Places with some "there" in them can still allure home buyers.

Source: BIG BUILDER Magazine
Publication date: 2007-10-01

By Teresa Burney

Housing recessions excite Andres Duany, a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism. "I love recessions because new urbanism does better in recessions," says the principal of the design firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company. "A lot of new urbanism is built, but it doesn't necessarily sell better than the competition [in a booming home market] because everything sells anyway."

Photo: Stefan Hester "I built it for myself, and I hoped to see other people like what I liked." – Greg Whittaker, Whittaker Homes

While Duany has become a poster child for new urbanism, what he is really saying is that well-designed communities in general will sell better in a downturn.

"Everywhere else you look, from the iPhone to running shoes to cars, the great designs prevail and the bad designs die," Duany says. "Americans can tell the difference between good design and bad."

And they have a way of becoming emotionally attached to great design in a way that can–assuming they can get a mortgage–drive them to buy, despite the uncertainties in the market

As sales deteriorated at communities nationwide this summer, Big Builder went out looking for neighborhoods where place-making and good design were helping them sell better than the competition in the downturn. And while there are probably dozens of these communities defying gravitational market trends all over the country, we chose to focus on three where buyers are getting more than shelter from their buy: places where their neighborhood and home satisfy other needs as well–senses of community, connectedness, identity, and delight.

Incidentally, these three communities all have new urbanist roots. Two also share another thing in common–founders who live in their communities and who designed them as places where they want to live. The third, too, has the influence of a strong founder behind it.

Duany doesn't think that's a coincidence. "When the developer is a real person who lives there, the place becomes real, not corporate," he says. "There's a real flesh-and-blood town founder with ideas and personality."

It may be that when the developer or builder plans to dwell in a community he's building, he thinks about more than making the parcel pencil; he manages to lock onto how to make it appeal on a primal level as well.

After all, shelter is one of humankind's most basic needs. It would make sense that where we choose to live, like who we choose for our mates, may in the end be determined by some synapses in a primitive part of the brain that signal, "This place is right for me."

Describing what the real appeal of a place is to us can be elusive. Just ask Brad Reed, one of the pioneer buyers in Whittaker Homes' The New Town at St. Charles, Mo., why he was willing to buy a lot when the development just looked like a bunch of dirt with a ditch and two holes in the ground.

"It's just a real cool place," he says, shrugging his shoulders.

Photo: Courtesy The New Town At St. Charles

Show Me Density

St. Charles, Mo.–In 2004, Joe Vance and Anne Ney wandered over to the former corn fields they had heard would become The New Town at St. Charles out of curiosity. They left with a lot. More precisely, they left with what would become a lot.

"We bought drawings and dirt," says Vance, forgetting to mention his purchase also included a piece of builder Greg Whittaker's dream of planting a new urbanist town in the alluvial soils between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers south of St. Louis. Turns out it was a fertile vision.

Vance and Ney joined a list of 1,100 initial buyers who immediately signed up to buy lots in the community shortly after sales began in early 2004. And the popularity grew; at one point, the waiting list was two years long.

Despite the wait, and the ensuing precipitous housing downturn, most of that backlog stuck, says Whittaker, whose company builds between 500 and 600 homes per year. Those who dropped off were quickly replaced with others who were willing to pay $20,000 to $30,000 more than the original buyers.

The first residents moved in during the spring of '05. By summer 2007, there were 700 new homes and roughly 2,000 residents in New Town. Those numbers made New Town the best-selling community in St. Louis and several other places as well.

Another 200 closings are expected in the next year, a drop-off Whittaker attributes to the downturn.

"It's affected everybody," he says. "It's even affected New Town." But not the way it's affected other communities. "We didn't have the losses like we heard from other builders, maybe three percent."

Sales traffic at New Town is five to 10 times what Whittaker Homes' other neighborhoods are drawing these days–and the lookers are buying. A new affordable condominium product in New Town, with prices starting at $120,000, is selling two units per week. Whittaker only planned to sell about half that amount.

