Should $400 million in public subsidies be spent to assist privately-funded redevelopment plans for Harborplace and if so, exactly how should the money be spent?
 

That was one of the key questions raised this week by a panel of experts assembled to speak at a forum about the past and future of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, pegged to a private developer’s proposal to “reimagine” the once-bustling but now mostly-vacant shopping pavilions at Pratt and Light streets.
 

Economist Stephen Walters raised the question first, warning that city voters should beware of any claims that spending $400 million in public funds will pay off in the way that developers and elected officials might suggest.
 

“One of the things that has been asked for as part of the proposal [to redevelop Harborplace] is a fairly generous subsidy,” Walters told an audience at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel. “The papers are suggesting that about a $400 million public subsidy might be necessary. That seems like a lot of money to me…The general justification for subsidies has always been: Oh, it’s going to be a catalyst. It’s public money but it’ll fuel lots and lots of investment so don’t worry.”
 

But are the promised “spillover benefits” likely to materialize? he asked.
 

“When we hear the promises that this new development will be the catalyst that solves everything, we should be a little bit suspicious about that,” he said.
 

Landscape architect Barbara Wilks expanded on Walters’ comments, detailing how leaders in four other U. S. cities used public funds to support redevelopment projects on their waterfronts. In three of the four cases, she showed, the cost was lower than $400 million.
 

Wilks also noted that many cities ask more from private developers than Baltimore does, in cases where officials grant height variances, allow more density or otherwise change zoning to permit them to build more than they could before the zoning was changed.

“In New York City, where I work, when developers are granted this type of upzoning, they are required to create public space around their developments,” she said. “This has not historically been the case in Baltimore.”
 

If officials are talking about spending $400 million in public funds to subsidize a private plan to redevelop Harborplace, “maybe we should think a little bit about the best way to spend it,” she said. “What will really attract you?…What would bring people down? What would attract your grandchildren and future grandchildren? How can we catalyze the renewal of the downtown while attracting more people to the harbor? How can it be such a special place that people want to go?”
 

The panelists’ presentations were followed by a half-hour Q&A session, with at least two audience members expressing concern that current elected officials are ignoring lessons of the past and making decisions that threaten to undermine previous planning efforts.
 

Jane Shipley, a longtime Baltimore resident and community activist, asked what private citizens can do when they think elected officials are promoting a plan that they don’t believe is right for the city. She said she has fought development proposals in the past, starting with a 1974 plan to raze much of Otterbein that was eventually defeated.
 

“I think we have a state of emergency right now,” Shipley said. “I don’t think we know what to do. It’s very difficult to fight against powerful forces…I haven’t heard anybody talk about where we go from here…How do we get people to understand what is happening? Where do we go? What do we do?”
 

“How do we keep developers from coming into our public parks and seeing them as prime real estate and taking over our parks and making these into exclusive residential neighborhoods for the rich?” asked Baltimore resident Brent Bederka. “That’s what we’re talking about. That’s exactly what’s going on here.”
 

Bederka said he’s worried that any Harborplace plan that would allow residential development on what has been considered city parkland could set a precedent for turning even more city parkland over for private development.
 

“I think that that’s an important consideration that we all need to think about,” he said. “If we let these developers come into our parks and make these parks exclusive neighborhoods for the rich, there’s no stopping them from doing that in Druid Hill Park or Patterson Park or any other parks that we consider sacred in our city.”
 

A City Planning Conversation

More than 200 people gathered at the hotel on Wednesday to hear five experts share thoughts about Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and “how it can best attract residents and visitors.”
 

Entitled “Inner Harbor 2024: A City Planning Conversation,” the two-hour forum was organized by the Urban Design Committee of the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).  In addition to Walters and Wilks, the multi-disciplinary panel included: Amber Wendland, an associate principal at Ayers Saint Gross, as the Architecture/Urban Design panelist; Peter May, a scientist, ecological engineer and University of Maryland faculty member, as the ecological engineer on the panel, and Erwin Andres, vice president and senior principal of Gorove Slade Transportation Planners and Engineers, as the transportation expert. Otis Rolley, director of Baltimore’s planning department from 2003 to 2007, served as the moderator.
 

