METROPOLIS MAGAZINE.
BY ALEX MARSHALL
APRIL 7, 1997

Driving around Columbia reminds me of surfing the web. Everything is hidden, not visible except for an icon that says mall or village center, or hotel. But double-click one of these icons – that is, follow the small, waist-high sign that tastefully pokes up off the road – and a hidden reality opens up to you, be it a shopping mall, a housing subdivision, a park, or a school.

Like the web, one can pas quite a few pleasant hours in Columbia, navigating its maze of curvy, curvilinear streets, losing all sense of place and time. Each choice leads to a new set of choices. Destinations are down secondary roads, and in even there are concealed behind rows of trees and sculpted man-made hills.

Residents of Columbia, which sits on 14,000 acres midway between Baltimore and Washington a few miles off I-95, are generally proud of the sleek coat of shrubbery and rules that conceals their community’s vital parts.

Things are hard to find here, said a middle-age man in a T-shirt who stood in his driveway under a basketball goal, next to his teenage-daughter holding a boxed pizza. “There’s a restaurant I still can’t find. First day I was here, I was running of of gas, and I couldn’t find a gas station.”

I heard that story a lot.

Columbia is one of the largest and most ambitious of the several dozen new towns started in the 1960s. The idea was to capture the hordes then leaving the center city, and funnel them into some sort of planned community that would be better than the more laissez-faire sprawl that was bubbling outward. Beside Columbia, the list included nearby Reston in Virginia, Irvine, Ca., Clear Lake City in Houston, and others. Huge sums of private capital made developing an entire region possible, as well as weak local and state governments that ceded their land-use authority to private enterprise. Columbia was based in part on European new towns then being developed. But in Europe, government was the designer and developer. In America, the private developer persuaded municipal governments to turn over the reigns of authority for a chunk of real estate. In exchange, the private developer laid out the streets and parks. And then bet that the profits from selling homes and leasing stores and offices would make it worthwhile.

Columbia was started and developed by Jim Rouse. Still led by The Rouse Company, its design and ongoing development bears the mark of this man who was a player at every step in the ongoing evolution of the prevailing urban-suburban zeitgeist over the past half-century. Victor Gruen just beat him in building the first enclosed shopping mall in the 1950s, but Rouse came up with Faneuil Hall festival marketplace in the 70s, which was cloned all over the country. In the 60s, the new town concept was the cutting edge and Rouse was on it. He was determined to improve the design of suburbia, to build a better, more manageable kind of sprawl, where commerce, religion, schooling, shopping and all the components of 20th century life would take place in a more practical and harmonious fashion. Rouse, who died last year at age 81, was also determined to build a socially better place, where a mix of all races and even incomes would live and work together, avoiding or overcoming the derisive racial battles then ripping apart the nation.

To a large degree, Rouses vision, both socially and otherwise, was realized. As of this year, about 85,000 people, with about 20 percent African-American, live in eight villages grouped loosely around a regional enclosed shopping mall, which is the town center. The ninth and last village is set to begin construction, which when finished, should bring the total population up to the planned 100,000 people. From the hindsight of 30 years, it’s interesting to ask not only whether Rouse got to where he was going, but whether he was going in the right direction. Rouse and many others put a lot of freight on new towns, including that it would be a model for future development, spawn countless imitators and cure the ailing center cities.

Its also fascinating to compare the New Town movement to New Urbanism, the latest town planning movement. Although New Urban proponents would probably shriek in horror at the comparison, the goals and results of both movements are identical in many respects. Both are attempting to create new, self-sufficient places in open countryside, and both are ultimately harmful to the historic cities their developers said and say they love. Both conceptually link back to Ebenezer Howard of the 19th century and the belief in the merits of starting over. Like settlers making their way to the new world, or abandoning the Catholic Church for the Protestant Reformation, these believers in new places love the fresh canvas, and the idea that old problems can be cured by doing something somewhere else.

When Rouse conceived of Columbia in the early 1960s, he was determined, like the New Urbanists, that people would be able to live, work, play and do other stuff at Columbia without leaving its borders. In his mind, this made Columbia a city. He never called or considered it a suburb or suburbia, which he despised. This of course, leads into a discussion about what is a real city, but more about that later.

