‘Smart Growth’ Goals Frustrated By Local Authorities

In a pasture, along a tree-lined road, a small herd of hefty black-and-white striped “Oreo cows” — more formally known as Belted Galloways — graze near the entrance to a housing development widely regarded as one of the few examples of “smart growth” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The Village of Cooke’s Hope is a neighborhood of upscale, single-family homes set on small, manicured lots in the town of Easton. Planners praise it for combining land preservation with housing innovation.

“Everybody loves Cooke’s Hope,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute. “You are driving down the road and you see a bunch of designer cows. That’s because there is a conservation easement on the property out in front. Then you drive in and there is a little village. The houses… have a color palette, vernacular architecture, and they are not all the same builder houses.”

McMahon said that while growth and development are inevitable, it is important to control where they go and what they look like.

“Beyond a handful of projects, there is not a whole lot that you can go and look at on the Eastern Shore that is not your typical crapola suburban development,” he said.

image‘Oreo Cows’ graze near the entrance of Cooke’s Hope, a smart-growth neighborhood on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (Dick Cooper/CPI)It’s an especially sobering assessment in light of recent history here. After more than a decade of well-intentioned efforts to serve as a national model of carefully managed development, Maryland finds its so-called Smart Growth programs frustrated by local governments whose parochial interests often trump the broader visions of regional and statewide planning efforts.

Partly as a result, the pastoral Eastern Shore is at risk of losing tens of thousands of acres of farms and forests over the next two decades if current growth patterns are not changed, according to a state Department of Planning report issued last year.

Story continued at the Center for Public Integrity