University of Maryland students should be prepared for a huge campus makeover. Apparently, the project already in development is being labeled as “Vision 2020″ , and it sounds AWESOME.
“Our mission is to really create a top university community here,” says Eric Olson, a former Prince George’s County Council member who directs the College Park City University Partnership, a town/gown group that includes high-placed university officials, the mayor, and state senator Jim Rosapepe.
Vision 2020 isn’t the first such prescription for College Park. But the City University Partnership, founded in 1998, was for years the domain of “men in suits sitting in rooms, talking to each other,” in the words of one planning veteran. It has now begun to pull in more voices: In October, in conjunction with the partnership, the university held its first “talkathon,” which brought students and residents together to discuss how to incorporate cultural and artistic spaces into a renovated downtown along Route 1.
The group’s long-range plans are starting to bear fruit. A $250-million mixed-use development featuring Prince George’s first Whole Foods is under construction just south of the city line in Riverdale Park. The university, meanwhile, has broken ground on its own “innovation district” on the east side of campus and recently hired Ken Ulman—the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor who was defeated with Anthony Brown in November—as a consultant to foster a “start-up hub” in College Park.
Wallace Loh, the university’s president since 2010, has signaled that he wants the school to contribute to College Park’s revival in big ways and small. He recently announced a deal for a $115-million, four-star hotel and conference center to be built across the street from the university’s main gate. And when Rosapepe resigned recently as chair of the charter school, College Park Academy, Loh accepted the post.
A last, crucial piece of the Vision 2020 puzzle is the Purple Line. Planned in fits and starts since the ’90s, the $2.4-billion, 16-mile light-rail service would run from Bethesda to New Carrollton, connecting the two arms of Metro’s big U-shaped Red Line and linking the Green and Orange lines east of DC. Trains would run along the university’s main road, Campus Drive, with four stops in town, including one at the student union.
Development will bring its own discontents, and if the Purple Line gets built, it won’t likely turn College Park into a cosmopolitan university town like Ann Arbor. Instead, it will further knit the school and the downtown into the prosperous and quickly urbanizing metropolis next door, making College Park more akin to Cambridge or Berkeley. But it’s a trade that town officials and most residents would jump at the chance to make.
