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Baltimore officials agreed this week to lease a 6-acre waterfront parcel worth nearly half a million dollars to developer Patrick Turner for free for 40 years. In return, Turner pledged to plant trees, widen a ravine and wetland area, and maintain the land as a public park. The land is sandwiched between the site of Turner's planned $1.5 billion Westport development and an Interstate 95 bridge, according to a lease agreement. "We're actually saving the city money by taking the liability off of it," Turner said.

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A hillside property with a view of Baltimore's harbor and skyline was sold at auction Tuesday for $715,000 to an unnamed buyer, whose representative said he expected the land would be developed for residential use. The auction of the 8.8-acre parcel on Waterview Avenue between Westport and Cherry Hill was a foreclosure sale on behalf of Columbia Bank. Tranzon Fox was the auctioneer. The city of Baltimore in 2004 approved plans for a project called Waterview Overlook, which was to contain condominiums and townhouses on the site, but construction never began.

Two families in financial distress are asking Baltimore County to buy the development rights to their farms so they can preserve them as agricultural land, a county official said. Owners of the two separate tracts, comprising nearly 132 acres in Cockeysville and Maryland Line, have qualified for a six-year-old program designed to preserve land that faces an immediate threat of being sold for some non-agricultural use, said Wally Lippincott, natural resource manager for the county Department of Environmental Protection and Resource Management.

Outgoing Sen. J. Lowell Stoltzfus and his wife, Sharon, set aside 52 acres of their land in Somerset County for conservation, a donation that abuts a larger parcel the couple agreed not to develop several years ago. The property, which is on Back Shelltown Road south of Snow Hill, is valued at about $314,000, according to a preliminary estimate from the Department of Natural Resources. Stoltzfus said he'd initially planned to build homes on the property, but decided against it. "It is like a little garden of Eden," he said.

Plans for an 11-acre development in Remington — including apartments, shops and a Walmart store — won final approval from the Baltimore City Council on Monday, after stiff opposition from some groups and months of wrangling over traffic and environmental concerns. Tensions over the project — which divided neighborhood groups and pitted labor activists against city officials — rose in recent weeks, as robocalls and e-mail chains denounced the sponsor of the zoning bill for the project, Councilwoman Belinda Conaway.

One of the last major empty parcels in Baltimore's Inner Harbor is headed for the auction block, attracting strong interest from potential bidders while renewing hope that one of the city's most valuable properties will be developed. The former McCormick & Co. spice factory site, a 1.9-acre tract at Light and Conway streets, has been used as a surface parking lot ever since the aromatic factory was razed in the late 1980s. It was to have been the location of a 59-story skyscraper that would have been Baltimore's tallest building, containing luxury housing, a hotel, shops and parking.

Before 1998, John and Bobbin Kreider lived for 16 years in Howard County in a saltbox-style home known to their neighbors in Dayton as the "Red House. " Bobbin Kreider was happy with their 17 acres, where she was able to keep three horses. That was before she saw an advertisement in an equerry newsletter on the attributes of a 27-acre horse farm with barn, stalls, outbuildings and a two-story farmhouse, circa 1880. And it was only nine miles from the "Red House. " After looking at the property in Sykesville, she was thrilled, but her husband was less so. "I loved the property but hated the house," said John Kreider, 58, recalling the tiny, chopped-up rooms.

Baltimore's Inner Harbor has a wide range of attractions for families and acres of open space, planners say, but it doesn't have many quiet outdoor spaces where a mother can take her baby in a stroller or where area residents can relax without running into throngs of tourists. Two local nonprofit groups are working to address that shortcoming by creating a $2 million waterfront park for families living in the Inner Harbor and Harbor East communities. Pierce's Park is the name of a public space that is expected to open by the fall of 2011 on a one-acre parcel on Inner Harbor Pier 5, between the Columbus Center and Eastern Avenue.

The state has added 82 acres to the Piney Run Rural Legacy Area in northern Baltimore County with the preservation of a farm near Falls and Gunpowder roads. The property, for which the state paid $507,000, becomes part of the 13,000 conserved acres adjoining Gunpowder Falls State Park and will add to the buffer for Prettyboy Reservoir, part of the drinking water supply for the Baltimore area. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources also announced plans to spend nearly $1.4 million for a conservation easement on 253 acres of the Bee Tree Preserve property, which is immediately adjacent to the Torrey Brown North Central Rail Trail in Baltimore County.