Summerfield is a new neighborhood proposed for a 934-acre site on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the town of Snow Hill about 25 minutes southwest of Ocean City

Summerfield is comprised of three neighborhoods with numerous connections to the existing town and each other through a network of pedestrian trails and vehicular streets. Each neighborhood will have a limited retail component with the highest concentration of mixed-use in Summerfield centered on Lake Odachowski. Summerfield’s retail and office uses are intended to meet some of the daily needs of its residents within walking distance. Additionally, some retail needs that the town wants, such as a grocery store and a movie theater that don’t fit downtown could be accommodated in Summerfield. While Summerfield’s residents may be able to meet some of their daily needs within walking distance, other needs and certainly “wants” would be met in downtown Snow Hill where the retail and office uses serve the entire region.

The site is particularly challenging from an environmental standpoint as it is adjacent to the Pocomoke River and has numerous wetlands scattered across the site. Other natural features include a number of tree stand areas and ponds. The plan calls for a large lake to be added and a number of ponds to be enlarged to provide limited recreational opportunities for both residents of the town and Summerfield, as well as provide state-of-the-art storm water management.

The proposed program is based on the discharge capacity of a proposed sewer plant to serve the entire town as well as Summerfield which, when completed, will discharge less than half the effluent of the present plant.

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These are difficult times for the residential real estate market, and it's easy for people to become confused about value. They cling to the hope that things will return to the way they were in the recent past, when everything was selling and appraisals were routine and formulaic. But how does one pick winners in a downturn, especially when there are no comparables?

The American economy and the American real estate market are resilient. They always bounce back. But society and markets are strong precisely because they are dynamic, because they always change; and change is the only sure thing.

As the market recovers, what will lead the way? What trends are on the horizon? What will home buyers value? Some of these answers are obvious. Seniors want quality of life, a sense of community, safe environment, stress-free access to the natural world, with all its healing powers. They are tired of wasting their lives in traffic. They want a lower cost of living, with lower energy costs, and they want to be within reach of their kids and grand kids who live in the cities and suburbs.

Younger people also want a low cost of living and a sense of community, but they also need careers, good schools, and a healthy recreational environment in which to raise their family.

All about us are the signs of a cultural shift in what people value in their homes. It is becoming less fashionable to value size alone. Now people want to tell their friends of the small size of their utility bills and the number of birds in their backyards. Walking around the neighborhood and staying fit is cool; fighting traffic and stress is not.

We all see these trends, but what do the experts see?

So how is Summerfield different from the development patterns of the past? And how does Summerfield measure up to the trends we see for the future?

Let's take a virtual tour of Summerfield's location. Go to Google Earth. Enter Snow Hill, MD in the search box.

 

You will see a town of about 2,000 residents, the historic hub of Worcester County on high ground along the Pocomoke River. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see farm fields on the southern edge of town. This is the site of Summerfield, a neo-traditional community designed by world-renowned planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Place your pointer on 38 00' 56.07"N and 75 23' 47.76"W.

 

This is the Snow Hill Elementary School, a Maryland Blue Ribbon School, on the northern border of Summerfield. Just off to the northeast is Snow Hill High School, also a Maryland Blue Ribbon School, still within walking distance from Summerfield. The Worcester County school system is rated one of the best in the State.

Look a little to the west, over to the winding Pocomoke River, the deepest river for its depth in the entire nation. It’s also one of the most wild and undeveloped, full of fish and wildlife. Notice the large forested area bordering the river on both sides. Much of this is part of the great cypress forest that runs from the Chesapeake Bay through Maryland and into Delaware. A great deal of this forest is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy. Just south on the river is Shad Landing State Park, famous as a site for countless Boy and Girl Scout outings.

Now zoom out a bit to take in some of the surrounding farms and open land. Note what you do not see: No large cookie-cutter subdivisions, no strip malls, no large industrial factories. Worcester County has an extremely high percentage of land in open space, farms and forests. About half the county is forested. Much of the rest is agricultural. Will it stay this way? In a word, yes. It’s no accident that so much of Worcester County remains rural and peaceful. The County has the strictest agricultural preservation zoning in the State, maybe in the nation. Any farm, no matter how big, can only be subdivided into five lots. That’s all, five lots. To create more lots requires a near-impossible rezoning and annexation into a nearby town. The Summerfield project took five agonizing years to get through this process.