To pursue his dream Rouse, a millionaire mortgage banker and shopping center developer, walked out about halfway between Washington and Baltimore, and proceeded in 1963 to surreptitiously buy up much of Howard County. This was a start of a lengthy process where by Rouse, after revealing his purchase, eventually persuaded county commissioners to pass in 1965 something called New Town Zoning which established the legalistic framework for Columbia.

Because Rouse could only develop what he could buy, and some landowners refused to sell, Columbia is a rough assortment of land parcels, some contiguous and some not, a few miles west of I-95. Studded throughout the area known as Columbia are chunks of land, now mostly turned into subdivisions, which are not part of Columbia at all. As one woman pointed out, an easy way to tell when you are in Columbia proper is whether the telephone poles are above or below ground. In Columbia, of course, they are neatly stowed below ground. That Columbia is not a definable chunk of land shows the limitations of private development. If a government had laid out Columbia, it could have done so in a practical and neat fashion, much as the municipal government laid out Manhattan in the early 1800s.

Columbia was formed against the backdrop of the 1960s, and as President Lyndon Johnson struggled to get the Voting Rights act passed, and southern governors stood on the steps of schoolhouses and threw down gauntlets, Rouse and his partners wanted to give the country an alternate example of how the races could live and work together. It was an admirable, and daring, dream, given the fact that most real estate leaders overtly segregated their developments under the belief that it helped sales. This dream of racial harmony gives Columbias much of its historical shine.

Rouse’s basic design was to have 100,000 or so people live in nine villages and a town center, in this case a regional shopping mall. Mixed in would be parks, schools, interfaith centers, offices, industry, hotels and other accouterments, like the 17,000 seat, open-air, Merriweather Post Pavilion. The design was largely realized, an amazing thing, because usually the marketplace forces developers to alter their designs over time. Roughly a third of the land was dedicated to what in developers lingo is known as “open space,” which gives Columbia its ambiance of greenness and nature. As we know now, this is probably the most environmentally destructive way to build. It chews up more land, and the greenery left over isn’t suited to real wild life. Instead, it consumes fertilizers which find their way into the water sources. But at the time, it was seen as saving the land, or even improving on it.

The physical design of Columbia is mirrored in its organizational structure. At the top is the Columbia Association, a mammoth homeowners association with a $33 million budget. Like other homeowner associations, it takes care of the open space, runs the recreation centers and, through its village appendages, determines what paint colors are allowed on houses and other aesthetic guidelines. It is controlled by a ten-member council, each of which is elected by the villages and town center property owners. It is, in reality, a private government. To fund the Columbia Association and the village associations, residents pay an extra assessment based on property values. On a $200,000 house, this amounts to $750 a year.

The village system that is at the heart of Columbias physical and organization design has been successful in many respects. If Columbia did not help save the center city, it did construct a more practical and more hassle-free suburbia. True, people don’t walk as much as planned, and major mass transit never materialized, although there is a minimal bus service. You still drive to the supermarket. But the drive to the village shopping center is shorter and less confusing.

“I love Columbia, because I hardly ever have to leave the town,” said a school teacher I interviewed, who lived in a set of lower-priced condominiums. She spoke from the door of her home, which faced a tiny courtyard with three other front doors. These in turn, faced a larger courtyard, all of which was invisible from the street.

“Everything I need is right here. With the village centers, I can go over the Wilde Lakes to get fresh fish. Next door, I can get fresh produce. If I want to buy clothes or do more serious shipping, I can go to the mall. I used to live in Rockville, and it would spend all Saturday morning driving miles from this place to that to get my errands done.”

The design of these village centers vary, but usually their backs face the road and storefronts are relatively concealed. At the Wilde Lake Village center, for example, the entire complex faces inward, like a mini-version of the Pentagon. Even after driving into the parking lot, I could not see the supermarket and collection of small stores around a courtyard that form the nucleus of the center. This design has its charm, in that only people who live in the village know its there. But it also makes it very difficult for the centers to succeed financially. Although I was told it was one of the more successful centers, it was relatively dead. The courtyard was empty. The bagel shop was pretty busy at lunch, but the wine shop next door was devoid of customers. Its manager said they were barely holding on.