The audience was a Who’s Who from the local design and development community, including former city housing commissioner M. Jay Brodie; former city planning director Thomas Stosur; and architects Adam Gross, Gary Bowden, Eric Lowe, Diane Cho, David Benn, Klaus Philipsen, Paul Marks, John Mariani and Stephen Glassman.
 

Others included former mayoral candidate Thiru Vignarajah; American Visionary Art Museum co-founder Rebecca Alban Hoffberger; planning consultant Andy Frank; folklorist Elaine Eff; and Ted Rouse, son of Harborplace developer James Rouse. Some of the audience members were part of the Inner Harbor Coalition, a citizen’s group that has been critical of recent planning efforts involving the downtown waterfront, or lack of them.
 

$500 million private development

The forum comes as a private development company, MCB Real Estate of Baltimore, is seeking approval to tear down the two-story Harborplace pavilions and replace them with a $500 million mixed-use project consisting of two residential towers containing a total of 900 apartments; offices; shops; restaurants and public space, including a two-tier waterfront promenade and a green space called The Park at Freedom’s Port.
 

MCB owns the Harborplace pavilions and leases the land beneath and around them from the city – 3.2 acres in all.  Before it can move ahead with construction of its proposed replacement project, MCB needs city voters to approve an amendment to the City Charter that would expand the amount of land it controls from 3.2 acres to 4.5 acres. Voters will be asked to approve that amendment during the citywide election in November, and MCB’s proposal is largely what prompted the AIA forum.
 

The format for Wednesday’s session was different from a series of community engagement sessions that MCB has organized to provide information about its plans and build public support for them. Instead of inviting presenters from MCB or the city government to be on its panel, the AIA invited speakers who are experts in various facets of urban design and waterfront development but who aren’t part of MCB’s development team or employees of Baltimore City.
 

Instead of asking the panelists to talk about the pros and cons of MCB’s plans for replacing Harborplace, the AIA wanted the experts to discuss the Inner Harbor as a public space and what steps the public and private sectors should take to make it better. The organizers stressed that the panelists’ remarks reflect their own views, not those of the AIA or its committees.
 

“The event is not a design critique on the proposed development and instead will discuss the role of public space and private development in a public space,” the AIA stated in an announcement about the program.
 

Ground rules

Chip Place, a member of the AIA’s urban design committee, said at the start of the forum that the AIA wanted to give some background information about the Inner Harbor so city residents can make informed decisions about its redevelopment.
 

“As you all know, a little over six months ago, local developer MCB proposed a major redevelopment of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor,” he said. “However, MCB’s proposal is not really the focus tonight. Instead, we will take a step back to discuss how Harborplace arrived at its current condition with the overall objective of [thinking about what] our urban waterfront redevelopment could be and how we would measure success.”
 

Rolley, in response to Shipley’s questions, said the AIA panelists were selected for their expertise in certain fields and the forum wasn’t intended to be a setting to air or wage specific development battles. He said the organizers wanted to give audience members information that would help them arrive at creative solutions to urban design problems.
 

“Principally, the AIA was hoping to talk about…not necessarily the battles but really to give you all the information that you need as relates to going to battle, right, and to figure out what you need in terms of additional resources so that you could understand how to move from adversarial to creative [thinking] about how we could be collaborative in our approach.”
 

Rolley didn’t ask any of the panelists to answer Shipley’s questions about fighting a development plan.
 

“It’s not a cop out,” he told her. “It’s just that each of them came with a certain amount of expertise.”
 

The need for public subsidies

The ground rules for the meeting meant that some controversial aspects of MCB’s design proposal for Harborplace, including the height of the proposed buildings and the idea of introducing 900 residences and possible on-site parking, would not be up for discussion. For the most part the ground rules held, with only one panelist even showing a rendering of MCB’s plan and no one from MCB or its design team addressing the audience.
 

But while the specifics of MCB’s plan were off limits as a topic for discussion, the idea of spending taxpayer funds to support private development at the Inner Harbor was not. As part of recounting the history of the Inner Harbor and its redevelopment over the years, speakers discussed the practice of investing public funds to assemble land and attract private investment, and the strategy of creating public-private partnerships to improve and maintain the waterfront.
 

In announcing his team’s proposal for a $500 million private development last October, MCB managing partner P. David Bramble said the project would need an investment of $400 million in public funds to complete improvements that would be associated with the private development but part of the public realm.
 

