Bowie Shopping Center Owner Promotes Townhouses

Development Planned Near Hilltop Plaza

The owner of the Hilltop Plaza shopping center in Bowie is promising nearby residents that sprucing up the property and constructing townhouses on an unused parking lot will breathe new life into the center and deter crime.

Residents who live in the Belair Town II community say they hope the planned improvements will work.

In the meantime, they said, they want the owner, M. Leo Storch Management of Baltimore County, to close a pair of stairwells that lead from the shopping center into their neighborhood. Residents say loiterers and criminals use the stairs as a passageway into their community.

The improvements to the retail area are scheduled to begin in the next 30 days and could take six to eight months, said Bruce Levine, the director for commercial real estate for Storch.

Storch also plans to build 49 townhouses on the parking lot adjacent to the shopping center that the company owns and to improve the center with new lighting, parking and facades. New tenants, including an Aldi supermarket, also are expected.

The townhouses, however, will not be built until the real estate market rebounds, Levine said.

In the meantime, Storch officials have submitted to the Prince George's County Planning Board a request to rezone the property from rural residential and commercial to mixed use.

The four-acre parking lot on which the townhouses would be built attracts unwanted loiterers and skateboarders and criminal activity, Storch's attorney, Thomas Haller, said during a recent meeting about the project at Bowie City Hall. Most of the customers at the center's stores use the parking lot on the corner of Route 450 and Race Track Road.

Building townhouses on the vacant parking lot could reduce crime by bringing more residents to the area who would spot and report it, Haller said at the meeting. Beverly Bell, owner of Guy Savoy barber shop and Life Spa wellness center in Hilltop, said she worries that the townhouses would produce more foot traffic and subsequent crime.

In an interview, Levine said new shopping center tenants will give the center a boost.

"I'm sure it will help," he said. "There will be a lot more activity."

Aldi spokeswoman Heather Tarczan confirmed that the discount grocery store has signed a contract to move into the shopping center in November. Levine said Storch officials also are negotiating with representatives from My Organic Market to bring a store to the center.