After the boom and after the bust

Our Opinion

Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2009

Desperate for signs that the economy is getting back on track? Drive along Route 235 between Route 4 and Lexington Park. Two new commercial developments are under construction.

One is a shopping center called Lexington Village, where a Kohl's department store will be the anchor. The other is Park Place, where office space and five restaurants, including an Olive Garden, are planned.

At the time they were being approved by county agencies each had its controversies. Lexington Village displaced National Mobile Home Park, whose residents were relocated in 2007.

During that same year Park Place was opposed by the residents of Town Creek and other nearby neighborhoods. It sits at the intersection of Route 235 and Shady Mile Drive, and the original plans have been scaled back by 52,000 square feet of construction.

"A lot of things have happened in the last two years in this economy," John Parlett Jr., the project manager, said in June.

The battles were fought and these projects were approved before the economy tanked, but now earth has been moved and steel beams erected. Construction workers are on the job.

This means that financing, which was frozen for many projects following the near-collapse of the nation's financial industry last year, is again available for viable projects.

The construction here may not signal anything else definitive about the lifting of the national recession, but it does indicate something about St. Mary's County. The construction industry has certainly suffered here, but now as investors in commercial and retail building tentatively gear up they are looking to move forward with projects here, where the effects of the recession have been less severe.

As Patuxent River Naval Air Station was expanding in the 1990s, a big complaint of families moving to St. Mary's in those boom times was that there was not enough local shopping. People undertook expeditions to points north for what they considered necessary shopping. That sparked a sharp expansion of retail options.

That, along with the frantic pace of residential construction in those years, provoked a kind of backlash against the too-rapid development of St. Mary's County.

Everything changed last year, all too abruptly. The decisions to permit Lexington Village and Park Place may have been controversial, but now it is encouraging to see projects approved a couple of years ago under construction.

Surely there are lessons to be learned from the great economic bust of 2008. But in St. Mary's there were lessons to be learned from the boom of the preceding years as well. The county government put in place a growth policy limiting residential development last year that, as it turned out, has yet to be tested because housing construction dropped off sharply.

In both residential and commercial development, it's now clear, the healthiest course for this community is a moderate, steady pace of construction, no boom and no bust. The argument before last year was that a breakneck pace of development strains the county's infrastructure. Now we know that it can also leave empty houses and vacant retail and office space.