A Tale of Two Master Plans

The home building industry is in for a long, grueling winter, but there are signs of spring on the horizon. At opposite ends of the country, two new urbanist neighborhoods are sprouting up on sites that were more than ready for a little rejuvenation. Thanks to smart planning and a cooperative effort between public and private entities, East Beach (top right), a 100-acre project in Norfolk, Va., that was once a collection of crime-ridden housing, and Villebois (left), formerly home to the state mental hospital in Wilsonville, Ore., are on their way to becoming dynamic traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs).

Large scale as these projects may be, there are lessons here for builders of all sizes, whether you're constructing homes on a few lots or stepping up to the dual role of builder/developer and tackling a brand-new neighborhood. First, it pays to look at pockets of land in locations that are close to jobs and transit (even if that means doing some remediation). Infill is here to stay. Second, it's in your interest to work closely with state and local authorities. Public-private partnerships may help expedite approvals, achieve community buy-in, and unearth additional funding sources. And third, one successful community often begets another. There is no currency more valuable than goodwill banked from a past project when you're asking a zoning commission to approve the next one.

Getting in on a promising project at the ground floor takes some legwork, but it's a worthy long-term investment. Done right, your development might just be exactly what folks want in their backyard. And chances are, it will be an improvement on what was there before.

Bayside Beauty

At East Beach in Norfolk, Va., tip-top planning and Tidewater design join forces to turn a crumbling site into a vibrant waterfront neighborhood.

At the turn of the 20th Century, Ocean View Amusement Park in Norfolk, Va., was a big draw for residents of the Hampton Roads region. They flocked to the boardwalk and roller coaster via both streetcar and ferry, happy to soak up the sun and smell the salt air (generated not by an ocean, exactly, but by the mighty Chesapeake Bay). “It was a kind of Great Gatsby–like destination,” says D. B. “Bart” Frye Jr., a managing partner with East Beach Co., developers of East Beach, a new 100-acre TND built on the peninsula that was once home to Ocean View. “For years and years, it was a wonderful place.”

Fast-forward to the end of the century. By then, after a huge expansion of population during World War II (Norfolk is home to the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and the largest naval base in the world), Ocean View had fallen into disrepair. In place of the vibrant beach resort were 1,600 dilapidated residential units, owned primarily by absentee landlords. “Ten years ago, a cab wouldn't take a fare to Ocean View and a pizza driver wouldn't deliver,” says Frye. Military police were allowed to arrest service personnel just for being at Ocean View, which had more than its share of drugs, prostitutes, and violent crime. The city was spending $2.5 million to $3 million a year on public safety issues alone.

Ocean View's slide into slum status especially irked Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim and W. Randy Wright, Ocean View's representative on the Norfolk City Council. The two men were a big part of a $50 million citywide effort to obtain title to the land and clear the 100 acres for development.

Another prominent player in the redevelopment of Ocean View was the No rfolk Redevelopment & Housing Authority (NRHA). Founded in 1940, the NRHA has a long history of innovative redevelopment and is one of the few municipal authorities in the country that not only oversees housing management but also handles significant residential and commercial development.

In 1994, the NRHA started the ball rolling by engaging Miami-based Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. and holding a planning charrette for what would become East Beach. Collaborating on the project was Ray Gindroz of Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates, the city of Norfolk's longtime planning consultant.

East Beach is bounded on the north by the Chesapeake Bay; on the east by an existing single-family development; on the south by Pretty Lake, a marina; and on the west by a well-traveled street called Shore Drive. The master plan that emerged for the new TND created a new street grid (see site plan, below), with all of the north-south streets getting shifted a half block to the east. The existing streets became the alleys. This not only provided rear access for garages but also placed the mature trees toward the front of the new streetscape, a boon for the community's front yards and a series of small public parks.

The character of the neighborhood changes from north to south, going from predominantly residential near the Bay to increasingly urban toward the marina at the south end of the project. Here, the plan calls for a “Little Annapolis” of sorts, a nod to Maryland's capital city on the Bay, with apartments over marina-related shops, restaurants, and a plaza or market square. An unusual feature of the East Beach plan is the use of bayfront greens: Every north-south street meets the Bay, with public access to the beach provided by paths or one of the greens. Homes facing the greens enjoy expansive views of the Bay.