"This community should be out-selling just because of the location (about 20 minutes from the St. Louis airport and an easy commute to St. Louis)," says Whittaker. "But we are getting more traffic than that just because we are unique."

That uniqueness actually kept Whittaker from daring to build New Town any earlier than he did. He wasn't sure the Show Me State, where acre-sized lots are more the rule than the exception, was ready for new urbanism.

But Whittaker's been a believer for more than 16 years, ever since he and his family started visiting the flagship new urbanist community of Seaside in the Florida Panhandle on family vacation. "I've always loved going down there, parking the car, and not having to drive again," he says. "It's such a nice feeling."

Whittaker wanted to live in a community like that in his own hometown. But it took about 12 years before he thought St. Louis was ready for the concept.

Ready Or Not

Photo: Courtesy The New Town At St. Charles New Urbanism Meets New Town: Master developer Whittaker Homes called upon the planning expertise of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company to bring traditional neighborhood design to Missouri. Water features and enhanced walkability are incorporated throughout.

When he finally screwed up the courage to try, Whittaker bought some of the property that would become New Town and hired the designers of Seaside, famed new urbanists Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, to plan it. DPZ set up a seven-day charette in early '03, bringing in local politicians, government officials, and neighbors of the property to have input on its design.

"Instead of public meetings with the city, they had the chance to have input ahead of time," Whittaker says. And the charette paid off. No one spoke against the project and several spoke in favor of it during the public approval hearings. "Usually in the past, you sued to get the right to build 2 1/2 units an acre," he adds.

Whittaker needed density to support the expensive infrastructure and amenities he had planned for the project. When it was over, he was granted the right to build 6,000 units on 736 acres, an unheard of density among greenfield projects in the area.

DPZ's designers had their work cut out for them. The land was flat and featureless. There were only a couple of dozen trees on the whole parcel. Dirt was needed to build the houses up, creating the need to dig retention. DPZ wove water into the design fabric of the community.

"Instead of doing it from an engineering point of view, we did it from a Dutch point of view," Duany says. "The Dutch always integrate communities with the water. It's deeply integrated, not just there to look pretty."

A canal, crossed with graceful pedestrian bridges and lined with "apartment mansions" that look like large old homes, stretches the length of the main street into New Town. There's another lagoon with a fountain that makes up a linear park, as well as a more naturalistic large lake in the back. In the winter, residents skate and play hockey on the frozen waterways. In the summer, they line up along the banks to fish the stocked ponds.

Whittaker spared no expense on the community's infrastructure details. Wrought iron railings are abundant. The street lamps are gas-lit. Gorgeous stone bollards from Great Britain line the canal banks. A set of columns with sturgeons, patterned after examples found in London's House of Parliament and placed in front of a fountain, have become a community focal point. The organic farm, which will soon have a live-in farmer and crops, is delineated with unusual dry-stacked stone walls.

Wherever you look in New Town, there are long, linear stretches of green, often bisected by water, that give homebuyers views out their front windows and provide pretty pedestrian paths through the community. Every home buyer, whether they are buying an entry-level $120,000 condominium or an $800,000 single-family home, has access to the same amenities. The for-rent apartment mansions have views of the canal at the community's entrance. It's difficult to think of many communities that would dare to put their rental housing at the most prominent entry into the development. Whittaker, himself, lives in a townhome on the same stretch.

Inclusion–creating a town where there are homes at every price point–was a goal from the beginning. Lack of affordability was a flaw Whittaker saw with many new urbanist communities. Their desirability drove prices up beyond what an entry-level buyer could afford.

Whittaker found another fault with other new urbanist communities he had visited: They were pretty, but the streets weren't populated. At New Town, even in the middle of a work day, there's usually somebody walking somewhere. One strategy to get people out and about was to place the mail boxes at town hubs. Another method was to provide a lot of scheduled activities. Friday night is movie night in the amphitheater. Thursday nights feature live music at the Prancing Pony bookstore and eatery.

