The recent downsizing of federal agencies is having a real and immediate impact on Montgomery County—displacing workers and leaving many with uncertain futures. These changes are difficult, especially for those whose livelihoods have long been tied to federal employment. At the same time, this moment calls on land use planners to think strategically about what comes next, as it may no longer be a given that the federal government will occupy the same building and campus footprints that it has in the past. If certain federal properties are no longer needed for government use, we may have an opportunity to reimagine how these sites could serve our communities in new ways. This blog provides an overview of federal property … Continue reading
Carrie McCarthy
Thrive Montgomery 2050: How does the COVID-19 pandemic shape our plans for the future?
For more than a year, we have been working on Thrive Montgomery 2050, an update to the General Plan directing the long-term vision and direction for land use and growth in the county. While public attention is understandably more focused on short-term issues, long-term thinking remains critical to guide how we respond to changes in the future.
From the beginning of the Thrive 2050 planning process, we have emphasized that the plan needs to be flexible and adaptable to a future in which change seems to happen more rapidly than in the past. Where to do we want to be as a county in five, 10, 30 years? The framework for the plan identifies three key themes as core … Continue reading
Lessons Learned from ULI Fall Meeting: Authenticity is key to great places
In October, I was fortunate to attend the 2018 ULI Fall Meeting in Boston as a recipient of a scholarship for local public officials from the Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use. The conference attracted over 6,000 industry leaders in real estate and land use and was a wonderful opportunity to get out of the day-to-day bubble of planning and land use in Montgomery County and learn about trends in other parts of the country to inform our work.
Particularly valuable were the site tours and sessions offered by the ULI Placemaking Council during the Council Day on Wednesday. The program comprised visits to the new Seaport District in South Boston adjacent to the Convention Center and … Continue reading
Planning Reality Check
Recent analysis of three past plans reveals goals for housing and public facilities were accomplished, while visions for commercial spaces and transit have been slower to achieve
Planning, by design, is a forward-looking field and with 20 to 30-year plan horizons. Planning departments don’t often look back to see what happened with their visions. Such analysis is usually too challenging – staff who have worked on the plan have moved on and departments don’t often have the capacity or resources to handle such a task along with their day-to-day planning work.
The Montgomery Planning Department, however, decided to tackle this task in 2016 with three plans. We wanted to find out what had happened in different types of … Continue reading
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