Greenbelt Scholar Visits from Japan

Yoshiro Morita, an associate professor in the Engineering Department of Architecture at Tokyo Polytechnic Institute, is an Alexis de Tocqueville of Greenbelt.

On Labor Day, Sept. 5, Morita and his graduate student Ryohei Hashida and an architect Hiroko Ryu arrived in Greenbelt for several days of research, after touring Greenbelt's sister communities, Greendale, Wis. and Greenhills, Ohio.

Morita has been studying Greenbelt since 2002 and visits about once a year. Morita is interested in co-ops as an option for Japan's housing problems because there are no co-ops in Japan currently, he said.

During the , Morita, Hashida and Ryu toured the with Sandra Lange as a tour guide and then took a walking tour of Old Greenbelt led by Stephen Oetken.

Morita asked museum director Megan Searing Young how many people visit the museum. She told him about 4,000 to 5,000 people participate in some museum activity each year.

Three Greenbelt Communities—Three Survival Strategies

Morita believes that each of the three communities has its own survival or sustainability strategy that continues to shape its future. 

For Greenbelt, he thinks it gained its staying power through the formation of co-ops. This has made Greenbelt the most preserved of the three, Morita said.

For Greenhills, he said, after 50 years of no development and deteriorated buildings, its strategy was tearing down the historic town center and building new homes and businesses. 

Greendale's strategy was to build a visitor center and become a tourism destination as one of this country's three Greenbelt communities. "They have 200,000 visitors a year now," he said.

Saving GHI Housing by Rehab and Regulations

Morita said he also believes that the Greenbelt Homes, Inc., (GHI) rehabilitation program that began in the 1970s helped the housing co-op survive. "They not only made physical changes," Morita said, "but they also made new regulations." 

He cites two of these regulations as key to sustainable housing: The 1981 changes in resale procedures that required members to bring their homes up to standard before selling and the 1984 establishment of an addition maintenance program.

The Communities Have More People

He noted that the number of households increased by 6-fold in Greenbelt since its sale by the federal government—from 1,600 homes to 10,000 today; by 11-fold in Greendale, from 570 to 6,200 today; and by 2 1/2-fold for Greenhills, from 680 to 1,700.

Morita is looking at the three communities' different survival strategies for ideas to apply to Japan. He sees these as offering possible solutions to Japan's private-public partnership housing, which is having financial problems in the face of government funding cuts. He said if this type of housing were turned over to the private sector for either co-ops, condos or single-family homes, it might become self-sustaining without government aid.