Vibrant Downtown or Downtown Disaster?: A Case Study of Salisbury, MD
Most towns and cites throughout the United States have been brought to their knees by urban sprawl, and the development problems of Salisbury, Maryland are typical of most U.S. urban areas. However, the solutions for city and landscape woes offered through responsible planning are easily implemented. Car fixation away from self sufficient walking, biking, or efficient public transportation causes a further set of problems: an ever increasing dependence on an energy source. The United States’ energy dependence rests almost entirely on foreign oil which is satisfied in large part by the Middle East, an excitable and unstable part of the world and a decidedly undependable energy source. But even if energy needs are met within one’s own country, the enormous consumption of natural resources by cars through oil, road infrastructure, and massive land use needs is prohibitive. Salisbury began nicely enough, with a central downtown plaza that had shops and offices in artistically designed several story buildings side by side. But the quality of essential retail, or basic goods stores like clothing and grocery, degraded very rapidly with the onset of the fringe commercial developments like Wal-mart. People flocked to these so called "big box" stores where they could get a cheaper gallon of mustard that came in more varieties, in deference to the downtown stores' business practices which were not solely based on cost. Planning officials gave their blessings to these commercial fringe developments, well aware of their decentralizing and economic impact on the existing downtown businesses. The decline of basic goods stores in Salisbury gave rise to an imbalance: 9 to 5 office businesses such as lawyering, insuring, and financing companies began operating from the recently vacated first floors. Proper planning, however, dictates that retail shops and restaurants should be placed on the ground floor for storefront appeal, and residential and office space on floors above. Unfortunately, the shops and eateries that once attracted large groups of people throughout the day were mostly replaced by fringe developments several miles away in North Salisbury centered around an indoor shopping mall named, affrontingly, "The Centre at Salisbury." Efficiency of space principles are of paramount concern in addressing these imbalances. Multistory buildings, and mixed retail, office, and residential buildings are necessary for any city with a definable and sustainable center. Weighing heavily in favor of either residences, offices, or retail stores collapses the home, work, and shopping close proximity needs of people. With urban sprawl design these three needs are greatly distanced in mileage from one another, enhancing dependency on automobiles and the movement away from a humanistic and social environment. * Reminder: Home, Work, and Shopping needs of people are the three basic components of Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) where each component is close together on a human scale such as walking or biking. Then the hours of operation of downtown Salisbury took a nose dive. Because the area became office oriented, the few remaining retail stores began to share similar hours which concluded in a desolate look to Salisbury downtown after 5 PM on weekdays and all weekend long. There is little incentive for people to go to the city's center when there is little retailing available. Instead, people drive far away to urban sprawl and its mix-matched locations. The city of Salisbury could have launched a well funded effort to attract businesses to the downtown by the use of creative marketing, planning, and integration with other branches of government, but they choose not to. The original planners, at least, got a design aspect right of the downtown Salisbury structure that has to do with the distance between buildings and the width of the road. On Salisbury's downtown plaza, the buildings are several stories rising up on either side of a narrow landscaped road. Those buildings are efficiently planned for retail shops on the first floor, and residential or office above, otherwise known in planning lingo as efficiency of space for the purpose of a walkable humanistic environment. The pedestrian feels comfortable because he feels his space is enclosed. The roadway is not a threat because the crossing distance is reasonable, and the cars are naturally slowing down because the superhighway feel has been taken away by various slowing designs. Progressing from downtown Salisbury towards Rt. 13 and northwards, efficiency and centralization is cast aside and the buildings and roads change. The buildings are spread out more, many are one story, set back far from the road which has begun to widen and is a gauntlet for the pedestrian to cross. Lube joints, tire garages, quickie-marts, and billboards contribute to an overall ugliness. Businesses are largely single use and fronted with large unshared parking lots which further enhances a mind-numbing blacktop effect. The sidewalk is drawn down to a sliver and walkers have hurtling cars and trucks an arm's length away. North Salisbury urban sprawl, in particular, has practically no sidewalks and few but the most battle hardened walkers would walk to or around this area. Changing the current road conditions such as width and shareability are essential tasks to improving sprawl in Salisbury. Decades ago, Rt. 50 was widened and super highway characteristics were added on as it came into and through Salisbury. The addition of guard rails, wide lanes, and uncrossable sections split the area of Newtown and the downtown area from each other, further crippling a person's ability to walk to downtown Salisbury. Sadly, many U.S. towns are discovering that having a fast highway hurtling through their downtowns was extremely poor planning and are now suffering the consequences: poor walkability, segregated neighborhoods, and noise pollution, among other difficulties. Narrowing roads, adding curves, creating bike lanes and parking spaces, building tree-lined medians, and widening sidewalks are some examples of how to put our roads on a diet, so to speak. * Reminder: Bringing your home, work, and