This is one of the most interesting trends at Columbia, the beginnings of its own version of urban decay and inner-city abandonment. The plight of the village centers have been made worse by a recent, and quite ironic development. The Rouse company, which Jim Rouse retired from in 1979, opened last year a huge collection of big box stores on land it owned on both sides of Route 175 leading into Columbia. A mammoth Target, a warehouse style supermarket and other stores are open, and more are being built. They were constructed over the protests of many residents, and it has predictably drained the village centers of much of their business. The Rouse company still owns the village centers, so it is hurting itself to a degree. The company has essentially done to itself what the shopping malls in the 50s and 60s did to innercity downtowns. As a consequence, Columbia is now struggling to rejuvenate its older village centers. One, Harpers Choice, is being renovated. In Oakland Mills, the supermarket is set to close, and plans have not been worked out yet on how to replace it.

That these small commercial centers are struggling is significant, because it shows how large a critical mass is needed now to make it commercially. It also shows how difficult a task New Urbanists have set for themselves by attempting to put small commercial centers within New Urban communities, most of which are far smaller than even one village in Columbia. The New Urban development of Kentlands in nearby Gaithersburg, Md., for example, will have 1,500 homes when completed. By comparison, each villages in Columbia has more than 3,000 homes, while Columbia as a whole will have about 33,000 homes when completed.

Accompanying the decline of some of the village centers, and causing it to a degree, has been an increase in crime and the fear of crime. Much of the subsidized housing was built near the village centers, so poorer residents without cars could walk to the store. But this has also increased crime, or at least the fear of it.

“Just from living here, you know you don’t go to a village center at midnight,” said one man in his twenties, from the doorway of his apartment, who also added that everyone in his apartment put clubs on their cars. “I don’t want to walk down to the village center of Harpers Choice, because of the areas you have to walk through between here and there.”

The increase in crime has some racial overtones, because the subsidized housing are usually located near the village centers, and much of the subsidized housing is African-American. Still, Columbia is a racial paradise compared to the rest of the country, and its residents have had better lives because of it.

Columbia is roughly 20-percent African-American, with a fair sprinkling of other minorities. Its also fairly diverse economically, including some subsidized housing, although the overall household income is high. This racial diversity seems to have been achieved through sheer force of will. Rouse said that Columbia was open to everyone, meant it, and pretty soon word got around.

“The grapevine,” was what brought him to Columbia, said Alan Blondell, a burly black man who says he has lived here since 1974, shortly after he graduated from college. Hair speckled with gray, he sits reading the New York Times sports section in a bagel place at Wilde Lakes village center.

Blondell, as with many whites I spoke with, said his children benefited from growing up here.

“I wanted my son to interact with people of various backgrounds. That’s happened. His best friend is someone who is Jewish and white. They still hang out, even though both are in college, because their roots go deep. It’s fascinating to pull out the photos of the birthday parties, and see the same kids, all different colors, over the years, growing up.”

This diversity of ethnicity is accompanied by a homogeneity in Columbias physical appearance. Your neighbor might have a different skin color than you, but not his house, or at least not one you can’t predict. Judging from a few days spent at Columbia its bedrock values are control and concealment. The placement of signs, the location of shopping centers, the paint colors of houses – are carefully controlled in order to keep back the louder expressions of present day civilization, be it the yellow Midas Muffler sign on the 20-foot-pole, or the neighbors who insist that avocado shutters on a lime-green facade is just fine. What you get in Columbia instead is a reality carefully colored beige.

“People either love or hate it here,” said a plump woman behind the real estate booth in the shopping mall. “Some people dont like the big brother thing, that you can’t paint your house chartreuse, stuff like that. These people live in Ellicot City, (a few miles down the road.) There you find strip development, all the things not allowed here. I love it here though. I drive around other places and think, ‘How could they allow that pink door on that white house?'”

Homes too, in Columbia, might be said to be icons, revealing nothing of their inner identity. A visitor on the street sees only a generic assembly of house-like components: lawn, shrubbery, driveway, shutters. Weird paint colors, bird baths on the lawn, and apparently even lavish shrubbery or gardens are prohibited. Practically the only accessory permitted to this minimalist fashion style are basketball goals, which stand out sharply as the only addition to the generic landscape. Although even these, have to be the approved style and form. Even religion has a generic feel to it at Columbia. When developing Columbia, Rouse set aside slots for Interfaith Centers, which would house several religions in one building. It was meant to be progressive, and perhaps it is. But the effect is to submerge even God underneath the code of suburbia. All one sees is a bland, square brick building with a utilitarian sign saying “Interfaith Center.” Barbara Kellner, who is kind of the informal historian at the Columbia Association, tells the story of going to a crafts fair recently and buying a contemporary metal sculpture. She decided to place in her front yard.

