Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  3

  Epiphanies

  Learning that, under the right circumstances, home buyers would not only accept density but actually pay more for it, was the real estate equivalent of discovering a new planet.

  Joe Duckworth saw Seaside in 1996, while attending one of Andrés Duany’s workshops. Duckworth didn’t agree with all that the architect said, and he thought that some of his views about real estate development were more than a little simplistic, but he was impressed by Seaside. He made a point of meeting its developer, Robert Davis.

  Seaside is widely known among architects thanks to Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s innovative planning, but the beach community would not have achieved its popular fame had it not also been a commercial success. That was largely Davis’s doing. The way he built Seaside was surprisingly conservative. He had been a real estate developer in the nineteen seventies in Miami, where a brush with financial failure made him averse to partners and debt. Davis developed Seaside slowly. Initially, he sold only twenty to thirty lots a year — he did no home building himself — and reinvested the profits in infrastructure. He cut overhead to the bone. For example, since the lots were too small for individual septic tanks, the first group of houses was connected to a common septic field located in an unbuilt portion of the site. Only after selling more lots did he install a sewage treatment plant, which he upgraded as the community grew. Davis, who has a Harvard MBA, is a clever businessman. When he was unable to sell some awkward, pie-shaped lots around a small circular plaza, he built a gazebo in the plaza; the lots sold like hotcakes — at a premium. To encourage house sales, he started a rental program, which not only allowed homeowners to recoup part of their costs but also generated steady income. In addition, many renters later became buyers. He carefully nurtured small local businesses and slowly created a lively town center with kiosks, shops, restaurants, and bars, which attracted many day visitors. Like all good developers, he took care of the details.

  In 1982 Davis sold the first lot for $15,000, slightly more expensive than lots in nearby beach communities; after four years, he was getting $50,000. That was only the beginning. Thanks to the healthy economies of southern Georgia and Mississippi, real estate on the Gulf was booming. By 1992 he was selling lots for $130,000, and by 2001 for $690,000. Waterfront lots, which he had wisely held on to, were going for close to $2 million.1 In 1981 Davis’s land had been valued at less than a million dollars; by 1996, when Duckworth first visited Seaside, the assessed value of the entire development was approaching $200 million.

  “I don’t want to be the first one taking a bite of the apple,” Duckworth often says, so he appreciated Davis’s pioneering accomplishment. The working assumption of residential developers had always been that Americans dislike density. The selling price of a home is usually in direct proportion to the size of the lot, the ideal being a lot so large that you can’t see your neighbors — the proverbial house in the woods. That was the image Duckworth sold at Realen. Davis had demonstrated that, under the right circumstances, home buyers would not only accept density but actually pay more for it. This was the real estate equivalent of discovering a new planet.

  At the time Duckworth visited Seaside, he was ready to make a change himself. His career at Realen was a success. He had learned the formulas and rules of thumb of the home-building business, and he was good at it. In 1992 Professional Builder magazine named him National Builder of the Year. But the work was no longer a challenge. The truth was that he found it repetitive and uninteresting. “I like the creative side of the business, but home building is only five percent about development, the rest is making and selling a consumer product,” he says. He spoke to members of the board, and they suggested that he appoint a CEO. Then, he says, he could “kick [himself] upstairs and join them on the golf course.” That didn’t appeal to him. “I wasn’t ready to retire,” he says. “Anyway, I don’t play golf.”

  Duckworth had always been interested in architecture and design, and he had served as head of Philadelphia’s Architecture Foundation. But most of his work at Realen was distinctly conventional as far as design was concerned. He had done a couple of what he called “progressive developments” that went beyond the cookie-cutter format, clustering houses on small lots, preserving open space and farmland. One of these projects had won a planning award. “I liked doing this kind of development, but it always took more time, so I couldn’t do much of it at Realen,” he recounts. “I figured that, if I was on my own, I could take on more projects dealing with issues such as environmental conservation and walkable communities.”

  Duckworth decided he would start his own company, doing only land development, not home building. “From my Wharton classes I remembered product differentiation and market segmentation,” he says. “I figured I would focus on unusual and unconventional real estate opportunities, and special clients, such as old family landowners, institutions, or progressive townships, who were interested in quality and in a long-term investment rather than in quick returns.” The first person he told about his planned career change was his friend Chris Leinberger, a member of Realen’s board. Leinberger was a managing director at a national real estate consulting firm. His reaction was unexpected. “You know, Joe, I’m bored, too. I think I might join you.” Then he added, “You met Robert Davis when you were at Seaside. I think he might be interested.”

  The trio formed the Arcadia Land Company, a loose partnership in which everyone would have a percentage of every project but one partner would always be in charge. “We complement each other nicely,” says Duckworth. “I know land development. Chris, who is based in Santa Fe, is a land-use strategist. Robert is not a big deal maker, but he’s the one with the vision and the national reputation. He’s the man who built Seaside.”

