The edge of Annapolis changes in 20-year waves. Today, right on time, a new swell of homes and retail is shaping up, promising to create the latest transformation of an area named for a long-ago prisoner-of-war camp, Parole.
More than 750 new apartments in five- and six-story buildings are welcoming their first tenants. Another 750 townhouses, apartments and condos loom in various stages of planning.
Wide swaths of new retail and restaurant space are coming, too, including the first Annapolis location for the German grocery chain Aldi.
Even more seems certain at Westfield Annapolis, the partially vacant mall purchased by Centennial. The Texas company bills itself as an expert in redeveloping commercial properties, creating destinations that combine retail, restaurants, entertainment, office space and — luxury housing.
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So far, the advertised rents are well above the area’s median family income and seem almost certain to make Annapolis unwelcome to people just starting out in life.
“I will be very curious to see who can meet the rents they are offering,” said Lisa Rodvien, the Anne Arundel County councilwoman representing the Annapolis area.
According to leasing for the Aventon Annapolis and Avalon Annapolis projects on Riva Road, monthly rent starts around $2,100 for a studio and tops out just above $4,000 for the largest and most luxurious units. That’s not the most expensive on the market. Nearby Mariner Bay starts at $2,400 and tops out above $5,000.
Rent calculators estimate the income needed to support any of these entry-level apartments at more than $90,000 a year, $25,000 more than the starting salary for a public school teacher or police officer.
And they are nice. I stopped by Avalon on Friday and told the leasing associate who greeted me the truth. My wife and I have started talking about downsizing from our single-family home someday. What would living in Avalon be like?
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White walls and high ceilings make clear this is a brand new building, and something new to Annapolis. There’s not much in the way of views, unless you like the river of traffic on Route 50, but there’s a ton of light, a community pool, a dog wash and bike storage space. Plans call for casual food restaurants, a pub plus a few shops.
Even though the buildings are outside city limits, almost anyone other than a nerd for boundaries calls it Annapolis.
“You can get downtown quickly,” Rodvien said.
It looks awfully similar to the development that has transformed the northwest corner of Anne Arundel County, where thousands of apartments have filled in around Arundel Mills mall and Live! Casino in Hanover. Some of the companies are the same.
“It’s just different when people are renting and that’s what most of the housing is, rental,” said state Sen. Pamela Beidle, who has represented the area in the General Assembly and the County Council for 26 years. “We needed the housing, don’t get me wrong.”
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But she added, “it’s really hard to get to know the folks that live in apartments.”
Multi-family buildings on the edges of Annapolis are not new. More has been the plan for a long time.
Jenny Dempsey, the county’s planning and zoning officer, said the long-term goal is to add 6,700 new residences to Parole Town Center by 2040, about 75% of the new development projected around Annapolis. It will divert new construction from rural areas such as Crownsville or South County below Edgewater.
That density, theoretically, will create an urban center where people can walk or bicycle to shops and restaurants. It doesn’t include new homes inside the city, which has its own planning and zoning process.
It builds on trends that started in the early 1960s when the first Parole shopping center opened, named for the Civil War prisoner exchange camps that occupied the area and the historically Black neighborhood just across the city line in Annapolis. Downtown merchants started leaving their 18th- and 19th-century commercial buildings for shiny new spaces and wide open parking lots of Parole Plaza.
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Twenty years later, though, the plaza got one-upped. The Annapolis Mall opened on the site of the former Best Gate train station, and shoppers deserted the aging Parole plaza for the spacious mall, where retail space eventually swelled to 1.4 million square feet.
Homes followed. Developers added more than 1,500 apartments, townhouses and single-family homes on small lots along Bestgate and Housely roads, Admiral Cochrane Drive and other streets. New single-family homes on large lots created another ring of development further out from the city-county line.
Then malls, including the renamed Westfield Annapolis mall, began to fade in popularity.
Annapolis Town Center replaced Parole Plaza, adding 2 million square feet of retail, office and restaurant space plus more than 650 apartments and condos in the area’s first high-rises. Only the 2008 recession kept it from being completed as planned, which would have added several hundred more homes.
Now, just like clockwork, the next wave is coming. Dempsey said her office has either approved or is considering nine projects in Parole:
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- Aventon Annapolis — A five-story, 250-unit apartment building on Riva Road is about 80% full since opening. Approval is pending for a 6,413-square-foot retail/restaurant building and 18 four-story townhouses.
- Beacon Square — The Avalon Apartments has begun leasing the first 508 units in a six-story complex between Riva Road and Route 50. Small restaurants, shops and offices have started opening in 94,154 square feet of space surrounding the complex.
- Orvil Bowen Property — Plans call for building a five-story, 320-unit apartment building plus a Wawa convenience store on the grounds of the Riva 400 Office Park near Annapolis High School. The county has yet to approve it.
- Everleigh at Annapolis Towne Center — The current owners of the massive mixed-use project plan to build a 175-unit, independent-living apartment building. The project, which has yet to be approved, would go on the site of the unbuilt fourth residential tower from the original project.
- 179 Jennifer Road — The Annapolis Restaurant Park and Crowne Plaza Hotel occupy a swath of pavement always intended for additional development. The county is considering a 252-unit apartment building that would occupy much of that unused parking.
New commercial projects include:
- Twenty Five Ten Riva Road — Work is underway on a 22,597-square-foot ALDI grocery store in what has been named The Shoppes at Riva. The project includes a 7,000-square-foot Honey Grow restaurant plus 6,500 square feet of retail space.
- 2575 Riva Road — Work has started on a Dash In, a Mid-Atlantic chain of convenience stores and car washes at Shell gas stations.
- Cracker Barrel — The county approved a location for the national restaurant chain in the Annapolis Restaurant Park last year.
- Home Depot — Annapolis has two Home Depots and no a Lowe’s Home Improvement, go figure. The larger one, at 145 Defense Highway, is seeking approval to build a 4,289-square-foot tool rental center.
Many things, meanwhile, aren’t being planned.
Traffic will grow, and the county is supposed to require road upgrades. But demand for parks and recreation and police services will grow too. Public schools, for the moment, seem somewhat insulated.
Rodvien, who will return to Anne Arundel County Public Schools this fall as a part-time music teacher, said only a handful of school-age students live in the town center projects — and there’s no reason to believe that will change anytime soon.
Unlike the area around Arundel Mills and the casino, this development doesn’t come with dedicated funding.
Those areas get $18 million in community impact money from the mall and casino, money that has helped pay for additional police and fire services but also community initiatives.
“Homes need more schools, more medical care, more paramedic and fire than businesses need,” Beidle said. “So that’s always been a discussion.”
