text: Development accelerated after Wallace Loh became the president of the University of Maryland in 2010 and relations between the university and the city improved. It was recognized that the university could not compete if the students, faculty, and staff could not live in College Park so the Greater College Park initiative, a $2 billion public-private investment to revitalize the community around the university aiming to create one of the nation’s best college towns, was launched in 2014.  Some of the developments that occurred as a result of this initiative included the 4-star Hotel at UMD in 2017 and the Cambria in 2018, the first hotels built in the city in over half a century, and the construction of the College Park City Hall in 2021, a joint venture between the city and the university that provides offices for both as well as retail space and a public plaza. This plaza holds music performances, markets, and city events throughout the year that  contributed towards the revitalization of College Park's downtown. The university also launched the Discovery District, its business and research park, and promoted several mixed-used apartment high-rises such as the Aster (2022) or the Union (2024) that brought along new restaurants, shops, and grocery stores.
  This development has been complemented by two major infrastructure projects: the Purple Line, which will provide direct light-rail connections form College Park to Bethesda, Silver Spring, and New Carrolton, and the reconstruction of a portion of Baltimore Avenue into a boulevard with a planted median, new bicycle lanes, and continuous sidewalks. Additionally, the University of Maryland has added several state-of-the-art facilities on their campus, including the Iribe Center for computer science and engineering, the Thurgood Marshall Hall for the public policy school, and the IDEA factory for engineering and entrepreneurship.
  On June 9, 2020, the city government passed a "Resolution of the Mayor and Council of the City of College Park Renouncing Systemic Racism and Declaring Support of Black Lives" which recognized harm done to the historic African American community of Lakeland. In it, "the Mayor and Council acknowledge and apologize for our city's past history of oppression, particularly with regards to the Lakeland community, and actively seek opportunities for accountability and truth-telling about past injustice, and aggressively seek opportunities for restorative justice".