On a Saturday in late October, Mark and Angie Gordon spent the morning as they often do — volunteering in Roosevelt Center, the historic shopping plaza in Greenbelt, Maryland. Mark helped out at the tool library, in a basement office space, where locals can find things like cordless drills and refurbished KitchenAid mixers and can lend tools for other neighbors to borrow or repair. Angie is a volunteer at the town’s traditional book library just up the road.
“It’s a big community for volunteers,” Mark said while putting up a sign for the library and greeting a young man arriving for his shift.
The tool library is part of the Greenbelt MakerSpace, one of many co-ops in the city of about 25,000 residents in Prince George’s County, roughly 10 miles outside D.C.
The MakerSpace embodies the spirit of Greenbelt, where many of the main attractions are co-ops — including the New Deal Cafe, which locals call the “community living room” with live music six nights a week, and the Greenbelt Co-Op Supermarket & Pharmacy, which boasts nearly 11,000 members who spend as little as $10 a month to participate in food samplings, wine tastings and wellness programs.
The federal government built Greenbelt on former tobacco fields during the Great Depression as a planned utopia for low-income residents to help solve the housing crisis. At the time, only White applicants were accepted, despite Black workers helping to construct it. Houses came with furniture and yard space, and residents were encouraged to be active participants in their community. Visitors can see a 1930s model at the Greenbelt Museum, located in one of the original units.
By the end of its first year in 1937, Greenbelters had formed 35 community clubs, including the Greenbelt News Review, a weekly newspaper that now operates out of the community center.
The town had the full support of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who visited several times and advocated for its funding. It was one of three New Deal-era “green towns” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration built across the country at the nudging of his adviser, economist Rexford Guy Tugwell; the other two were Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wisconsin.
Of the three, only Greenbelt remained out of the hands of private investors. In 1952, residents formed a housing co-op, Greenbelt Homes Inc., which still manages 1,600 houses, including the town’s original 885 units.
In the historic district, not much has changed.
When the Gordons moved to Greenbelt from New York about two-and-a-half years ago, their daughter and son-in-law were naturally curious about this eccentric community where things like a monthly gym membership, pool access and movie tickets at the nonprofit Greenbelt Cinema cost no more than $10 each and the housing co-op covers house repairs.
“They said, ‘We think it’s a cult,’” said Mark. While a cult it is not, Mark said the couple has “never experienced another place like this in our entire life.”
In the historic part of town, houses face inward toward shared green space. GHI townhouses range from about 600 to 1,100 square feet; what the houses may lack in size, they make up for in affordability and proximity to the town’s amenities, which are all within walking distance. The main sidewalk runs beneath Crescent Road so pedestrians don’t have to cross the street.
“It does feel like the buyers who are coming in now are intentional about wanting to live in Greenbelt,” said real estate agent Kim Kash, a Greenbelt native. “They want the community that is here.”
Kash said she and her husband, also a Greenbelter, have lived in D.C., then Baltimore, and then left the United States to work overseas — they’ve yet to find a place like their hometown, which they returned to in 2016. Kash attended Greenbelt’s Eleanor Roosevelt High School, still ranked as one of the top public schools in Maryland.
Several community groups joined to provide food assistance to locals amid the SNAP cuts and government shutdown, Kash said. “People don’t just sit back and let things happen here,” she added. “We sort of joke about — not are you on a committee, but how many committees are serving on?”
Across Greenbelt, interested homeowners will find a mix of townhouses, condos and, particularly in Greenbelt East, plenty of single-family houses. The city is divided by several major roads, including the Baltimore-Washington Parkway on its east side and Interstate 495, which runs diagonally through the middle of town.
“There are three Greenbelts, and they’re completely different,” said Susan Harris, a retired congressional staffer and gardener who moved to Greenbelt in 2011 after living in Takoma Park for 26 years. She calls Historic Greenbelt “camp for adults.” It’s true — on any given Saturday afternoon, you might stumble upon the Greenbelt Honk! Situation street band practicing in Roosevelt Center, spurring an impromptu dance circle.
West of Kenilworth Avenue are apartment buildings, a busy shopping mall with a Target and AMC theater, corporate offices, a federal courthouse and the Greenbelt Metro Station, the end of the Green Line. The FBI’s new headquarters was planned for a plot near the station until the Trump administration got involved. (Several Greenbelters said they hope the deal still goes through.)
Over lunch at the popular Cedars of Lebanon restaurant, Mayor Emmett Jordan, who became the city’s first Black council member in 2009, said Greenbelt has a growing immigrant community and residents are proud of its affordability relative to the region and diversity in age, ethnicities and education levels. “We’ve got rocket scientists from NASA Goddard living next to artists,” he said, referring to the Goddard Space Flight Center, responsible for some of the nation’s most famous unmanned spacecraft missions.
Lest its reputation confuse you, Greenbelt isn’t just for retired hippies, according to Matt Severson, a 46-year-old physics professor at the University of Maryland, who stumbled his way into running audio at the New Deal Café’s open mic nights on Tuesdays.
“We’re really in a community where age has very little relevance on the way that people are grouping. We have friends that are 25 and friends that are 75,” Severson said. He moved with his wife to a townhouse near the edge of the historic neighborhood in 2014 and later bought a single-family house in the Lakewood neighborhood.
Traditions like music festivals and the annual Labor Day Festival draw people from all over the region. And in keeping with its name, Greenbelt has lots of parks, such as the gorgeous Buddy Attick Lake Park, which has a trail wrapped around a man-made lake, a city-run dog park and Greenbelt Park, with campsites managed by the National Park Service.
The idealism of Greenbelt proved to be a perfect fit for artist and nonprofit director Shaymar Higgs, the 38-year-old founder of The SPACE Free Art For All, which provides free art supplies and activities. He grew up in Prince George’s County and said his mother ran a day care center in Greenbelt when he was a child. He dreamed of living here when he grew older.
“I’ve always believed in the motto and pledge of Greenbelt,” said Higgs, who now lives in Greenbelt’s co-op housing and was named the town’s Outstanding Citizen in 2021. He was out running errands in Roosevelt Center when he ran into the mayor and stopped for a conversation.
“This is what happens in Greenbelt,” he said. “You go to the grocery store, it’s a five-minute walk, and it turns into an hour.”
The average sale price of houses in the last year in Greenbelt was $318,189. The lowest was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in the Chelsea Woods complex for $127,000, and the highest was a five-bed, five-bath end-unit townhouse in Greenbelt Station for $714,000. The average house price in the last year for GHI houses was $264,706.
There are 58 houses on the market, ranging from another Chelsea Woods condo to a five-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath single family house in Greenbrook, a neighborhood in Greenbelt East.
Public schools: Greenbelt Elementary, Springhill Lake Elementary, Greenbelt Middle School, Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
Transit: The Greenbelt Metro Station is, aptly, at the end of the Green Line and serves the Camden Line of the MARC train service. Several bus routes serve Greenbelt.
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