Remaking Master Plans
A master-planned community, says Greenstone Corporation’s Jason Wheaton, is “nothing more than a lot of small subdivisions.”
But instead of letting an agglomeration of subdivisions grow into a suburb or a small city piecemeal and without forethought, the master-planned community starts, as you might expect, with a master plan. What amenities and design should this small city have? How many retail areas and offices? What schools, parks and trails? Only then are the housing developments designed into the scheme.
It’s a model that has been used multiple times in Washington state, from Northwest Landing at DuPont to West Campus (Federal Way), Snoqualmie Ridge and Redmond Ridge in King County. Greenstone’s Kendall Yards project in Spokane is a tweak on the master-planned community, putting one in an existing urban area, in this case, a former railroad switching yard.
Then there was Cascadia.
Launched in 2005, Cascadia was to be a 4,700-acre planned community near Orting and Bonney Lake in Pierce County. It was to become home to 16,000 to 20,000 residents over 20 years. Developer Patrick Kuo spoke of such features as a conference center, an outdoor sculpture park, golf courses, a high-tech business park, a pedestrian-oriented town center and all sorts of environmental measures.
Very little exists at Cascadia today beyond the layout of streets. Cascadia wound up in Chapter 11 in 2009; the developer defaulted on $75 million in loans, according to published reports. When there were no bidders at auction, HomeStreet Bank took over the property and has been marketing it.
Did the Cascadia saga mark the end of master-planned communities?
“When you think about the capital-intensive, up-front costs to create one, I just wonder who’s going to go do that,” says Ken Krivanec of Quadrant Homes, which helped develop several of the established master-planned communities in the Puget Sound region. “That takes such a huge commitment.” Quadrant is developing a smaller community called Skagit Highlands, but “outside of that, I’m not seeing too much of that in the future just because of what it requires up front.”
Wheaton understands the attention given to problems with large projects like Cascadia. “When a master plan fails, the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” he says. “When you hear about it, it makes a lot of news because it’s a very significant impact to a community.”
Wheaton thinks master-planned communities do have a future because they hold advantages for both developers and communities. But as Cascadia demonstrated, having a plan is no guarantee of success.
“If you position a subdivision wrong, it will fail,” he notes. “If you position a master plan wrong, it will fail.”
Greenstone’s plans for Kendall Yards differs from those of the previous developer, who, Wheaton says, “frankly, positioned it wrong.” Greenstone cut the number of planned residences in half and shifted more of what remained to lower price points. The former plan, he adds, “wasn’t consistent with real demand.”
Greenstone has been building out a master-planned community in Coeur d’Alene for 15 years, and that plan has changed over the years because “the market has changed dramatically in many ways.” The lesson learned, Wheaton explains, is that “there has to be adaptability in a master plan to move with the market.” And the lesson to communities studying approval of a master-planned community? “Cities have to be careful who their partners are.”
Comments
Post new comment