The County is now in the midst of re-working its Comprehensive Plan, placing even tougher restrictions on development and sprawl.

There is something else about this rural setting that may not visible from Google Earth, but it's very real: prosperity. Agriculture is booming across the country, but especially so on Delmarva. Corn and soybeans are at record highs. The poultry industry is shipping product to a hungry world. Nearby Salisbury University’s Perdue School of Business is actively engaged with agricultural scientists and business leaders from China and Europe. And this prosperity is recession-proof. It creates jobs in many sectors. It is a quiet, steady source of capital.

Every local land owner has his favorite story of someone from the city who decides he might like to try rural living. They start looking for a small farm, some land in the midst of this peaceful scene. Their awakening is always rude, because what they hear is: Not for sale, not at any price.@

Now, follow Rt 113 southwest along the river to Pocomoke, another historic old town that is drawing high-tech industry because of its proximity to the NASA facility on nearby Wallops Island, Virginia. Pocomoke, 10 minutes from Snow Hill, is home to the Mid-Atlantic Institute for Space and Technology, a public-private partnership between government and academia that was created to take advantage of the booming technology sector, bringing new jobs to the area over the next ten years with its planned expansion.

Because of NASAs increasing dependence on Wallops Island, Senator Barbara Mikulski recently obtained millions of dollars to build a fiber-optic grid that is bringing broadband internet to the entire region.

Scroll due east until you see open water. You've come to Chincoteague Bay, a shallow, sandy-bottomed estuary where you can spend all day without seeing another boat. Along the Bay's eastern edge, protecting it from the open Atlantic is Assateague Island, owned and managed by the government as parkland, never to be developed. Here are miles of pristine, uncrowded ocean beaches for swimming, surf-fishing, hiking and all the other pastimes that make life so delightful for nearby residents.

Scroll down to the end of Assateague and you come to the Virginia town of Chincoteague, with its working waterman’s atmosphere.

Scroll north along Assateague and you will come to the Ocean City inlet, the access to the ocean for some of the finest deep sea fishing in the world.

Jump north across the inlet and you're in Ocean City, just a 25 minute drive from Summerfield. Here is the nearly endless supply of restaurants and amusements in one of the best beach towns in the country. Ocean City bills itself as a Afamily-oriented resort, and they work very hard to maintain that image.

Tourists flock to Ocean City every summer between Memorial Day and Labor Day; their dollars boosting the local economy and helping to keep county taxes low. The tourist industry employs thousands, seasonally and year-round. During the off-season. residents and visitors have the opportunity to enjoy the beach without the crowds.

Now, scroll back southwest to Snow Hill. From there, follow Rt 12 northwest to Salisbury, the commercial center of Maryland's Eastern Shore. Just 15 minutes from Snow Hill, Salisbury has all the national retail chains you'd ever need, along with all the amenities of a bustling prosperous mid-size town. The Peninsula Regional Medical Center is a top-rated hospital, boasting a coronary section with a national reputation. Salisbury University dominates the southern end of town. Follow Rt 13 south a little ways and you come to Princess Anne, another historic town and seat of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.



Zoom out again until you can see the entire Delmarva Peninsula. Within a four-hour drive from Summerfield lives 60 million people from Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. A great many of them would like to escape the congestion, the crime, the pollution, the overwhelming crunch of high population densities.

Once the secret is out, once the real story of this special place is more widely known, there will be no shortage of interest in what Summerfield has to offer.

We began with a quote from Albert Einstein. He also said his talent didn’t come so much from brains, but from vision. He looked hard at things, seeing what others had overlooked.

Summerfield is one of those things. Once you see it, once you really look, it’s easy to understand, and once you understand, it’s easy to value.
 

Worcester County Facts

Download 4 page Brief Economic Facts for Worcester County - [download] (PDF)

Local Information

* Snow Hill, MD
* Worcester County, MD
* Ocean City, MD

Bringing Smart Growth To Snow Hill

Downloadable Pamphlets

Traffic and Environment - [download]
Impact Study - [download]
 

Summerfield at Snow Hill
9939 Jerry Mack Rd
Ocean City, MD 21842
info@summerfieldmd.com