At build-out, which is expected within seven to 10 years, there will be 700 residential units, including single-family detached and attached homes, condominiums, and cottages, plus 150,000 square feet of commercial space. So far, 155 homes have been built, and amenities include a bayfront club, pocket parks, and a Montessori school.

In 2000, with a preliminary master plan in hand, the NRHA embarked on an RFQ (request for quotation) process. Several local development groups responded, along with an out-of-town team specializing in new urbanist development, led by LeylandAlliance of Tuxedo, N.Y. The Leyland-Alliance team was favored by the NRHA, but political leaders wanted a local group also to be involved. As a result, a joint venture was formed by LeylandAlliance and East Beach Renaissance, a local development group. East Beach Co. (EBC) was designated as the master developer.

The NRHA and EBC then came up with an interesting financing deal. The NRHA owned the site outright, having used city funds, raised over the years through annual allocations, to buy the land. EBC paid market rate for the parcel but gives 20 percent of each lot sale back to the NRHA. “That way,” says Frye, “if we hit it out of the park, they do too. They've done extraordinarily.” Frye estimates the final amount may be 50 percent more than what the city first expected to get. “On a bad day, the total [value] at build-out will be about $450 million, with a return to the city of new tax dollars of more than $6 million a year.”

Not bad for a part of town that was once almost written off as lost.

Much of the success of East Beach can be directly traced to the buy-in by city officials. They believed in the principles of new urbanism and have given the developers and East Beach's town architect a wide degree of latitude when it comes to design approval as well as zoning and variance issues. “It was a huge leap of faith for the city to come to a developer and not tell us what we were going to do, but said, ‘You tell us what you need, and we'll make that happen,' ” says Rock Bell, EBC general manager. “We've been fortunate to have backing at the highest level.”

“We will remain close to what Andrés [Duany] originally drew with the master plan, which is highly unusual,” says Frye. “Everybody had to back up and rethink what they were used to. Forget conventional cul-de-sacs and street right-of-ways. We weren't stopped at every turn by the normal public works–type thinking.”

Project: East Beach, Norfolk, Va.; Size: 100 acres; Unit size: 300 (garage rental apartments) to 6,000 square feet; Total units: 700; Price: $600 (monthly garage apartment rents) to $2.85 million; Builders: East Beach Builders Guild, includes 21 companies (full list available at BUILDER Online); Developer: East Beach Co., Norfolk (a partnership between East Beach Renaissance, Norfolk, and LeylandAlliance, Tuxedo, N.Y.); Architects: East Beach Design Professionals Guild, includes 44 firms (full list available at BUILDER Online); Land planners: Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (master planner), Miami; Urban Design Associates (design guidelines), Pittsburgh; Landscape architects: Stephanie Bothwell, Washington; CMSS Architects, Virginia Beach, Va.; Interior designers: Design Consultants, Virginia Beach; Gilbert Interiors, Virginia Beach; and CMSS Architects, Virginia Beach

Playing to Win

Costa Pacific Communities and the city of Wilsonville, Ore., teamed up to turn the grounds of a former state mental hospital into Villebois, a transit-oriented master planned community being built near Portland, Ore.

The building where Costa Pacific Communities had its offices until recently offers a big clue as to how its CEO, Rudy Kadlub, works. “Nondescript” would be a charitable way to describe the low-slung, '60s-era brick structure that was once the administration building for the Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville, Ore., just south of Portland. Closed down in 1995, it's now the site of Villebois, an ambitious, transitoriented master planned community developed by Costa Pacific. Its name is French for “village by the woods.” The former hospital grounds make up close to 200 acres of the site; another 300 were acquired by state and local authorities.

Kadlub wanted to show Wilsonville officials that his company, which also developed Orenco Station, a pioneering transit-oriented development in Hillsboro, Ore., meant business. He didn't need fancy Portland digs to get the job of turning a site with significant stormwater issues into a new community. The former college football coach would rather be on site, smack-dab in the middle of the backhoes, even if that meant well-worn linoleum floors and bleak, elementary school–like hallways. (Kadlub and his company would eventually move out of the former administration building to make way for the project's town center.)