As outlined in a news conference on October 30 and subsequent briefings, development team members said the public improvements would include rebuilding the Inner Harbor promenade to make it more resilient and less prone to flooding; narrowing and realigning Pratt and Light Streets, eliminating a road spur that connects northbound Light Street with Calvert Street; and creating new public spaces in and around the five buildings proposed as part of the private development.
 

Bramble has maintained that MCB’s privately-funded project cannot proceed without the concurrent investment of public funds for improvements at the ground plane. He also notes that some changes, especially those involving the waterfront promenade, will be necessary whether a private development moves ahead or not.
   

The Maryland General Assembly has approved $67.5 million in state funds to assist the redevelopment of Harborplace, primarily to rebuild the promenade. City Councilman Eric Costello, who did not appear at Wednesday’s forum, has said on numerous occasions that he believes the federal government will pay for the bulk of shoreline improvements because it has done so in the past. Beyond that, backers of MCB’s proposal have not said where the rest of the $400 million might come from.
 

Questions have increased since the collapse last month of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is expected to cost between $1.7 billion and $1.9 billion to replace. Although President Joe Biden has vowed the federal government will pay 100 percent of the bridge replacement costs, some South Baltimore residents have asked whether the federal government can still be counted on to fund reconstruction of the Inner Harbor promenade given its commitment to the bridge project.
 

Funding questions

That uncertainty about public funding played into much of the discussion at the forum on Wednesday.
 

Speakers went into detail about how public funds have been used since the 1960s to jumpstart development of Charles Center and the Inner Harbor, by creating individual parcels that could be offered for redevelopment by the private sector, with strict controls spelling out what city planners want to see constructed. They noted that Baltimore has been a leader in waterfront development, largely because of the way the city leaders created a master plan and followed it carefully to guide development over the years.
 

Looking to the future, the panelists talked in the abstract about how public funds might be used to trigger a new wave of private development. Andres gave an overview of trends that are shaping urban development and transportation planning following the COVID-19 pandemic, including a rise in office vacancies, a drop in traffic volumes and car ownership, and a declining city population in general.
 

Walters, who is the chief economist at the Maryland Public Policy Institute and author of Boom Town: Restoring the Urban American Dream, said he doesn’t dispute that developers in Baltimore need public subsidies to go along with their private investments.
 

“The people who ask for subsidies today and say, ‘without that subsidy our project is not viable,’ they’re not lying,” he said. “They’re telling the truth.”
 

Because of the disparity in property tax rates between the City of Baltimore and the adjacent counties, where taxes are lower, “we are at a cost disadvantage vis a vis our competition, which is our surrounding suburbs,” Walters said. “Pretty much everything we’ve done since Charles Center has involved these kinds of subsidies and, again, they’re necessary.”
 

‘People keep leaving’

But it’s never a certainty that public subsidies will pay off in the way elected officials hope they will, Walters said. Despite years of public investment in Baltimore, he and Andres said, the city’s population continues to decline – from more than 900,000 in 1970 to fewer than 575,000 now.
 

“The problem is that it’s obviously not effective…people keep leaving,” Walters said. “We have deep problems with the durability of our Renaissance…That’s something that we have to do something about.”
 

To make his point, Walters showed a slide of the “hole in the ground” where the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre was razed starting in 2014 to make way for a high-rise development that never materialized.
 

The catalytic effects of all these subsidies is “kind of disappointing,” he said. “The Howard Street corridor got light rail investment, got Charles Center next to it,” but “I don’t know of anybody who thinks that Howard Street is a model of urban vitality and living.”
 

The fact that the city continues to lose population “should be setting off alarm bells,” he said later in the meeting. “That’s what put Detroit into bankruptcy. You have a lot of fixed costs of government, and a shrinking tax base of taxpayers…If we don’t do something like a competitive tax rate plan, and there are some circulating…we’re not creating a durable Renaissance that spreads widely.”
 

The New Normal

Adding to the difficulty of investing public funds now, Walters said, is that is no one knows for sure what will work to revitalize cities as they struggle to recover in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns it caused.
 