shopping closer together through proper city planning creates a more efficient, healthy, and communal spirit. The anti-social, polluting, and withering effects of car dependency are greatly reduced, while the joys of social interaction and relaxing are greatly enhanced. More compact urban planning also allows green spaces such as forests and parks to be preserved and easily accessible to even the city dweller. For this reason and as a place to congregate, the town square or central green has always been integral to traditional town planning. Salisbury's "town square" adjacent to the public library consists of blacktop in the form of an enormous parking lot that serves to hasten a visitor's departure. A town central green would better replace at least 1/2 of the current space devoted to the bleakness of parking. A comfortable, garden-like and shaded setting would allow people to relax, to assemble, and bring more of a human centrality to downtown Salisbury. Salisbury is largely bereft of green spaces such as gardens, forests, and natural areas apart from the zoo and park which, arguably, should be better maintained and developed. The construction of “The Centre at Salisbury” mall 3 miles north along an auto oriented highway included a larger capacity movie theatre which effectively displaced large numbers of evening people away from the downtown movie theatre. This mall theatre is now being replaced by an even larger megaplex type theatre. Neither movie theatre should have been constructed. If the original downtown movie theatre had been preserved, and perhaps another built nearby, the showings could have varied between the two, such as new Hollywood screenings at one and older movies or film festival type movies shown at the other. In addition, a drama theatre could be built downtown which would satisfy a different demographic of people. Instead, citizens of Salisbury are offered only one choice of movie type: new Hollywood releases which do not effectively broaden your cultural horizons. * Reminder: Cultural, aesthetic, and educational needs suffer within a city succumbing to urban sprawl. Incorporating anchor retail stores and cultural attractions into an urban plan attracts other businesses, restaurants, and potential residents Before the construction of the Centre at Salisbury Mall, there was the Salisbury Mall (now defunct) built to the north of the zoo and park area and near downtown Salisbury. The location was reasonable, but the site planning and construction was terrible. Instead of building a multi-story building which would take up a much smaller footprint, developers built the mall one story and spread out over an enormous area. The rest of the property consisted of an equally enormous parking lot whose capacity significantly exceeded usage. The inclusion of apartments, homes, and offices into the overall building plan was overlooked. The opportunity to rebuild or refurbish the Salisbury Mall property according to better planning principles like the Traditional Neighborhood Design (TND) method of having your home, work and shopping needs close together was ignored. In regards to possible locations for a future mall type retail building, a superb location would be the Wicomico Hotel, the tallest building in the immediate downtown area visible from Rt. 50 and Rt. 13 (see photo below). Remodeling the Wicomico Hotel into a multistory retail space would only be successful if accompanying problems were addressed, such as parking and already developed fringe retailers. The correction to these problems would lead to building higher density residential units nearer to downtown (so people could walk and not be required to drive), improving public transportation, and inevitably a phasing out of displaced retail businesses in fringe areas. In other words, an overall development plan addressing all the interlinking concerns for a centralized downtown is necessary. Unfortunately, Salisbury, like most U.S. towns and cities, does not have an overall plan that encourages and requires this kind of traditional neighborhood development, as partly outlined in this article, that developers and businesses can build in accordance with. Taking the landscape into account is yet another responsible planning technique, and the Wicomico River is an important asset to be appreciated. Along the Riverwalk, a pleasant winding walk along the Wicomico River adjacent to Salisbury's downtown, can be seen more examples of building inefficiency. Oddly, few buildings front the river and some audaciously display their backsides of HVAC machinery and exit doors to any pedestrians strolling by. The potential for retail and residential buildings overlooking a beautiful waterway is grossly underutilized. Many buildings are lower storied and inefficiently sized for their lot size. * Reminder: The importance of centrality shows, for example, that a person can have dinner, shop, watch a movie, stroll around town afterwards, and appreciate the natural surroundings, landscaping, and night sky—all within the same place, and just a short walk from their doorstep. A little known but pervasive problem with current Salisbury construction methods is called duplicated services, sprawl within sprawl, where similar business services are repeated in close proximity to one another. A good example of this is having Home Depot and Lowe’s right next to each other, or a Wal-Mart food store and Giant food store immediately next to each other. An excellent example of duplicated services is in the sprawl of south Salisbury where, unbelievably, a combination Giant Pharmacy/Food store, another Giant drug store, a Rite-Aid drug store, an Eckerd Drug Store, and a Community Pharmacy are all within a four block square. Locating similar businesses in one area means customers have a more limited variety of stores, have to travel further to reach other kinds of stores, and distant sections of town are left without the stores they need, not to mention the extreme competitiveness such planning fosters. If the Salisbury downtown center ever developed responsibly and the population increased, several other centers should be developed within the city to satisfy the growing population. Unfortunately, in many American cities the centers apart from