  Tom Comitta heard Andrés Duany lecture about Seaside during a Harvard summer program. Comitta has firsthand experience of old-fashioned urbanism,; he grew up in Manayunk, a blue-collar neighborhood of Philadelphia where his father had a barbershop. With its steep streets and narrow houses, Manayunk resembles an Italian hill town, but what drew Calabrian immigrants like Comitta’s grandfather here in the twenties were the paper mills lining the Schuylkill River. Today, Manayunk’s Main Street is a fashionable restaurant row, but while Comitta was a boy, it was still a neighborhood shopping street.

  In the summers, Comitta worked for his maternal grandfather, who tended the grounds of estates on the Main Line, and when he was admitted to Penn State, he majored in landscape architecture. He won a scholarship to Harvard. After graduating, he returned to Pennsylvania and was offered a job by a large environmental engineering firm in West Chester. He worked for the firm’s municipal clients, writing floodplain ordinances, preparing environmental impact assessments, and reviewing zoning and development applications. After two years he felt ready to strike out on his own. He married, started a family, settled down.

  In 1993 his father became terminally ill. Comitta found himself taking stock of his own life. It wasn’t a midlife crisis, exactly, though he was forty-four, but looking back over the last twenty years, he realized that he wasn’t satisfied with the direction his career had taken. The small municipalities and rural townships he worked for were under pressure from the suburban growth of Philadelphia and Wilmington, and a large part of his job was helping them evaluate applications for new residential subdivisions, office parks, and strip malls. “The truth was that my clients were unhappy with what they were approving,” he says. “They dragged out the process. They beat up on developers. And they didn’t like the results when they were built.”

  Comitta felt he needed to rethink what he was doing. During Duany’s workshop, he had learned about Raymond Unwin, an English architect and planner who was a central figure in the British garden suburb movement of the early nineteen hundreds. Unwin’s masterpiece was a large residential development outside London, Hampstead Garden Suburb, which Robert A. M. Stern has called “the jewel in the suburban crown.”2 Comitta found a cop
y of Unwin’s long out-of-print primer, Town Planning in Practice, in the library.3 The illustrated text described precise principles for designing new communities.

  Comitta’s father died in September, and he decided to take a month’s leave and go to England to see Unwin’s work for himself. He visited Hampstead Garden Suburb and found the experience absorbing. “I would read Unwin’s book in the evening, then walk around the actual places he was writing about the next day,” he recalls. Unwin had modeled parts of the suburb on Rothenburg, a thirteenth-century Bavarian town, so Comitta, who wanted to see the original, went to Germany.

  A planner from suburban Pennsylvania looking for lessons in a medieval town in Germany sounds odd. Surely the two situations are so different as to defy comparison. But town planners — like architects — have to see things with their own eyes. Comitta had spent many years intellectualizing his profession, worrying about rules and regulations. He needed to be reminded of the physical reality of planning. “Walking around these old towns, I saw the delicate relationships that exist between large spaces and small, the progression from narrow to grand as one passes from street to plaza,” he explains.

  Comitta stretched his leave to almost two months. Shortly after returning home, he invited his largest clients to a slide show at the town hall. It wasn’t exactly “My European Vacation.” Comitta told the audience that the old ways of mixing uses, such as residences, shops, and community buildings, were more effective than modern zoning, which separates uses into different areas. The point was not to copy English garden cities and German medieval towns, he said, but to look to our own urban traditions, the old small towns of southeastern Pennsylvania. His message was that, rather than resist new development, municipalities should actively direct growth to complement and improve their communities. He spoke in his usual calm and deliberate fashion, but in the context of southeast Pennsylvania — or, indeed, in the context of almost anywhere in the metropolitan United States — Tom Comitta was preaching revolution.

  “Some people must have been put off by the pictures of the dense center of old Rothenburg, for the next day, two of the townships called and politely fired me,” he says. “On the other hand, two others told me they liked what I had to say.” Encouraged, Comitta started writing new kinds of zoning ordinances that would allow small rural communities to grow in ways more compatible with how they had done it for the last hundred years. He says, “I tried to figure out what people liked about their old towns and to write ordinances that would permit that.”

  4

  Last Harvest

  Thanks to the failures of zoning, we hide our communities behind landscaped berms.

  Tim Cassidy works for Tom Comitta as an architectural designer and landscape architect. He also happens to serve on the Londonderry planning commission. Since I’m interested in learning more about the township and the Wrigley tract, I arrange to visit him one Sunday morning. A tall, intense man of about forty with a ponytail, he’s in the middle of renovating his home, a rambling yellow farmhouse. His two young daughters play among the sawhorses and the construction debris. His wife, Carolyn, holds little Rebecca, born last year. He is the eighth generation to live in the area. “My great-grandfather is buried in a graveyard down the road,” he tells me. “When my parents were children, they lived across the street from one another. I was born less than two miles from this house. How’s that for provincial?”

