Across the country, developers are looking at neighborhood design that predates the end of World War II, when the mass production of homes gave way to our current building habits. This is before we were dealing with the isolation, alienation and dysfunction associated with the massive tract home subdivisions that have been common for the past 50 years.

Where we went wrong
“You have to understand how it happened,” says Randy Jackson, president of the Planning Center, a firm that specializes in master-planned communities based on the village philosophy. “Before World War II, most subdivisions were built the way good towns are built,” he says. “It was a series of builders mixing product types. But what happened is at the end of the war, all the soldiers were coming home and the government set up the Federal Housing Authority to get people back to work. So they built highways, which created freeways. So that made us build automobiles, and on the flip side, the FHA set standards for how housing tracts should be built, based on a car culture, so you wound up with Levittown and others like it.”
This condition begat oceans of homes located a few miles from any shopping or entertainment, creating the need to drive everywhere and discouraging pedestrian traffic, not just from lack of purpose, but from distance as well. The new ways are actually old ones. Developers are taking mixed-use and community design in another direction, creating villages out
of land, and threatening to remove the
term “bedroom community” from our vernacular altogether. Jackson explains the mind-set behind village design, which is different from the old master-planned developments that sported a gate and a fancy name. Now, the name is secondary
to the quality of life.
“It’s a shift,” says Jackson. “I did that for the first 28 years of my working life. We created great subdivisions around an amenity, like a golf club or a tennis club. What we found out is that they’re not sustainable as communities if you have to get into the car and drive everywhere, including to the grocery store. And you don’t become endeared to them. You may love the golf course, but it’s not like you think, ‘That’s the place I want to live the rest of my life, because it’s a balanced community.’ What we found is that you really have to go back and create that cross section of the demographics.”
Still, Jackson points out that creating a village design is not going to be a formula like the old master-planned developments were.
“It’s not equal in all parts of the country,” he says. “Where you get a traditional village on the East Coast and Midwest, on the West Coast you may get more of a district approach, where you’re trying to create and focus around a cultural amenity like a university or a church or even just a neighborhood park.”
This new approach generates a real feeling of membership in a community, says Jackson, that moves beyond a house number and into a genuine township feeling.
“The master planners are trying to create a model that is not a subdivision, but a community that is made up of many components on a sustainable level,” he says. “So we’re thinking about it a lot.
The buyers don’t necessarily come in for that reason, but after they’re there for a while, they no longer speak in terms of where they live as their individual home. So, they won’t say, ‘Oh, I live in product number 33.’ They’ll say, ‘I live in Ledair Ranch,’ or the names of some of these villages. It’s based on the interactivity between everybody in the community, so they can’t imagine not being there or living in something that doesn’t have this rich level of social structure.”

Theory and Practice
One such community already up and running is Villebois Village Center in Wilsonville, Ore. The development is modeled after a typical European village, with a variety of residential options, from single-family to apartment, all centered on a hub filled with storefronts, squares and parks. Rudy Kadlub, CEO of Costa Pacific Homes, helmed the project, which opened in March. He described the method behind the project.
“If you think of a European village,” he says, “you’ll drive through the countryside, and after a while you might see a farm house and then a little store, and then pretty soon you drive into the center of the village where the streets are narrow and there are shops on the streets and balconies overlooking the cobblestone streets.”
This vision is exactly what Villebois has become, and the idea is to have people as happy to be there both at work and off. “Everybody lives in or around the town,” he says. “There’s housing for the butcher, the baker, the banker. So, we started creating these development tenets for Villebois that drove the design and still drives all of our thoughts for the community.”

The three tenets
“Those three tenets are connectivity, diversity and sustainability, in the broadest sense of the terms. Connectivity drove a lot of the land planning. We wanted the three neighborhoods to be connected,” he says, “so the community follows a traditional grid pattern. There are no dead-end streets or cul-de-sacs, except for one, which was unavoidable. The streets are connected and there are set-back sidewalks everywhere. The architecture is designed so that it connects with the street. The garages are tucked to the rear, so there’s no conflict between the pedestrian movement and cars moving across the sidewalk.”