the downtown are merely sprawling strips and not centered at all. Because one central area can be over saturated with people and congestion, other smaller downtown models should be designed to accommodate people further away. A better guide to housing development is having an apartment or townhouse every 10th house. One of the worst enemies of public transit is low density communities and communities that are gated, dead ended, and cul-de-saced, preventing efficiency of movement. Most people in Salisbury drive because the area's poor design prohibits public transportation, causing excessive amounts of cars on the road. Further congestion occurs when many people drive to the same place such as North Salisbury. * Reminder: If Salisbury was more centralized, people would have less travel time between their home, work, and shopping places, and public transit would then be a viable option for people to consider. The first step in solving the poor planning of urban sprawl is relatively straightforward: determine an urban growth boundary within which responsible centralized development is encouraged and required, and outside of which agriculture, forests, and parks are preserved and urban type development strongly discouraged. Along with this boundary a "new construction moratorium" should be declared during which time planning and zoning departments will be required to conform their laws and planning methods to responsible Traditional Neighborhood Development type planning techniques. This step will inevitably create a new set of problems because of fractional jurisdictions. Fractional jurisdictions occur when Salisbury, Wicomico County, Delmar, and Sussex County disagree over planning standards because of petty bickering and general ignorance over how best to design their cities and landscape. In the event of squabbling jurisdictions the state of Maryland or Delaware, or the Federal government eventually, should step in and delegate authority. Realistically, the Federal government should set a development and zoning law mandate for the United States as a whole because of the complete pervasiveness of urban sprawl. Through years of exposure to poorly planned communities most people have no idea what is really wrong with where they live, even defending in many cases their marred and anti-social environments. The few citizens, politicians, and professionals who have stepped forward with better planning methods have not been enough to persuade a generally ignorant populace. Elected officials have truly represented the citizens and their apathy, and the look of our towns and landscape confirms that. * Reminder: We might have fleeting moments throughout our lives of wanting things to be better as we choke on diesel fumes, squint from the supernova brightness of the fluorescents at the supermax food store, or aggressively motion our flabby arms at others through windshield glass, but in the end it is not enough. We have gotten what we deserve. |
Lack of leadership, poor planning, and general ignorance has broken the centrality and community spirit of Salisbury, Maryland, a town located midway down the peninsula to the east of the Chesapeake Bay. The ruthless zeal of developers combined with the incompetence of planning and zoning officials has resulted in a car dependent, pedestrian unfriendly, land consumptive, low population density, and an ugly single use development blight that is scattered over a wide landscape—otherwise known as urban sprawl.
Car dependency, perhaps the most important reason for urban sprawl, permanently fixes and orients a person’s movements at all times around and inside of an automobile. This causes the basic self-sufficient movement of getting here and there through walking to be rendered obsolete. The healthful benefits of walking and the opportunities to appreciate your surroundings are passed up. Gone also are opportunistic meetings and conversations with other people because interactions within the community happen largely through windshield glass. As landscape design is oriented around automobiles and not people the area begins to take on a marred and anti-social appearance.
With the ease of distances apparently solved by each person owning a car, construction locations are built further and further away from the centers of cities. This occurs for various reasons: to own your own house and property, the lessening of crime, and to escape the typical urban problems of population density, pollution, and congestion. These are valid reasons to leave an urban community, but poor planning helped give rise to these reasons in the first place which responsible planning would alleviate.
The elimination of important anchors to the downtown, such as basic goods stores and the movie theatre further crippled the downtown area. Basic goods stores such as grocery, hardware, clothing, and pharmacy stores are essential places to satisfy the basic shopping needs of people. Downtown Salisbury now has practically none of these basic stores. Instead, specialty stores selling unique items have risen in an attempt to compete with urban sprawl. Specialty stores are important retailers but because they serve only a limited segment of the population, they should never replace necessity stores. Mixed usage of specialty and basic goods stores is the answer, but a predominance of specialty stores shows a serious lack in the downtown’s ability to sustain a centralized population and more imbalance..
The poor locations of significant anchors such as the Shorebirds Baseball Stadium, Wor-Wic Community College, and Ward Wildfowl Museum are another problem. Each should have been located closer to the central downtown. Possibilities of compact design, mixed usage, and shared space have been and are continuing to be ignored throughout all phases of Salisbury's and Wicomico County's planning and development. 
Traffic congestion is another major concern in Salisbury, but this is due to the failures of urban sprawl design and its dependence on automobiles. Construction of mainly single family homes spread out over great distances causes public transit difficulties because bus routes to them cannot be cost justified. With everyone required then to drive a car to get anywhere, congestion results.