Mixing Use

All the street traffic has attracted commercial development, something Whittaker wasn't expecting for some time. There's a grocery/deli next to the postal boxes, an Irish pub has opened up, and a church is currently renting space in town.

"I figured it would happen when the rooftops came," Whittaker says. "I had budgeted nothing for commercial [development] at the beginning."

The benefit of mixed uses is that more residents will be able to walk to work.

Already, 50 Whittaker employees live in the community. Whittaker, himself, walks to work.

All the hubbub makes Whittaker happy he went to the trouble to do something different in St. Charles.

"To do this, you have to spend more money," he notes, drinking an orange soda and listening to music outside the Prancing Pony on a cool summer evening. "This takes about five times as much energy and time … But I built it for myself, and I hoped to see other people like what I liked."

Left Photo: Courtesy Barron Collier; Right Photo: Lexey Swall, Naples Daily News MORAL MASTER PLAN: Tom Monaghan (shown above, right) partnered with developer Barron Collier to bring his vision of the jointly-named town and Catholic university Ave Maria to life.

Faith In Sales

Ave Maria, Fla.–On grand opening day, thousands of people, like so many ants, swarmed. They teemed around and through Ave Maria's 100-foot-tall oratory, marveling at its steel gothic arches and the 10-foot-tall Celtic cross that jutted into the summer sky, a giant lightning rod amid bolts flashing in the blue-black clouds hovering in the distance.

The fledgling Southwest Florida community's visitors barely heeded the gathering storm. The sky over their heads remained blue as they lined up 20-deep for lemonade and water, face painting, balloons, and Ave Maria-labeled favors. Cars clogged the community's streets, creating huge traffic jams as drivers jockeyed for spots close to Pulte Homes' models, where hundreds of potential buyers ambled through to gawk, covet, and consider a new home of their own.

It was a scene that sellers of other homes in communities beneath those looming storm clouds, closer to Naples and Fort Myers, would marvel at. Their communities sat becalmed on a steamy Saturday in July, while the crowd trooped through this new community spawned by Tom Monaghan, the devoutly Catholic philanthropist and founder of Dominos Pizza. Monaghan set out to build a Catholic university on the edge of the Everglades and ended up building a town as well.

Six months after sales officially began in February, there were 250 sales in the community–about 100 fewer than developer Barron Collier Companies had hoped for, but stellar considering Ave Maria is near nothing except a town full of housing for migrant farm workers and situated in the middle of one of the worst hit home-selling markets in the country.

"It has done very well," says Michael Timmerman, Hanley Wood Market Intelligence's managing director for Florida. "It's a huge economic catalyst, and it's also a very good new urban community."

The town of Ave Maria was conceived only five years before its grand opening, after Monaghan's request to build Ave Maria University in his native Michigan was turned down. Executives from the giant Florida land owner Barron Collier called him up and offered the company's land east of Naples for his university.

"Basically in a week or two, we had a handshake deal," says Blake Gable, vice president of real estate for Barron Collier and project manager of Ave Maria. Soon, Monaghan moved himself and his university to Naples, and the planning began. Three years of work later, there were plans and permission to build a town of 11,000 homes on 5,000 acres abutting the university property.

Two years later, the community had sprung from the flat, featureless expanse of former tomato fields, its town center already well formed. Even before the first house was built, buyers were signing up. "That's what's really unique about this," says Greg G. Wolpert, president of Pulte's Southwest Florida division–the only home builder, other than Barron Collier, on the project. "To have people commit so early on is enormous."

A factor that might be making the difference in Ave Maria is its emphasis on creating a community based on family values, which also happen to be Catholic values. For the record, the community's developers stress that the community is ecumenical–those of all faiths are welcome. Yet there is no denying its Catholic heart. At one point, before the American Civil Liberties Union jumped in, there was talk of banning the sale of meat on Fridays and contraceptives at all times within Ave Maria's retail establishments.

Higher Power

The publicity tied to that issue is the only negative local builder Jamie Pirrello, CEO of Vision Homes USA, can see with Ave Maria, and even that has an upside. "There's this whole issue of values that may be very valuable to people given what's going on in the world today," he says. "It's a great project; over the long haul, it's going to be a home run."

