Baltimore Avenue in College Park, MD: from strip malls to super-talls.

I don’t have a reason to visit College Park, Maryland all that often, even though it’s only a handful of miles away from my current home and hosts a major academic institution.  But when I do visit, the small city reminds me what an outlier it is: a freestanding municipality encompassing a major flagship university, just three miles from the boundary to one of the country’s largest cities: Washington DC.  Yet it still feels mostly like a cluster of stop lights on a busy highway called Baltimore Avenue (Maryland State Route 1), the arterial that bisects the city as a north-south axis.  In 1856, the year that a school first emerged on land that is today the University of Maryland, nobody in the Maryland legislature could have conceived that, someday, the vast suburbs of Washington DC would surround it.  Like so many flagship state universities, University of Maryland began as a land grant college, reclaiming the site of the short-lived Maryland Agricultural College, which failed during the Civil War, after less than a decade of operation.  College Park remained a rural settlement serving the agriculture-focused school during Reconstruction, developing slowly until the Maryland General Assembly integrated it with the rest of the state university system and made it the flagship in the 1910s.  But even then, Washington DC wasn’t a particularly large city, with 330,000 people within its boundaries; much of the District lands were still undeveloped.  And Prince George’s County, which contains College Park, only had 35,000 people.  It was rural.  Today, it’s suburban: the county’s population is approaching one million.  College Park, like the rest of the county, is densifying, but the urbanization isn’t without its growing pains, as Baltimore Avenue manifests.

Perhaps if University of Maryland hadn’t been so agri-centric during its formative years—a campus amidst cow pastures—it would have spawned a defined urban settlement in the late 19th or early 20th century.  But as it stands, downtown College Park has surprisingly little old architecture for a state that was among the Thirteen Colonies.  Many land grant universities in the Midwest boast much beefier adjacent college towns: Ann Arbor, MI, Bloomington, IN, Lawrence, KS, and Iowa City, IA all come to mind.  College Park, by contrast, always stood so close to the nation’s capital (and not too far from Baltimore, the state’s largest city) that it didn’t really need to devise an industrial economy right next to the University of Maryland.  And, since major urban centers were very always close by, the University of Maryland’s faculty, staff, and students could commute from larger hubs, by omnibus or streetcar or bus at first…then, by the 1940s, by private car.  Sure, the university has long offered dorms on campus, but it’s been a major school for over a century, and today, with 40,000 students, it’s surprising how little this translates to an identifiable center for College Park.  Anyone visiting the municipality with the expectation that it will look like Ann Arbor or one of those other Midwest college towns will be sorely disappointed.

My description so far suggests that I don’t have a high opinion of College Park.  This isn’t the case: the core of the university’s campus is venerable and very lovely, while the intersection of Baltimore and Knox avenues offers vestigial evidence of the pedestrian scaled architecture one expects from a streetcar suburb.  But these appear to be the biggest college town signifiers that offer any evidence of history.  Everything else in College Park suggests a city that strives to shift its identity from student-commuters to student-residents, often through mid or high-rise buildings along the Baltimore Avenue arterial.  (The super-talls of the title are an exaggeration, but hey, it rhymes.)  The place is densifying, but these mixed-use apartments with ground level retail aren’t replacing storied old 19th century architecture; they’re replacing gas stations, auto repair shops, drive-through restaurants, and other business typically located on either side of a busy highway like Baltimore Avenue.  Consequently, College Park is interesting for how little it resembles most other university towns.

My last major exploration of College Park arose through a visit in October of 2019.  The article didn’t post until February 2022, so it took over two years to formulate the thesis.  Even then, I noticed how, despite all the dense multifamily apartment buildings going up along Baltimore Avenue, it wasn’t translating to a huge amount of success for the first floor retail.  Things were okay, but they weren’t great—especially surprising considering all the student-driven foot-traffic one might expect, as well as college students’ customary penchant for interesting small businesses.  Although College Park was growing upward, the retail scene was pretty meh, and the previous two photos (each from 2019) attempt to demonstrate this.

Purely coincidentally, I was back in College Park five years later (to the exact day!).  The retail scene hadn’t really improved, but that’s no great surprise, given the tremendous challenges that COVID-19 and campus closures imposed on small businesses from 2020 to 2022.  Despite the unlovely pedestrian environment along Baltimore Avenue, the City of College Park was clearly actively encouraging a densifying up-zoning along the corridor to replace more of those auto-friendly uses from yesteryear with apartment towers.  And here’s the latest evidence:

Campus Village Shoppes was humming with activity back in 2019.  But now it has the fencing one typically expects when an existing building site is facing demolition.  Stepping back and viewing it from the six lanes of Baltimore Avenue traffic, it’s clearly a pretty big parcel.

And yes, that’s exactly what’s happening to Campus Village Shoppes.

The parcel is undergoing a transformation reflective of the up-zoning that the City of College Park has clearly promoted all along Baltimore Avenue.  Most of the medium or large parcels that previously hosted auto-oriented structures are getting transformed into the mid-rise apartments that cater to University of Maryland’s vast student population.  The obvious goal is to reduce the university’s dependency on commuter traffic by encouraging upperclassmen (those who no longer reside in dorms) to remain on or near campus by renting in privately owned apartment buildings.  By almost all conventional metrics, this growth is a win for the city and the university: fewer commuters will help shift the traffic away from private vehicles to pedestrianism and bicycles (or buses and shuttles).  It will also increase the city’s tax base by replacing low-slung uses with high-rise buildings of greater assessed value.  