“You know, I like to think my taste is pretty good,” she said. “But I had to admit, there wasn’t anything conceptually different in my sculpture and a white plastic bird bath, which is not permitted.”

So did she rip out the sculpture?

“No, I’m going to wait until they tell me to,” said the woman who is employed by the association that enforces such rules. “I can still put it in my backyard if I want.”

Such codes are more possible legally through a private homeowners association. Nevertheless, municipalities are beginning to have similar, if less drastic, rules. In urban areas, the stated rationale is often historic preservation. In more suburban areas, the logic is preserving property values. In each case, this kind of fastidious attention to detail rules out the ebb and flow of neighborhoods over time that make them interesting. Levittown, for example, is such an interesting place now because the homeowners were allowed to morph their houses into other forms with relative impunity. In the older neighborhood I live in, part of its charm comes from the variety of housing types built over the last 100 years. Much of the variety is becoming prohibited now, under the historical zoning that now rules the neighborhood.

Columbia is hardly alone in relying on a homeowner association. Such organizations are becoming standard in new subdivisions being built. The increased reliance on them is disturbing. It represents a larger trend of Americans turning away from government and buying an organization that will do the job government was set up for. It’s comparable to the current health care crisis, really, where American society rejected attempts to have a government-managed health care system and instead opted to have for-profit insurance companies and HMOs deciding who gets what care when.

With homeowner associations, residents have chosen an entity with far more power over their lives than a conventional government. And in a way, that’s what they are paying for. They care less about restrictions on themselves than on the confidence that their neighbors will be restricted. But there’s an inherent dishonesty about Columbia and most of these privately controlled subdivisions. At Columbia, through the homeowners association, Columbia residents have apparently purchased their way out of the messy affairs of democratic governments, for the safer world of a private community. But as Evan McKenzie wrote in his book “Privatopia,” these homeowners associations ultimately rely on a public institution – the courts – to enforce the deed restrictions that creates them. And as McKenzie explains in detail, the legal validity of such deed restrictions is questionable from a historical perspective. In addition, should Columbia fall on hard times financially, it would ultimately fall back on the public body that created its underlining zoning and legal framework in 1965, Howard County.

So judging on its own terms, Columbia is a success. An interracial cast has bought its homes, the company has made a profit, its lawns are green, its office towers high. But how does Columbia rate as a design model, and how does it compare to that latest New Town movement, New Urbanism.

When it was conceived, Columbia consciously built on the theories of Ebenezer Howard, the garden-city prophet of the late 19th century, who advocated saving cities by moving out of them, and building new, cleaner, safer and more orderly communities in the country. This theory now is seen as flawed, because it is apparent that what destroyed American cities was the exodus from them. Policies were needed to keep people in cities, not encourage them to leave. But in the 1960s, encouraging a more orderly exodus into more egalitarian planned communities was seen as a good thing, said Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias and professor of history at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

“The whole rhetoric of urbanism, throughout the 60s, carried on the idea that the cities were overcrowded, and that the solution was to get people out of the cities,” Fishman said. “No one really comprehended that cities were so vulnerable, and that decentralization would not return them to a proper density, but would create these vast wastelands right in their center.”

Fishman also noted how similar the New Town movement is to New Urbanism, despite the absence of front porches and neo-Georgetown-style row houses in Columbia.

“It’s uncanny how the rhetoric of New Urbanism resembles that of the New Town movement in the 1960s,” Fishman said. “You could publish what Rouse was saying in the 1960s, and substitute Andres Duany’s name, and it would sound the same.”

Which indeed is true. I dug up an old of Business Week from 1966 with an article on New Towns. Jim Rouse sounds like Andres Duany, from his view of architects to his view of suburbia. Said Rouse:

“Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst of all it is inhuman. . . . .There has been too much emphasis on the role of the architect as an artist, not enough on his role as a social servant. . . The suburb is the most controlled environment you can have. A kid can’t do anything without a parent. How many kids in the massive sprawl around the big city can walk or bike to school, to a concert or music lesson, to a stream to fish, or to the movies?” (This last statement is particularly interesting, given the degree of control present at Columbia.)