Short term, Pirrello thinks sales will slow as the initial novelty wears off and the contingent of people moving to the town for the university dwindles. "But like any community that is going to have great amenities, they are going to be in better shape than other developers," he adds.

Photos: Courtesy Serenbe RURAL URBANISM: From the annual May Day celebration (left) to weekly farmer's markets (above) to pleasant streetscapes and preserved open space (below), Serenbe blends the best of both worlds.

Magnetic South

Palmetto, Ga.–If Shangri-La had a sign, it would probably look like Serenbe's. Oval, small, matter-of-fact, and unassuming, it's easy to miss and hard to guess it advertises anything of import. But hang a left, turn a few curves, pass the big new barn nestled in a hollow, and Serenbe unfolds, as though a myth from the mist.

The surprising, even slightly unsettling feeling of suddenly coming upon a budding town with shops, restaurants, a grocery, and the kind of diverse architecture you might find in an organic, rather than master planned, community is cultivated by the developer of this hamlet 40 minutes southwest of Atlanta.

"We don't advertise the community," says Tucker Berta, Serenbe's director of communications. "I doubt if we will ever advertise the community. It's sort of a secret, and if you know about it, you are in the know."

Serenbe's salespeople say they really aren't selling houses. "We are selling real estate secondary and a lifestyle primary," says Garnie Nygren, director of operations. "We haven't had a single person coming here looking for a house. We have people who come here to stay at the inn, come to our restaurants, come for the weekend, come to the farmer's market and say, 'Hey, this could be a lifestyle.'"

So lifestyle is selling houses in the middle of what feels like nowhere during a less-than-robust housing market. Granted, the numbers aren't high, but then the developer isn't really interested in volume.

"We have 60 rooftops up, 100 people living here. We are ahead of where we thought we would be–six months ahead of where we thought we would be," says Nygren. "By the end of July, sales had already more than doubled from the total sales in 2006. We have kind of hit that tipping point so that when you come and see it, you see the community."

Seeing Green

Serenbe was founded by Steve Nygren, a former restaurateur more interested in preserving his new-found rural lifestyle than selling houses. "If we had been traditional developers, we never would have done this," says Garnie Nygren, his daughter.

Steve Nygren was the successful founder and owner of several restaurants in Atlanta and beyond when one day, he decided to sell his restaurants and move his family out to their weekend place: a 1905 farmhouse his wife had dubbed "Serenbe" because it was a serene place to be.

In 1999, Nygren and his daughter Garnie were out running along the farm's trails when they noticed a neighbor clear-cutting his property. Worried that the featureless sprawl that had crept into other parts of metro Atlanta was showing up in his family's backyard, Nygren started buying land around him. "He had 500 acres under contract in five weeks," Garnie says. Soon, he owned 900 acres. Realizing that he could go broke buying land to protect his piece of paradise and that some development was inevitable, Nygren decided to control growth on his own terms. Serenbe's homes will be clustered into densely populated hamlets, leaving at least 70 percent as open space. Prairie Crossing, the famous Illinois "conservation community," was an inspiration.

There's not a front lawn in town. Just enough trees are cut down to allow for the home's footprint and access. Grading is frowned upon, and the houses are built to fit the hills. If the lot doesn't allow for a basement without digging, basements aren't allowed. Every house backs up to natural green space or open space. And there are 15 miles of nature trails throughout the community.

The vegetation, not to mention the artist-designed, solar-powered Seussian tree-like streetlights in the first of three hamlets to be developed, gives Serenbe a bit of an otherworldly aura. The hamlets are established around omega shapes (think horseshoes), with the more intense commercial and live-work homes built at the curve and the single-family homes along the straighter ends. Open space rules inside the shape.

Eugene James, director of Metrostudy for Atlanta, has never seen anything like Serenbe. "This is a very unique community," he says. "This is a lifestyle thing, an almost dream-come-true kind of development with a very, very long build-out."