“We'd be in a meeting at Villebois, talking about something—say moving trees—and someone would say, ‘Let's just go out and take a look,' ” says Lee Iverson, principal of Iverson Architects in Newport Beach, Calif., and a member of a team of consultants that has worked with Kadlub for more than 20 years. “We worked directly with the city, close enough that there were design meetings held at Villebois with city staff. We did the same thing at Orenco Station. The city of Wilsonville and Costa Pacific were joint applicants when the master plan applications for Villebois went in. We were literally included on the same team.”

Teamwork is a theme that comes up repeatedly with the 57-year-old Kadlub, whose first job out of college was coaching football at the University of California at Davis (coaching stints in Colorado and Idaho followed). His company was one of the smallest to respond to the RFQ that the state of Oregon and the city of Wilsonville put out for the project in 2000.

“I firmly believe we were awarded [the master plan contract] for Villebois based on what we had accomplished at Orenco Station,” says Kadlub. “By law, this property had to be a compact urban village for it to be developed. That was part of the requirements for the sale of this excess land. Wilsonville controlled the entitlements and was part of the selection process.”

The desire to have a compact urban village, with access to light rail, wasn't a pie-in-the-sky dream of smart growth–minded officials. There just aren't enough homes in Wilsonville for those who work in this robust region (Nike, SYSCO Food Services, and Xerox are all large employers), which makes for a nightmare commute. Currently, there are 10,000 more jobs in the city than workers. Villebois will eventually increase the area's population by an estimated 7,000 residents.

“More and more people spending more and more time in their automobiles putting more and more pollutants in the air is an unsustainable model,” says Kadlub. “We want to create communities that rely on alternative modes of transportation—transit, bicycles, pedestrians—that put jobs and housing close together, and that offer education and daily services so that when people do come home they don't have to get in their car to get a quart of milk. At Orenco Station, people told us that their lives were happier, healthier, and more social for living there. It became sort of an epiphany for me, and we said, ‘If we have the ability to create places where people's lives are happier, healthier, and more social, than why in the world would we ever do anything else?' ”

So far, the first of three single-family neighborhoods is going up at Villebois. The mix of architectural styles—French Revival, colonial-inspired American Classic, English Revival, and American Modern—reflect the established architecture of many of Oregon's pre–World War II neighborhoods. Work is also under way on the 48-acre town center, which will offer townhomes, loft-style condominiums, and rental apartments, as well as retail and commercial space.

A state-of-the-art rainwater management system is being put in place to help address a significant stormwater-runoff problem that began when the hospital was built in the late '50s.

“When the state built here, they dried up some wetlands and piped everything into a stormwater pipe that became a seasonal creek,” says Kadlub. “Now it's become a big gully. We're working with the Army Corps of Engineers to reinstitute the historic wetlands and reduce the flow into this legacy creek, which will stop the erosion.” Villebois' street grid system has also been designed so that it follows the sheet flow of water, with streets designed to act as dams to slow the movement of water toward the open space. Porous pavers also help filter large amounts of water.

“There have been quite a number of new things to deal with here and still come up with a great place that will have a mix of uses, social gathering places, and provide people with the daily services that they need,” says Kadlub. “And rounding out what we have dubbed a ‘complete community.' We think complete communities add value to people's lives.”

Kathleen Stanley is a freelance writer based in Washington.

Project: Villebois, Wilsonville, Ore.; Size: 470 acres; Unit size: 500 to 4,312 square feet; Total units: 2,700; Price: $675 per month (rental apartments) to $699,900 (single-family homes); Builders: Arbor Custom Homes, Beaverton, Ore.; Costa Pacific Homes, Portland, Ore.; Legend Homes, Portland; Trammell Crow Residential, Atlanta; Developer: Costa Pacific Communities, Portland; Architects: Iverson Architects, Newport Beach, Calif.; Fletcher Farr Ayotte, Portland; Land planner: Iverson Architects, Newport Beach; Landscape architects: Walker Macy, Portland; Mayer/Reed, Portland; Civil engineer: Alpha Community Development, Beaverton