The wider view
For residents who might work or play beyond the borders of Villebois, the planners incorporated a wider network of connection, again mirroring those in Europe.
“The community is connected to the rest of the city and the state via a web of alternative modes of transportation,” Kadlub says, “from bicycle paths to new roadways to direct connection to the new WES commuter line, which lies just to the east of the village itself.”

More than just nuclear families
The new village mentality also requires thinking of buyers outside the common single-family demographic. This creates more sales opportunities and enhances the diversity of the village.
“From a diversity standpoint, we wanted the place to have a lot of texture, with different end uses,” Kadlub says. “We have different product types and different home styles and sizes and price points, so that we could accommodate a diverse population, one that’s more representative to the population in general.”
This idea is echoed by Jackson, who advocates the same philosophies with a little different angle.
“If you don’t plan for the youth and the senior, which I call the youth and the wisdom, you just wind up with the middle core, which is the core family,” he says. “But that core family doesn’t exist anymore. You really have six segments of the community that you have to provide for. You’re really creating diversity when you’re providing apartments for the first-time worker and if you’re providing senior housing for those that are getting ready to exit, so to speak. That’s what creates the richness in the community. The same thing goes for the diversity of economics, you have to have a place that the fireman and the teacher and the grocery store owner can live in the community, as well as the person that’s running the business. So, those cross sections, we’ve found, makes the community. The granularity is much more important when you start to break it into much smaller pieces of housing. You don’t have big tracts anymore.”
Getting away from big also means getting away from dull, according to Kadlub.
“We thoroughly believe that the most uninspiring places are those that are homogenous. Think of an industrial park, where that is the only use, or even a single-family development, where all the houses are pretty much the same.”
“There’s not a lot of excitement to those. The excitement comes when you start to mix uses and products. It also, from a convenience standpoint, makes it easier for people to interface, and gets people out of their cars and on foot, so the place becomes one where it’s a little healthier to live, because it’s easier for people to walk from place to place.”

Advocacy
The movement to build village-style neighborhoods is not without organized support. John Norquist is president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a 16-year-old nonprofit organization promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an alternative to sprawl. He, like Jackson, says the philosophies behind building this way mark a return to traditional planning, and that developers can’t be blamed for the sprawl model.
“I think developers build that way because it’s the formula,” Norquist says. “It’s a nice simple formula. And the developers didn’t invent the cul-de-sac; they were forced to put in the big streets.”
Norquist explains that traditional developers didn’t include cul-de-sacs for aesthetic reasons; rather, it was the result of street design mandated by the government, which drove neighborhood design.
“Before World War II, developers designed neighborhoods on streets with blocks,” he says. “It’s just a matter of rediscovering that. And it was dominant for a while, just like interior-facing malls for retail was dominant, but now, no one’s building malls, they’re building lifestyle centers or town centers.”
Norquist says CNU advocates village mentality in every type of community setting.
“We’re for urbanism in all the various sectors, what we call the transects, so from small, rural areas to Manhattan Island in New York, the blessings of urbanism can flow,” he says. “If the buildings are built close to the street and near the corners, you can create what amounts to a place, a community. It’s a place where you can walk just a few blocks to anything, like you’d have in a rural hamlet. But if you build everything set back, you know, 100 yards with large parking lots, you don’t create any connection at all, you just create large areas to park.”
If this philosophy seems to adhere more to social rather than environmental sustainability, Norquist says that is intentional.
“We happen to think Urbanism stands on its own,” he says. “We don’t need to scare people into it. I happen to think that climate change is for real, but I don’t think that’s the main reason to do it. I think there are several reasons to do it. It performs better environmentally, but it also performs better on the real estate market. It holds its value, and it creates better socioeconomic opportunities that are hard to create in an urban sprawl environment.”
Getting back to the highway design of the post-World War II era, Norquist says this was a sort of historical anomaly, that streets are normally intended for more than transportation.
“The traditional urban thoroughfare, throughout history, going back thousands of years to the Greeks, had three purposes,” he says. “Not just movement, but also economic and social applications. But what the U.S. highway policy has been for the last 60 years is that a route only has one purpose. So all across the country, they’ve been killing urbanism by creating these bigger and bigger roads. And the other part is the separate-use zoning that segregated residential from services. So if you get away from those things, you’re sort of reverting to the norm, and you end up with something that becomes a charming neighborhood or a charming community, and you provide a setting for jobs and social enjoyment. That’s what people want. ”

