Letter: Will an improved Harborplace come at the expense of downtown?

A recent Banner story mentioned that when T. Rowe Price moves its headquarters to Harbor Point, the downtown office vacancy rate will reach a historic high. The expected vacancy rate — 30% — was first reported by the Baltimore Business Journal and is one that city officials prefer to ignore.

If developed, at least 175,000 square feet of Class A office space in the plan proposed by MCB Real Estate to redevelop Baltimore's Harborplace would compete directly with downtown. MCB's planned construction of up to 900 apartment units would reduce demand for commercial to residential conversions essential to reviving downtown.

Concerns about the harmful impact of MCB's plan on the character of the Inner Harbor have lingered since city officials ran roughshod over objections to the plan by architects, planners and other experts, including that it would relocate too much of the publicly accessible sunlit green space between the built environment and the water that made the Inner Harbor an attraction emulated around the world.

Another Banner story on how Harborplace is "bustling with new vitality" as small, locally owned restaurants have replaced national chains belies the claim that turning land over to a developer for high-density development is necessary to revitalize Harborplace. The vitality is consistent with the vision of a "greener and softer" Inner Harbor that emerged from the Baltimore Inner Harbor 2.0 plan in 2013, with more outdoor events and less reliance on brick-and-mortar establishments.

Last year, an editorial in The Washington Post touted Cleveland as "America's best example of turning around a dying downtown" and described "focusing the transformation efforts on a compact area" as the key to its success. Baltimore has taken the opposite approach, using tax breaks to build shiny new neighborhoods outside of the city core that continue to suck the life out of downtown. The question city officials should be asking is not whether MCB's mixed-use development will succeed, but whether it will succeed at the expense of the Inner Harbor and the entire downtown.

It is looking more and more like MCB's plan for Harborplace is another triumph of politics and hype over thoughtful planning in Baltimore.