A mini Columbia decades in the making is coming to Prince George’s County

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. Well, neither was Konterra.

First announced in 1983, a planned community in northern Prince George’s County could one day boast several thousand housing units nestled among commercial and retail space, with trails and green space interspersed throughout. For now, the site of downtown Konterra, near the interchange of Interstate 95 and Maryland Route 200, is mostly an empty field.

But after decades of planning and site work, the first of 240 new townhomes are expected to be completed later this fall. As residents move in over the next several years, apartment buildings, retail space, restaurants and other amenities, like grocery stores, are expected to follow. The full build-out could last another decade or more.

With housing subdivisions sprawling outside cities, real estate developers like Jim Rouse pitched the idea of new towns in the spaces between major urban areas, birthing communities like Columbia in the late 1960s. Though much smaller in scope, Konterra belongs to a new wave of master-planned communities — another is Greenleigh in Baltimore County — that are once again being touted as a possible solution to the nation’s housing crisis.

Such a development could be particularly welcome in Maryland, where housing stock is under pressure and housing affordability is the top concern for Maryland voters, according to recent polls. And Konterra sits at the meeting point of the growing Anne Arundel, Montgomery, Prince George’s and Howard counties.

“I never doubted it,” said Caleb Gould, chairman of Gould Property Co. “It’s a unique site and at the nexus of two of the most important roads in the Baltimore-Washington corridor — and maybe in the state. It was hard to imagine that development wouldn’t occur here.”

Konterra’s website notes that it is being “built with patience” and that “good communities don’t happen overnight.”

The Gould family has owned the land for going on half a century. The family traces its lineage to Jay Gould, a railroad tycoon often considered one of America’s last railroad robber barons.

His grandson, Kingdon Gould Jr., was a successful businessman in the D.C. metro area and served as ambassador to Luxembourg and then the Netherlands. He purchased about 3,000 acres in the early 1980s for about $15 million, equivalent to roughly $50 million in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to archival news reports.

From the beginning, the family’s plan was to build a town center for Konterra at the site of an old sand and gravel mining pit.

“We’re in the very incipient stages,” Caleb Gould, then in his mid-20s, told The Baltimore Sun in 1983.

Kingdon Gould Jr. died in 2018. His son Caleb, now 69, invoked his father and mother at a ceremonial groundbreaking last week. About 100 people attended, including politicians like Del. Joseline Peña-Melnyk, speaker of the House of Delegates and a Prince George’s County Democrat.

Prince George’s County Executive Aisha Braveboy called Konterra “a master class in leadership, and a testament to what happens when the private sector and the community share a vision.”

The developers have long worked at Konterra’s outskirts, said Gould and his nephew, Giacomo Barbieri, the CEO of Gould Property Co.

They developed two subdivisions with office buildings, industrial space and hundreds of single-family homes, they said, as sewer and water systems were installed and roads were constructed.

But as years passed without a town center, that work wasn’t very visible to everyone else.

Adrian Simmons was growing up in Laurel when he first heard about Konterra in the 1980s. Sometime after the first decade of waiting, skepticism started to grow, he said.

“It’s kind of like, ‘Oh wait, that’s really happening now?’” said Simmons, a member of Laurel’s City Council.

Simmons is excited for Laurel to get a new neighbor, especially one that promises to be bikeable and walkable. There might be residents concerned about traffic, but Simmons said he’s attended some of the community meetings organized by County Councilman Tom Dernoga, and pretty much everyone seems receptive.

“Konterra’s status is always the number one question I get when I hold town hall meetings,” Dernoga said during the groundbreaking. “When I’ve held town hall meetings about Konterra, they’re the most well attended meetings.”

Now that construction of the town center has started, Caleb Gould said the planned community will be visibly advancing. He and Barbieri said the family plans to finance much of the development itself, avoid debt and hold onto the project for the foreseeable future.

Unlike some developers, who borrow too much and prepare too little, Barbieri said, his family has the patience to see the project to the end.

When asked what a future resident of Konterra might say about their hometown, Gould was circumspect. As a child growing up in Howard County, Gould said he met Rouse, the man behind Columbia.

Rouse had lofty ideas about social values and urban planning that he wove into the fabric of Columbia, but Gould said Konterra is not about idealism. It’s about building a resilient and adaptable community that will last for generations.

Konterra appears to be following, intentionally or not, almost all the principles of “smart growth” development, said Briana Paxton, a revitalization policy analyst at Preservation Maryland.

Smart growth, sometimes called “sustainable growth,” is a movement that emphasizes priorities like mixed-use zoning, denser housing, walkability and placemaking.

For the past century, the U.S. has embraced single-family zoning, leading to sprawling subdivisions far away from jobs or amenities like grocery stores and public transit, Paxton said.

With its plans for walking paths and public green space, its different types of homes and its mix of commercial, retail and residential zoning, Paxton said Konterra could be a model for other new towns.

But Paxton said she wanted to know more about Konterra’s plan for affordable housing.

Konterra’s home builder, Jeff Caruso, CEO and founder of Caruso Homes, said the price points for the townhomes have not been made public yet. The next step, he said, is apartment buildings.

Whatever ends up getting built, Paxton said, a truly vibrant community means that the grocery store clerks and baristas who one day work in Konterra would be able to afford to live there, too.