  Outside, he shows me the line of white pines — fifty of them — as well as spruce and viburnum that he has planted to hide the new housing subdivision that is being built in the field behind his home. The young trees barely screen the unfinished houses and the raw, exposed earth. “I now have a new crop of vinyl where the corn used to grow,” he says. Cassidy doesn’t like developers.

  “Ten years ago Londonderry was not a real estate market,” he tells me. He says that when he was growing up, he felt removed from the urbanization of Wilmington and Philadelphia. In fact, Wilmington is only a twenty-five-minute drive — his wife, a veterinarian, commutes there to work — and King of Prussia, with its vast shopping mall, surrounding office parks, and convention hotels, is only thirty miles away. As the region continues to attract tens of thousands of jobs — QVC is headquartered in West Chester, Vanguard, with eight thousand employees, is in nearby Valley Forge — home builders and developers have turned their attention to southern Chester County, including Londonderry.

  It was after a developer bought the field behind his house that Cassidy started going to township meetings. Thanks to his professional background, he found himself taking an increasingly active role in discussions. With his deep family roots in the area, he was quickly accepted by the locals and was invited to serve on the planning commission, which reviews all real estate development proposals and land-use issues for the township.

  Local responsibility for land control varies widely across the United States. Constitutionally, states control land use, but except for a handful that have formal statewide zoning controls or some degree of statewide control over land use, most states — including Pennsylvania — have devolved regulatory powers over land to local governments.* All American states are divided geographically and politically into counties (called boroughs in Alaska and parishes in Louisiana), a practice derived from the age-old English shire system, but the power of counties varies considerably. In the South and West, counties control land use as well as, in many cases, schools, libraries, hospitals, law enforcement, and judicial administration. In the Northeast and much of the Midwest, counties have much less power, and control over land use resides in much smaller units, called townships. In New England, counties have no real power. Control of land is in the hands of local municipalities, which resemble townships but — confusingly — are called “towns” and can be as large as sixty square miles.

  Pennsylvania, with more than 2,600 local governments, is an extreme case of so-called home rule. Whether such a system is a good or a bad thing depends on your point of view. On the one hand, home rule satisfies local property owners, since their voices are more likely to be heard on issues such as zoning and land use. On the other hand, it frustrates advocates of regional planning, who are obliged to deal with many different — usually parochial — constituencies. It also complicates the lives of real estate developers, since each township has its own priorities and ways of doing things.

  Londonderry Township was founded in 1734, when a group of Scotch-Irish settlers voted to break away from Nottingham Township. Over the years, Londonderry itself was subdivided until it reached its present size of twelve square miles. Its sixteen hundred inhabitants live in scattered houses, farms, and small residential subdivisions; there are no towns or even villages. But the small population is far from homogenous. According to Cassidy, there are four distinct groups, each with its own attitude to development. The first he calls the “old-guard farmers.” Although Chester County was once entirely agricultural, it is being rapidly urbanized. In 1994 The Wall Street Journal listed the county among “America’s twenty hottest white-collar addresses,” the fastest-growing, wealthiest, and most educated concentrations in the country.1* Philadelphia magazine has called the county the successor to the Main Line.2 The part of the county closest to Philadelphia is the most suburban; the rest is more rural but changing fast. Londonderry, for example, looks like a farming area, but farmers make up only 10 percent of the population. Cassidy describes them as free-marketers when it comes to property rights. “They would prefer no development, but if it is to happen, they want the option of selling their land.” This transaction is sometimes referred to as “the last harvest.”

  Another 10 percent are wealthy landowners who live on large estates and are devoted to what the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Dan Rose has called “the culture of the horse.”3 This way of life includes raising Thoroughbreds, attending polo matches, and taking part in horse shows. The cornerstone of the horse culture in Chester County is the foxhunt (of which no fewer than eleven
survive). A successful hunt requires a special landscape: not simply flat fields but a combination of rolling meadows, farmland, woods, and copses, divided by jumpable rail fences. Since the riders and hounds go for miles — a foxhunt can last six to eight hours — foxhunting relies on cooperative landowners who will allow the hunt to cross their fields. In other words, not only is foxhunting an intensely social activity, it requires a high degree of cooperation among its adherents.

  The modern horse culture came to Chester County in 1912, when W. Plunkett Stewart, a wealthy Baltimore securities trader, bought several thousand acres in the area, some of which he resold to wealthy friends who shared his enthusiasm for foxhunting.4 In 1945, when one of his neighbors, Lamont du Pont, head of the vast chemical company, put his five-thousand-acre holding on the market, Stewart arranged for his friend Robert J. Kleberg, owner of the vast King Ranch of Texas, to buy it. Later enlarged to nine thousand acres, the land was used as a fattening range for cattle shipped from the West.5 “When I was a schoolboy,” says Cassidy, “the fathers of some of my classmates were cowboys — Stetsons, chaps, and all.”