. Development of the east wing depends on the construction of several key long-term projects: a new sewer trunkline up Gray’s Run, the new interchange at I-95, and Creswell Boulevard. From a regulatory perspective, the Framework Plan would require: • Amendments to HarfordNEXT, to include the new Green Infrastructure Plan as a map with status similar to the new Thoroughfare Plan and to update the text to reflect the revised subdivision regulations. • Amendments to HarfordNEXT for a new sector plan for Creswell. • Updates to the zoning code to implement the OSD concept in the sending and receiving areas via an overlay zone. • Map and text revisions to the Sewer and Water Master Plans, the Parks, Open Space and Preservation Plan, and Schools plans. • State-led remapping of the Priority Funding Areas (PFAs) for Creswell and a remapping of the sewer tiers map based on SB 236, also known as the Septic Bill. Because this study was conducted over 16 intensive weeks, and without any community input, it could not explore numerous avenues or drill down further on some of the options that were explored. Some of these are noted in the last section, called Stones Unturned. Other information developed for this study but not included in this report is in an appendix volume, whose table of contents is listed at the end of the study.