Drafted in 2011, the University District Vision 2020 aims to shape College Park into a top 20 college town by 2020. Two years before that deadline, how close are they?
University of Maryland student Jocelyn Nolasco grew up in Hyattsville, graduating from Parkdale High School in 2015. She’s long criticized the lack of cohesion between her city and the nearby university.
“You don’t have to go five minutes down the road to see what’s been forgotten,” the rising senior government and politics major said. “People barely remember that there’s a high school down the street.”
But Nolasco, a current College Park resident, has recently noticed a marked difference in the relationship between the state’s flagship university and the surrounding municipalities — and it gives her hope. For instance, the university’s commitment to bettering the local education system has made it seem like less of a “bubble,” she said.
“I care about the development,” she said. “This is a resource people need.”
The College Park City-University Partnership is a nonprofit organization working toward this end by pooling resources from the government, the private sector and the university. The group plans, carries out and offers support to initiatives aimed at making College Park more livable for all 12 months of the year, as it hopes to attract more university faculty members to live in the city with their families. This goes beyond just construction — the group focuses on a range of factors that impact College Park residents, from infrastructure to education to transportation.
Partnership leaders commonly cite a slew of achievements from the past few years. These include a commitment from the state and federal governments to fully fund the Purple Line, a light rail that will run through this university’s campus and connect New Carrollton and Bethesda; the establishment of a homeownership program that provides zero-interest, deferred-payment, forgivable loans to some city and university employees who live within the city’s boundaries; the creation of College Park Academy, a blended-learning college preparatory middle and high school that allows students to accumulate up to 25 credits for this university; the opening of MilkBoy ArtHouse, a joint restaurant and live music venue; the expansion of University Police's jurisdiction; the certification of College Park as a Maryland Sustainable Community; and the implementation of new bike-sharing stations.
Five individual committees — specializing in housing and redevelopment, transportation, public safety, education and sustainability — help create and guide annual work plans, which are submitted to the partnership’s board of directors for approval. The committees hold meetings at least twice a year, and usually more often, depending on how much work they need to get done. The committees physically bring together elected officials, university administrators, state delegates and other local stakeholders.
The committees do not implement changes; they lack individual budgets and the authority to distribute funds, levy taxes or allocate resources as desired. Rather, committees join forces to help advise, execute and oversee different projects.
“The biggest thing is that it’s a collaboration, and we are working together, productively, and with a concrete vision to achieve these goals of making College Park an even greater college town,” said Eric Olson, the partnership’s executive director. “That’s how things get done, when we work collaboratively.”
Much of the original work plan stems from a blueprint that Omar Blaik, the CEO and co-founder of consulting firm U3 Advisors, helped design. Blaik said he examined other cities with major universities — such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — and found they differed from College Park in several ways.
“Here, there was a lack of diversity in housing types, limited employment options, less density, less retail and amenities, less businesses that congregate around the campus,” Blaik said. “The university had grown in size and in caliber over time, but the city never caught up.”
Leaders of the partnership attribute much of the area’s rapid growth and revitalization in the years since to the appointment of University of Maryland President Wallace Loh, who assumed the role in 2010.
Maryland Sen. James Rosapepe (D-Prince George’s & Anne Arundel), chair of the partnership’s board of directors, said Loh’s support of the collaboration and Vision 2020 has led to “unprecedented” momentum. Though Rosapepe’s constituents in College Park have supported moving in this direction for decades, he said growth stunted under Loh’s predecessors.
“The challenge was that, before, the university was focused on the university,” Rosapepe said. Now, under Loh, who Rosapepe said “has been a real hero on this,” the area has made progress in terms of solidifying the relationship between the two entities.
“The relationships were almost nonexistent before I came here,” Loh said. “What I learned is … you always make decisions not only to solve the problem right now, but you think about its implication 20 to 30 years down the line.”
Critics of the partnership have posed that the focus on the future and the lack of student and permanent resident presence on the board and committees has excluded those voices from the conversation, often to their detriment.
Twice in the past year, The Diamondback’s editorial board has taken the city council to task for its City Hall expansion plans, which would “take a chunk out of Route 1.” At a public hearing last fall, several residents spoke out against those expansion plans, with one deeming them a “vanity project.”
Nolasco said Hyattsville, home to a newly constructed arts district, “used to be very black and brown” but has recently become less diverse.
“I’ve heard people say the rent is getting higher,” she said. “You see people moving out.”
But Blaik said for a place like College Park, “gentrification is much more a perceived threat rather than an actual one.” In his previous role as a senior vice president at the University of Pennsylvania, Blaik helped lead a similar transformation in Philadelphia.
“The minority of housing in Old Town are owner-occupied,” he said. “Little displacement occurs because there’s a limited renter market for long-term residents.”
Loh acknowledged the “economic consequences” of redevelopment, noting that this university — together with leaders from Prince George’s and Montgomery county governments — signed a commitment to protect low-income communities and individuals from displacement and “getting priced out.” It promises to “identify and address the potential impacts of the [Purple Line] such as gentrification, displacement and loss of housing affordable to the community, while supporting benefits such as increased accessibility to transit.”
Former College Park Mayor Andrew Fellows said the agreement “commits to avoid displacement and gentrification in ways it typically happens.”
And Carlo Colella, this university’s administration and finance vice president, said the partnership’s leadership actively works to safeguard the interests of students and current residents. “We’re bringing about amenities that are keeping residents here who would otherwise move,” Colella said. “We’re also redeveloping vacant property, so really, we’re adding to the housing offerings.”
Under the leadership of Ken Ulman, the University of Maryland College Park Foundation’s chief strategy officer for economic development, the collaboration is also slated to add hundreds of jobs to College Park’s Discovery District — a more than 150-acre area around The Hotel at the University of Maryland — starting in July. Ulman, the founder and CEO of consulting firm Margrave Strategies, said the new office space in the Discovery District will host “the kind of companies that want to collaborate with faculty and staff and want to hire our students as interns and then full-time employees.”
Parris Glendening, Maryland’s governor when the partnership was created, said the university “would not have survived” had it not embraced change. He noted that elected officials from Sacramento had toured the College Park area in April, hoping to examine the region’s development.
“They’re studying us and trying to figure out how we are doing it,” he said. “I think our little university becoming a national model is pretty exciting.”
But meanwhile, some longtime residents have expressed fear that College Park’s historic quaintness will evolve into a louder, busier, more congested area that does not reflect their lifestyles. And several students have voiced concerns, saying the university has neglected matters of student life — such as parking, housing and the surrounding food desert — as it prioritizes redevelopment.
“I don’t see the student voice represented there,” AJ Pruitt, the 2017-18 SGA president, said about the partnership. Although he believes College Park “is better off” with the partnership in place, he said the focus on recruiting young professionals and university staffers to live in the city has come at a cost to students and residents.
“They say they’re helping students by developing, but I don’t think that can be true if you don’t fully incorporate students into the leadership."
And while the partnership has exceeded the expectations of many involved, leaders admit much of the work lies ahead.
“We always knew we weren’t creating the 2020 goal as something that would be done in 2020,” said Fellows, who helped draft the original University District Vision 2020 document. “It was designed to address the long-standing challenges of the divide [between the city and this university]. We’ve succeeded in that respect.”
Below, we examine more of the partnership’s achievements and goals as well as the criticisms.
