Long-Awaited Town Center Seen as Key to Fort Meade Strip's Revitalization
By Dina ElBoghdady
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 13, 2006
Mr. Major's Barber Shop, across Route 175 from Fort Meade, bustles with customers, perhaps a sign of things to come in a run-down retail strip that's been known for decades as "Boomtown."
But the name mocks the scene: the barber shop, a fast-food joint, a karate school sit beside boarded-up buildings in an area where GIs once packed into bars, tattoo parlors and pinball arcades during the strip's World War II heyday, when Fort Meade prepared 4 million soldiers for war. Since then, the soldier population dwindled. The Army post, 30 miles outside of the District, transferred 8,000 acres once used for target practice and tank training to a wildlife preserve in the early 1990s and settled into a smaller footprint, becoming a "briefcase base" teeming with mathematicians, engineers and physicists of the National Security Agency and other government tenants.
The Boomtown mile of retail withered during the base's transformation. The county presented plan after plan to revitalize Route 175, which curves north and east of the 5,400-acre base, but for two decades, until recently, those plans went nowhere.
Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens (D) despaired at Boomtown's decay, trying everything short of condemning properties to push revitalization. "I started fining some of the property owners based on crazy laws that say if the grass is over 14 inches, we can fine them," she said. "I even had the health department out there looking for rats."
Owens and others say their long struggle is nearing an end.
Under the Pentagon's most recent base-consolidation plan, more than 5,000 jobs will move to Fort Meade, most from Northern Virginia, in the next five or so years. Tens of thousands of workers for contractors are expected to follow those jobs. And state and county officials hope the growth will jettison the vestiges of Boomtown's boarded-up past and jump-start economic development in the small town of Odenton that includes it.
"Maybe things shouldn't change, because my rent will go up," mused Bill Major, 40, who is about to retire as a sergeant first class from Fort Meade and opened Mr. Major's Barber Shop less than a year ago. But a sense of optimism creeps into his voice, too, at the possibility of profiting off the $50,000 he invested in his business, one of the few places filled with life on this strip. On a recent afternoon, customers filled all 11 barber chairs and a dozen guys watched sports on a 65-inch flat-screen television or leaned up against a pool table, talking to buddies. "If 20,000 people or more come to this area, some of them are bound to end up in my store. Right?"
Others smell the possibility of profit, too.
After decades of bureaucratic wrangling, plans to build an Odenton Town Center just got the permits needed for homes, shops and offices a few blocks from Boomtown. The federal government appropriated $12.5 million toward widening a five-mile stretch of Route 175. A few investors are starting to put their money into strip malls. Others are poking around for opportunities.
The county has relaxed its zoning rules and begun offering tax breaks. That helped lure businessmen such as Edwin F. Hale Sr., chief executive of 1st Mariner Bank and owner of the Baltimore Blast professional soccer team, who thought a bank outside a burgeoning base would draw plenty of customers. Two years ago, Hale bought a boarded-up Burger King with a sunken roof across the street from the base for $450,000.
"The decision to buy took all of five minutes," said Hale, whose bank demolished the Burger King and opened a branch in November.
"We really hope to go from tattoo parlors to boutiques on 175," said J. Michael Hayes, director of military affairs at the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. "We knew for years, even before the Pentagon announced its plans, that this area would be growing."
Many Odenton residents are thrilled that revitalization plans finally seem to be moving.
"Maybe we won't have to drive to Columbia or Annapolis or Washington for restaurants and decent shopping anymore," said Holly Groves, who moved to Odenton in 1978 and manages Seven Oaks, an 850-acre planned community.
Seven Oaks, tucked behind the boarded-up China Plus restaurant, Pagoda House restaurant and J&J Pawnshop across from the entrance to Fort Meade at the corner of Route 175 and Charter Oaks Boulevard, has seemed a world away from the seedy Boomtown area ever since it was built in 1987. Its Colonial-style single-family units, apartments and townhouses are home to young professionals, military retirees and Fort Meade workers. The homes go for $250,000 to $650,000. On streets named Colonel, Artillery and Conquest sit neat lawns, well-kept tot lots, three pools and a small four-year-old strip mall anchored by a relatively new Weis supermarket.
"When you turn off Route 175 into Seven Oaks, it's like entering a different world," said Stephen N. Fleischman, a vice president at Halle Cos., the Silver Spring developer that created Seven Oaks. "As things continue to build up around here, those remaining Boomtown retailers will suffer from a lack of business."
It has taken a long time for development around Fort Meade to begin to shift to meet the needs of its current population. Today, the National Security Agency is by far the largest of Fort Meade's 78 government tenants, with 15,000 of the base's 40,000 employees and growing. Other tenants include the U.S. Army Field Band and a cluster of Environmental Protection Agency scientists. It pumps roughly $4 billion into Maryland's economy each year.
"We don't have the same soldier population anymore," said Col. Kenneth McCreedy, Fort Meade's commander since July. "The nature of our workforce has changed."
There are multiple reasons for the decades-long delays. The dream of a town center has been on the drawing boards since 1968. First, it suffered from a lack of funding, and then a 19-year battle with federal and state agencies over how to protect wetlands on the property. And at Boomtown, just down the road, longtime landowners were reluctant to sell because they weren't being offered enough money by developers. Those developers who did buy were afraid of sinking too much money into their properties because improvements promised by the county never seemed to materialize.
For example, when Baltimore philanthropist Yale Gordon died in 1984, his trust could not attract a serious buyer for the five acres it owned along the Boomtown strip, said Sidney S. Sherr, the trust's manager.
Old cars were dumped on some of the lots. Zoning laws were too strict. Water came from a well.
The county promised change for years, presenting one growth plan after another, but it never delivered, Sherr said. "We were waiting for a moment for the area to take off, and it didn't."
So the trust sold the property in December 2003 to Subhash Dhanesar for a lump sum of $650,000.
Dhanesar signed on Mr. Major's Barber Shop, the karate school, a Mexican restaurant and other tenants. But he's reluctant to sink much more money into the property until he's assured that the county will do its part. He wants turn lanes and traffic lights.
"None of us want to take the lead creating high-end restaurants because we still don't know what to expect," said Dhanesar, who describes himself as a scientist who develops real estate on the side.
Hart Beaver, who owned the Burger King purchased by 1st Mariner Bank, said he held out for money. Beaver and a partner bought the Odenton Burger King in the 1970s and operated it successfully until 1986, when they leased it to a businessman in New York. The store went bust about three years later, he said.
Beaver, a Pennsylvania resident, sat on the site for about three years, enduring the county's fines. "We knew the real estate value would keep increasing," he said.
And now it is, county and state officials say.
The county expects to add lanes to Route 175, make interchange improvements and build a 30-foot-high noise barrier around Fort Meade. The wider road will run past Odenton Town Center, a 1,620-acre site that begins across from where the base ends. Halle Cos., the largest owner of land there, plans to break ground on 5.5 million square feet of office space at the center within the year.
Some residents are wary of the changes underway. Lt. Col. Alfred H.M. Shehab, who retired from the Army in the 1960s and has been living in Odenton ever since, fears that the town's development exceeds its capacity to provide enough schools, roads, and police and fire services.
"If it all happened in an orderly way, it would be great," Shehab said. "But the American way is to develop first and worry about it later."
But Jay Winer, a developer in Odenton for 35 years who has been involved in planning the town center, feels no such ambivalence.
"We'd still be languishing if not for Fort Meade's growth," said Winer, president of A.J. Properties. "All the black and blue bruises from beating our heads against the wall for all those years may finally heal."
Researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
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