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The Maritime Industrial Zoning Overlay District (MIZOD) was created in Baltimore, Maryland in 2004 to preserve deepwater access for port and maritime industrial uses. As waterfront residential and commercial development encroached on maritime industrial uses within the city, waterfront industries were finding it harder to receive loans from banks to upgrade and expand their operations. MIZOD is an zoning district overlaid across existing industrial zones along the water to allow only industries that use or need deep water access. The Overlay district was set to expire in 2014, but was recently extended to expire in 2024. ==History and Enactment== Baltimore, Maryland’s port came in danger of withering into obscurity due to practically unrestrained development of the waterfront by commercial and residential developers. The development of Harbor Place on the Downtown Baltimore waterfront in 1980 near the then vacant Inner Harbor steamship docks was the harbinger of commercial and residential waterfront development on industrial lands in Baltimore. The 1990s and 2000s lead to rapid development and reuse of industrial buildings, including Tide Point, the reuse of a soap manufacturer into offices and Silo Point, which converted an unused grain silo into a high rise condominium development These projects were important in the development of the Marine Industrial Overlay District (MIZOD) in 2004 to limit the use of land in the district to uses served by the deep water ports. This included forbidding Planned Unit Developments (PUD), the reuse of industrial properties to mixed use developments and disallowed office and hotel uses from conditional use in the zoning laws. The City of Baltimore wrote the following in the legislative file which enacted MIZOD: “The Maritime Industrial Overlay District is designed to ensure the preservation of limited deep water frontage of the Port of Baltimore for maritime use. The intent is to delineate an area where maritime shipping can be conducted without the intrusion of non-industrial uses and where investment in maritime infrastructure is encouraged .” Baltimore had been experiencing rapid growth on the waterfront and planners feared that much of the infrastructure that supported the Port of Baltimore would be removed to allow for further waterfront gentrification. Once this infrastructure was removed it would be either impossible or very expensive to replace including both property with deep water access and railway and truck routes that support them. While MIZOD was created to protect industries around the harbor and port facilities relying on deep water access, the intended effect was to incubate manufacturing growth in the entire city and region. Many manufacturing firms outside of the MIZOD boundaries rely on the proximity to an international and national transportation hub. Baltimore is in a unique position to take advantage of international events, the expansion of the Panama Canal due to be completed in 2014 will open the East Coast to much larger ships called “Mega Ships” or Panamax ships. The canal will allow for ships a quarter of a mile long that can accommodate 14,000 shipping containers as opposed to the ships that carry 4,500 containers that can currently pass through the canal. Baltimore is currently in a position to take advantage of much of this new traffic due to the lack of infrastructure in larger East Coast ports. The channels that serve Savannah and Charleston are too shallow to accommodate the deeper drafts of the ships and the Bayonne Bridge blocks access to Newark by these larger ships. This will put Baltimore in a position to share the opportunity of “Mega Ship” traffic with only a few other East Coast ports. Industrial protection is needed both out of necessity to protect industries from encroaching non-compatible uses and to preserve high-wage, low education jobs. The encroachment of commercial and residential uses on industrial land makes banks very cautious about lending money to marine and industrial companies in areas where non-compatible uses are developed in the surrounding areas. Banks understand the power and political persuasion residents have once they move into or near an industrial area. The traffic and noise created by early morning and late night shifts and shipping lead to complaints to the city and eventually the lobbying efforts by residents lead to restrictions on industrial properties and activities which puts the productivity, profit and viability of an industrial company in jeopardy. A University of Wisconsin report on planned manufacturing districts used the phrase “industrial displacement” to describe the process of non-compatible uses forcing industry out of areas, especially those around the central core of a city. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Maritime Industrial Zoning Overlay District」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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