Letter to the Editor: Building near public transportation to combat climate change and make communities walkable

Zoning and planning are certainly complicated, but they are one of the most important things we need to pay attention to at the county level if we want to improve our quality of life and combat climate change.

After reading “County Council Members Fight Over Zoning and Urban Sprawl,” I became concerned about the need to ground our conversation. In 2018, after years of community meetings, expert input and policy discussions, the County Council passed the zoning rewrite, which aimed to streamline and simplify zoning, while promoting development toward areas of denser activity centers. These areas are centered around the metro
train stations or other important areas like National Harbor. This is a laudable goal as denser development reduces the need for cars and related pollution, costs taxpayers less to maintain and service, and has even been shown to improve the quality of life.

One of the concerns raised in the article is that it is too expensive to build higher density near activity centers because they “tend to need to be removed from floodplains.”

However, if you compare the best currently available Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA) flood maps with activity center areas, only about 7.46% of the land is in a FEMA-designated flood plain. Additionally, it's only the activity center areas around the West Hyattsville, Cheverly, and National Harbor metros where flood zones are a problem – most of the activity
The central areas have no floodplains.

Another concern raised in the article was the impact of tree cutting on the air quality experienced by children. I would never say that felling trees is good for air quality, and I certainly think that in many of these activity areas the existing intact forests should be preserved. However, the main source of air pollution in our region remains transport. The Washington, D.C. area is considered non-compliant with federal ozone standards and borderline in compliance with new federal standards for specific issues. One of the worst things we can do to make the problem worse is put more cars on the roads, which is what sprawling development does. So if we want to tackle air pollution, we really need to build more housing and businesses in activity centers. And that's not even to say that more cars lead to more car accidents, like the one in Riverdale in November 2023.

If we want to live well for the next generation, we need to act on climate at every level, and when it comes to local action, the most important thing we can do is stop sprawling development.

No one doubts that we need more housing, but people need to not have to have a car to survive. In Prince George, we can follow the facts and do what is right.

Joseph Yakuta
Resident of Mount Rainier, MD