It seems clear to me that each of these planning movements, from New Towns to PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) to New Urbanism, are so alluring because they offer an easy way to solve our collective societal difficulties. They can be compared to fad diets. Each propose that we build our way out of our collective problems, from too much sprawl to inner-city decay to environmental destruction. Its the equivalent of eating your way to thinness. It doesn’t work. The only way to better center cities and protect the environment is to do the urban equivalent of exercising more and eating less. That means such things as growth control, a big gas tax, investment in mass transit, prohibitions on parking. So far, there is only one metropolitan area willing to diet: Portland, Oregon. With its urban growth boundary, transit system, prohibitions on store size and other rules and efforts, it’s achieving a meaner and leaner urban form, the equivalent of going to the gym three times a week and avoiding McDonalds.

It’s significant that New Urbanism relies just as heavily on these private associations to create their advertised world of small town life. As with Columbia, there is a rejection of the public sphere in favor of what is believed to be a more manageable and safer private one. With New Urbanism, it is especially hypocritical because the design movement is dedicated to improving public, political life. With their own creations, they reject public life in favor of the private sphere.

What’s also similar about New Urbanism and New Towns is how their development attracted the interest of big corporations. Although Disney has attracted a lot of attention for its New Urban community in Florida, Celebration, Columbia was backed financially by Connecticut Life, which put up $25 million. Gulf Oil backed Reston in Virginia, while General Electric, Goodyear and other corporations backed other New Towns around the country.

From this light, what was new about Columbia was not its design, but its financing. It provided the chance for one company to profit from an entire region of people. Virtually every act a person does at Columbia puts or has put profit into the Rouse corporation, from buying their home, to buying groceries, to shopping at the mall. In scope, it’s a breathtaking proposition. It’s doubtless what attracted Disney to build Celebration. Before, Disney would just capture a family’s money a few times a year, when they visited Disney World or saw a flick. Now, they would have the chance to profit off nearly every act of their lives.

But the amounts of capital needed to finance such towns are also breathtaking. The New Town era stopped around 1970 because the lag time between spending and profiting was too long, and the risks are too great. Disney has taken on Celebration, but it’s less than a third the size of Columbia.

As Columbia faces the challenges of growing up, including unplanned sprawl and urban decay, the wider metropolitan area it inhabits faces even bigger ones. The amalgamation of superhighways, luxury malls and well-manicured subdivisions that makes up the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area is in its totality a nightmarish experience. The beltway is jammed at almost any hour, and the secondary roads are not much better. The irony is that this is some of the richest sprawl in the country, built to the most demanding of specifications. The roads are wide, the setbacks huge, the landscaping and berms ample. All this richness, however, produces a sprawl which is probably worse than your average metropolis.

Columbia has helped produced this sprawl by having 100,000 people live out in the boonies, rather than within a tighter metropolitan orbit. This in turn, has helped to create the demand for the hyper-controlled environments that is Columbia. In a sense, the development of Columbia exists in a symbiotic relationship with the sprawl around it, creating its own demand. Every time someone drives home from work or goes out on a Saturday morning on a traffic jammed freeway, it produces the urge to return or escape back to a controlled environment, where everything is in place.

But although Columbia is not threatening, neither is it exciting. Back in the mid 1960s, Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, was asked for her reaction to Columbia and the whole New Town movement. Her comment was pithy. It still seems accurate.

“They were really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.”

Ouch.

Surprisingly, some Columbia residents concur. Several people, although they praised Columbia, said they planned to move as soon as their kids were grown. One of those was Alan Blondell, the African-American executive.

“Now that my kids are of age, I don’t necessarily want to continue living here. I could see myself moving back to a big city, where there’s a real ethnic diversity and a lot of energy. Columbia does not have the kind of vibrancy from an ethnic viewpoint that a city does.”

Blondell said if the urban neighborhoods where he had grown up had offered a better place to raise a family in decades past, he might have never made the trek out to suburbia.

Said Blondell, “If the city had had good schools, and other stuff that Columbia offered, I might have stayed in the city.”