The recent economic stimulus package is supposed to create jobs, jobs, jobs. So, why does it include a half a billion dollars for part of a new $750 million National Computer Center, which would employ only about 80 people?

That’s nearly $10 million per job. And why are they putting it in the ‘burbs or exurbs, far away from downtown Baltimore, where it could help anchor some badly needed economic development, and the existing Social Security Administration operations at Woodlawn and Downtown?

Replacing the existing 1,000-employee facility at Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn with a new exurban fortress – in Frederick, perhaps! – means Baltimore loses again.

The plans were discussed in The Baltimore Sun yesterday by Michael J. Astrue, the commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Astrue wouldn’t say where the new facility would be going, but he said there’s no more space at the Woodlawn campus, just inside the Baltimore Beltway. And he said they could put it anywhere within a 40-mile radius of Woodlawn.

Why is there no discussion of building it closer to the main office at Woodlawn or in downtown Baltimore, where it could anchor some badly needed economic development?

Such is the huge, unfathomably complex and convoluted world of the Social Security bureaucracy. Maryland’s anti-sprawl policy calls for the preservation of farms, but little did anyone know that would include computer server farms.

Missed Opportunity
It all comes down to national security, which calls for increasingly high-tech government functions to be in locations that are as isolated as possible. This is the polar opposite of what urban society is supposed to be all about, where dense complex free human interaction generates economic energy.

We’ve already seen what this can do in the vicinity of the vast National Security Agency near Jessup. It creates impenetrable barriers to urban vitality.

Lord only knows what goes on in there, except that it is the home of all sorts of stuff that could have provided vital fuel for Baltimore’s revitalization. Instead it sits off by its isolated self. What’s worse is that it has spawned a huge number of new “Beltway bandit” consultants and subcontractors who agglomerate around it in secondary waves of sprawl.

Social Security Pulling out of Downtown Too
In addition to the National Computer Center relocation, the Social Administration also announced plans last year to close its downtown facility and move to the Seton Business Park in northwest Baltimore. Unlike the skeleton staff of the new computer facility, however, this move affects nearly 2,000 employees, although the new location would still be somewhat urban.

The fundamental problem is that government operations have gotten so huge that they take on a life of their own, beyond what any urban planning could hope to control. There are tremendous opportunities at the existing Social Security facilities at both Woodlawn and Downtown to intimately tie into the proposed transit Red Line and create dense, vital urban environments that would make government workers a key catalyst for urban economic growth. This has been done successfully in various locations along the Washington Metro, most notably at Ballston in Arlington.

It does make sense to separate high security fortresses away from high employment facilities. The National Computer Center, even with its huge cost, lack of new jobs and anti-urban character, could help point the way to the efficient revitalization of government facilities and their integration and stimulation into the local economy.