“We’re not in the New Normal yet,” he said. “We don’t know what the New Normal is going to be yet. And when we talk about replenishing or reinvesting and so forth, we have to be kind of humble about the fact that the formula, the recipe for growth, is as yet unknown. We don’t know the optimal mix of office space, residential space, commercial, retail, entertainment and so forth. We do know that parks work. We do know that people like that. We don’t know in what measure, however, all of the other elements of the recipe really are likely to have a favorable effect. We’re kind of feeling for the light switch in the dark.”
 

There’s also a chance that elected officials could make some bad decisions in their zeal to try something new, he said, showing a slide of the elevated highway that transportation planners proposed to build over the Inner Harbor in the 1960s to connect Interstate 95 and Interstate 83.
 

“At that time, we thought that those freeways crisscrossing the harbor were a really bang-up idea,” he said.
 

Walters left the audience with one thought to contemplate. He said the Inner Harbor’s original planners were guided by one “really good” idea: “They said our goal is to have a critical mass of attractions, and everything we do from here on out should be…relevant to that. Is what we’re doing moving us closer to the critical mass or further away from the critical mass? Are we knitting the attractions that we have together or are we maybe cannibalizing some of the existing attractions with new attractions?”
 

What other cities have done

Wilks, founding principal of W Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Brooklyn and former principal of Cho, Wilks and Benn in Baltimore said city leaders need to spend public funds wisely. Like Walters, she suggested that any new plan for the Inner Harbor should be judged on one key consideration: Does it reinforce what has worked well before in the Inner Harbor or does it work against it?
 

Wilks presented case studies of public investments in four cities – St. Petersburg, Florida; which invested $93 million in public funds to support redevelopment of 26 acres including a major new pier; Calgary, Alberta, which invested $16 million in Canadian dollars to make 20 acres of St. Patrick’s Island a popular visitor designation; St. Louis, which invested $30 million in public funds to support a 2.9 acre sculpture park called Citygarden; and Chicago, where $270 million in public funds and $205 million in private funds were used to  create the 24.5-acre Millenium Park over a railyard. 
 

In the four cases, Wilks said, public funds were used to support a variety of amenities, including new plazas and piers, ferry stops, parks, playgrounds, gardens, splash pads, pools, waterfalls, light shows, wetlands, skating rinks, amphitheaters, restaurants, marketplaces and streets turned into pedestrian zones.
 

Large-scale public art is a big feature of the developments in Chicago, St. Petersburg and St. Louis, where Citygarden boasts two dozen sculptures. St. Petersburg arrived at the design for its new pier after holding a design competition, and the result has won numerous awards.
 

Although the projects have different scales and budgets, “understanding what people want” has been the key to success in each case, Wilks said. “The answer is different for every city.” 
 

In her presentation, Wendland pointed to projects that have “pushed the envelope“ in terms of waterfront design, including Brooklyn Bridge Park and Little Island in New York City; the Coal Harbor neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia; and the work of Ayers Saint Gross to de-densify parts of the waterfront in Charleston, South Carolina.
 

Preparing for sea level rise

May, the ecological engineer, questioned whether the city needs to reconstruct the Inner Harbor promenade right now to the degree that some planners have proposed.
 

Noting that the Inner Harbor basin encompasses about 125 acres within a 135,000-acre watershed, he suggested that there may be some “adaptive” approaches to addressing sea level rise and flooding that wouldn’t cost as much as others.  He said he could support the idea of a two-tier promenade, especially if the lower, “floating” tier gave people a chance to get close enough to touch the water, and he’s enthusiastic about the introduction of floating wetlands around the harbor.
 

“Sea-level rise is coming,” he said. “It’s been coming for a long time now. It’s increasing. But how much is it increasing? And should we instantly say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to build walls and elevate everything’…Do we need to do that? Well, maybe we do. But not now, you know? We need to be thinking adaptively…2030, 2040 – there are a lot of things that can happen.”
 

AIA representatives said they were happy with the turnout, which filled one of the hotel’s large, fifth-level ballrooms. Urban design committee members said they hope to organize additional forums about Inner Harbor development, including one that might be held in conjunction with Morgan State University and its School of Architecture and Planning.
 

November 5 is the date of the citywide election that will include the Harborplace referendum. The exact wording of the question about amending the charter hasn’t been made public.
 

Rolley encouraged audience members to take steps to learn more about the Inner Harbor and its redevelopment potential.
 

“This is your city,” he said. “You decide how it can and should be shaped.”