Given the changes that have taken place along Baltimore Avenue over the last decade, it’s not surprising that Campus Village Shoppes found a developer who approached the strip mall’s owner and “made an offer he couldn’t refuse”.  LV Collective, who purchased the Shoppes in late 2022, announced its plan last fall to replace the shopping center with a multi-family apartment building that will house over 1,000 residents and 13,000 square feet of retail space at the street level.  The controversial closures began last summer and continued through the end of September; many tenants claimed they received insufficient time to relocate.  But the writing was on the wall for years.  After all, this is the streetscape just a bit north of the Campus Village Shoppes along Baltimore Avenue:

It’s a mixed bag of auto-oriented uses (like a drive-thru McDonald’s) and newer, larger structures, like the Cambria Hotel in the distance, with an adjacent CVS Pharmacy, both built right up to the property line in pedestrian-scaled urban form.  (This parcel previously hosted a Ford dealership.)  The McDonald’s may eventually get bought out as well, except that the lot is too small to host a mega-sized apartment building, so redevelopment is less lucrative.  Meanwhile, the opposite side of Baltimore Avenue proves what the corridor could become.

The densification is more or less complete.

Campus Village Shoppes offered at least a few other hurdles for its developer to surmount.

The corner of the parcel featured a gas station/auto service hybrid—previously a BP and then, briefly, University Gas before it closed with the rest of the complex.  A long-standing gas station almost certainly poses environmental remediation challenges, either through the continuous mechanical work that took place there or the presence of underground storage tanks (USTs)—most likely a combination of the two.  Eliminating soil contamination will almost certainly cost the development company more money, even if it receives state grants to assist in the process; after all, it will take more time than a simple demolition, and the law of transaction costs attests that time = money.  That’s not the only hurdle.

Campus Village Shoppes featured multiple outparcel fronting Baltimore Avenue, including another auto-oriented use: an auto glass repair shop, so another potential mini-brownfield, though less likely than the old BP.  The outparcel structure on the far right used to be a liquor store; its closure was no doubt a major inconvenience bordering on tragedy for the students.  This array of longstanding tenants underlies the predicament.

The economic development interests of College Park want the left side of the above photograph to develop and look more like the right.  The problem is, Campus Village Shoppes was not a dying old strip mall.

Sure, it deployed an aesthetic scheme from the 1970s, had virtually no landscaping, and its final tenants—a combination of vape stores, nail/beauty salons, and little ethnic eateries—were hardly high-end.  But its occupancy level in 2019 was nearly 100%—far better than the first floors of these towering new apartment buildings.  The developer, therefore, wasn’t injecting investment dollars into a blighted property.  From a retail occupancy perspective, Campus Village Shoppes was doing fine—better than the mid-rise and high-rise buildings replacing it.

The state of Baltimore Avenue, therefore, flies in the face of assumptions that retail analysts typically make—assumptions with which I normally concur.  Simply put, retail usually follows rooftops.  But is that the case here?  Injecting an area with higher density residential nearly always translates to a boon for nearby leasable commercial space.  And the fact that the new construction features buildings with entrance doors that directly front Baltimore Avenue further encourages walk-up customers in an area already teeming with college students.  But what if the fundamental character of commercial uses in College Park remains auto-oriented, aligned with commuters or traffic simply passing through on this busy Maryland Route 1, a highway directly linking Washington DC and Baltimore?  Perhaps these development schemes fly in the face of the build-it-and-they-will come ethos.  Simply put, people in College Park liked the Campus Village Shoppes because it offered abundant and visible off-street parking; they don’t get that with all those “urban” style mixed-use apartment buildings.  Even if the apartment buildings’ parking garages are cheap or free, they’re less intuitive than an off-street lot.  And even with all the people living along Baltimore Avenue, it’s not really a desirable place to walk, which I intimated through my previous blog article on the lagging retail occupancy.

I offer one final photo to demonstrate the point:

This unusual configuration, with hulking apartment towers surrounding a little one-story shack, probably reflects a situation where the smaller property owner refused to sell.  Developers build their megaliths around what for many years was a liquor store.  Eventually, in the late 2010s, the liquor store closed.  The hip local roasters Vigilante Coffee purchased the property, improved its aesthetics significantly (particularly the tiny parking lot), and began operating a successful coffee shop there.  I’d wager this is the highest capitalized tenant along Baltimore Avenue, even though it operates in a drab one-story building.  It’s distinct, it’s visible, it’s an outlier, and because of these characteristics it’s actually a more desirable commercial property than the first-floor retail in all those hulking apartment buildings.

College Park is making itself dense and urban from a visual/physical standpoint.  But, even though it sits squarely in the vast DC-Baltimore metro, it still carries the ethos of a semi-developed farmstead. With all this densification along Baltimore Avenue, College Park may achieve a walkable utopia someday, but the current student population isn’t going to see it—because for it to happen, they have to patronize these businesses.  Far too much vigilantism for that.