COLUMBIA, MD-Fifty years after Columbia's founder James W. Rouse purchased 14,000 acres in Howard County to build a planned community, the goal of creating a new breed of city here to nurture the human spirit has proven elusive.
Construction sites have emerged from the northwest side of The Mall in Columbia down to the edge of Lake Kittamaqundi as part of a 30-year plan to remake the Town Center. A Whole Foods market and a Foreman Wolf restaurant are in the works and renovations have recently been completed at an office building and the Town Center's landmark restaurant, Clyde's, on the lakefront, according to the Baltimore Sun.
The work is part of a redevelopment plan that could bring up to 5,500 new apartments and townhouses, add up to 4.3 million square feet of office space and as much as 1.25 million square feet of stores and hotels to the city's stock.
"Columbia has not achieved its full potential yet, and it won't achieve it until there is an alive downtown. ... That's the missing piece," said Padraic Kennedy, former president of the Columbia Association, a nonprofit organization that maintains open space and community services in Columbia.
Surrounded by nine residential villages, Columbia's downtown has become the "doughnut hole" in the center, said Kennedy, although it is home 3,100 people and 8,700 jobs. See story in the Baltimore Sun.
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