Sustainable on a new level
Villebois is designed to be sustainable on an economic and environmental level, but also on a social level, which is at the center of village design. This element was the catalyst for the overall layout of Villebois.
“The idea of social sustainability drove much of the land plan and the open spaces,” says Kadlub. “For example, all of the parks, and there are 160 acres of parks in the community itself, are bordered by single-moded streets. In other words, there are no houses that back up against the parks, so people driving through obviously have access. In conventional development in years past, post-World War II, only the people who lived next to the amenity would know it was there. I use Lake Oswego, Ore., as an example. When we first moved there back in 1991, we spent a day and a half looking for the lake, because the houses were so tightly packed around it.”
Jackson takes this idea a step further, describing a village model that puts a personality to each piece of the community, creating a group of communities that generate the village.
“If you look at any great town, it has districts,” he says. “There are different areas of the community that are focused around the service and the social networking that’s needed to make those districts work. I think our new communities need to be made of districts like this. The human being needs to have a spatial relationship. Something that’s really big is uncomfortable, so size is very important. A neighborhood should probably be no more than 40 or 50 homes. So a series of neighborhoods can work together to function as a village, and so I think what will happen more and more over time will be this smaller neighborhood linking together to create these communities.”

Reducing the waste
The largest difference between the old and the new developments is proximity to services, says Jackson. The village model all but removes the automobile from the equation.
“With these new communities, 80 percent of all the housing is within a half mile of 80 percent of the services and facilities,” he explains. “You can get on a bike and ride to your grocery store or you can walk to church.”
Still, the new designs must allow for some traditionalists, but that again is the value of diversity.
“You still need a full mix of housing,” Jackson says. “And there are people that still want to live on cul-de-sacs. There’s a place for it, but not the whole community.”
Even with these more traditional holdovers, Jackson says the end goal is to minimize the necessity for auto travel.
“A single-family home generates, traditionally, 10 trips a day in the car,’ he says. “Now we’re trying to get it down to two or three trips.”
This goal to create developments that don’t just sell units with no regard for quality of life is something Jackson and many like him describe as a sort of epiphany in their careers.
“Believe me, I’ve done a million homes probably in the old mode that are successful,” he says, “but not truly sustainable in the long run. And I’ve gotten religion myself in that regard.”
Another way the village design reduces the carbon footprint is in the simple reduction of street size. This more deliberate use of space is exponential in terms of economics and energy.
“Energy usage is reduced by creating clustering,” Jackson says, “minimizing the amount of street being built between the product. It used to be that every single-family home that got built owned a piece of street out in front of their house that was 70 feet long by 30 feet wide, so you had 2,100 square feet of street for each house. Now, we’re doing 10 homes in the same space that would have been used for that one home.”

Smaller is bigger, in the long run
Not only is the village mentality wise, it’s necessary and logical, according to Jackson, given the state of things in the industry.
“I’ll tell you, the economic setback has really helped to create an opportunity to build smaller,” he says. “You will no longer see subdivisions of 125 homes, like you used to. You’ll see 20 homes or 25 homes, just like how the old towns were built.”
And what about the old Levittown model? Jackson gives an update to that legacy here:
“The funny thing is, the Levitt developers have a development in Florida now where they create villages, so it’s come full circle,” he says.