Developer Greg Whittaker likes to sit and watch the small building where New Town residents retrieve their mail. You see, neither the 1,000 residents already here nor the thousands more who will eventually call this development home will ever have their mail delivered directly to them. The powers that be have determined otherwise.
"Half the people walk to get their mail and half drive," Whittaker says, his tone hinting at the superiority of the half who walk. "It takes people a while to get used to not driving, because the car is such an important part of our lives."
Isn't the mail thing a little, well, controlling? What if it's really cold, or if you're sick?
"Don't get the mail that day."
What if you have a broken leg?
"Send the neighbor kid."
And if you're elderly and have trouble getting around?
He shrugs and says, "If you don't like getting out of your house, this isn't the community for you."
A community rising from the cornfields west of Highway 370, New Town at St. Charles is unlike any development the St. Louis area has ever seen. An ambitious experiment, it aims to create a utopia where people from all walks of life sit on their front porches and shout howdy-dos to neighbors walking Fido to the park (or to get their mail). The $1.5 billion project is being built in 10 phases over 15 years and will be unusually dense, with 5,700 residents calling this community home. New Town will also have small businesses, retailers and restaurants, a new YMCA, churches, an amphitheater that can fit up to 2,000 people and—yes, Opie and Aunt Bee—even a general store.
Whittaker is one of the region’s most successful and prolific builders. In the past, he has built traditional developments almost exclusively in St. Charles County. Most are homes on cul-de-sacs with big yards, organized into subdivisions with golf-related monikers (“Pebble Beach,” for example). Few folks this side of Lance Armstrong could ride a bike or walk to the nearest coffeehouse.
Then Whittaker hired Florida-based Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., which is celebrating its 25th year as a practitioner of New Urbanism. And that means Whittaker is living out a dream he’s had since he visited DPZ’s first planned community: Seaside, Fla.
“I’ve been vacationing in Seaside for 15 years now, and I’ve been talking about doing a planned community like that here for 10 years,” Whittaker says, walking me around New Town. “But I don’t think St. Louis was ready for this even five years ago. Even when you tell people you’re trying to re-create Main Street America, sometimes they don’t get it until they see it.”
The community is in its early stages, clogged with construction equipment, noise and dust, yet I can already see a bold collection of design influences. First there’s a series of beautiful canals. Then the mixed houses: single family homes, small cottages, townhouses. Then the commercial buildings, their design recalling the early 1900s.
The streets are purposely narrow: Whittaker says that people become uncomfortable driving more than 15 mph on streets of this width. “This community is made first for walking, then for biking, lastly for cars,” he repeats several times. He points to imaginary stores, shops, ice cream parlors and restaurants he hopes to lure to New Town, giving people plenty of destinations to which to walk or bike.
Once you’re inside one of these single family homes, though, the nostalgia stops cold. Spacious modern kitchens with islands—every nook and cranny meticulously planned for modern utilization—and extra perks such as mud and laundry rooms are included. For someone like me, who owns an old home and has suffered the heartache of bad plumbing, few electrical outlets and tiny closets and bathrooms, these interiors raise the eyebrows all the way to the vaulted ceilings.
Also inspired is the philosophy: humble $100,000 places within shouting distance of $700,000 four-bedroom homes with mother-in-law apartments over their garages. Whittaker hopes to build a few $1 million homes in New Town before it’s all over, but he wants the community to remain diverse—a key goal in all DPZ-designed developments.
This unlikely place grows even more unlikely when you realize that it flouts pretty much every zoning law on the books. New Town resides in St. Charles city proper. “We’ve had to break a lot of rules for this,” Whittaker says—starting with the size of the streets, which the fire department wanted nice and wide. They eventually signed off, after they were convinced that although the streets might be narrow, there are more of them—and no cul-de-sacs—so there is always more than one way to get to a house.
Whittaker paints New Town as a huge success already: Every day, there’s another house closing, and the waiting list stretches all the way to California.
So what’s not to like?
“New Urbanists look back at a golden age of American communities that none of them lived in, and they idealize it, and, frankly, it’s BS,” says Wendell Cox, an urban consultant based in Belleville, Ill. “They try to imply that there were no class divisions back then—that the doctor lived next to the blacksmith and they did things together—but there was as much social segregation based on income back then as there is today. The blacksmith did not have dinner with the doctor. This model is pure romanticism, pure hallucination.”
Regarded as an opponent of rapid transit, which he considers a waste of public money, Cox is also, as you might guess, a critic of New Urbanism. It’s the near-religious fervor of New Urbanists that riles him, the audacity of thinking that by, say, designing more sidewalks, planners can make people interact with each other. “I recently lived in Paris for two months, and people were walking close together all the time,” he says dryly, “but they weren’t interacting with each other. They were talking on their cell phones.”
In Cox’s opinion, these New Urbanist communities aren’t urban at all. “New Town is suburban,” he insists. “It’s being built on a farm. Very few people will get to work right there, and I predict that the average homeowner will have a longer commute to work than if he or she lived in a traditional suburb.”
Having visited many DPZ-designed communities, he does admit that they’re pretty. “They should stick to architecture, which they are good at,” he says. “It’s their theology that’s the problem.”
One bit of dogma is the affordability factor. Seaside’s lofty goal was to be a community where people of diverse economic backgrounds live and work, but it quickly evolved into a vacation destination with houses only the rich can afford. Almost universally, in developments from Maryland to Oregon, low income people are quickly priced out. “The prices of the most modest places quickly move up into the $250,000-to-$300,000 range,” Cox says. “Do the math. Are teachers, police officers and firefighters going to be able to afford that?”
Whittaker concedes the point. “That is one of the problems of New Urbanism,” he says, “but how can you tell people what to sell their house for?” He hopes to combat the upward price swing by having so many lower-end units that the prices will stay in the $100,000s—at least for a while.
Among residents, the only bone of contention thus far seems to be the lack of restaurants and service-oriented retailers. “It’s like being on vacation,” says Julie Williams, a 25-year-old single teacher who bought a cottage. “But we do talk about how there aren’t any restaurants yet.”
Similar communities have had mixed success in attracting businesses and creating places to work. There’s Haile Village Center in Gainesville, Fla., which is a pretty area with excellent homes, paths, trees and pools—but there are few jobs there, and virtually all services and shops exist outside the community’s boundaries. A New Urban community in Columbia, Md., is populated with 75,000 people but only has one bona fide restaurant.
In New Town, Whittaker promises, “there will be a block set up for restaurants, and they will have terraces overlooking the Grand Canal.” Prancing Pony Books & Cafe is already doing a galloping business; a general store is about to open; three restaurants are under construction, as are a couple of cafes and sandwich shops; and negotiations are under way with an Italian restaurant, a Mexican restaurant and a microbrewery. The commercial phase is happening more quickly than Whittaker expected: “We thought we’d have three or five businesses by this time, but we have 45.”
He admits that, of the DPZ communities he’s visited, “only a few places have done a good job at attracting commercial [development].” But he’s faced with a chicken-and-egg scenario: There aren’t that many people living in New Town yet.
“It will be hard for businesses to make it at first,” Williams says, “but I think it would be worth the gamble.”
Three times I ask Whittaker about the racial and ethnic diversity that so many New Urbanists hold up as the ideal. Three times he skirts the question, saying that the community is diverse but speaking only about age and income. The third time, asked directly about race and religion, he says, “We have the most diverse of any mix. We thought we’d get mostly middle-aged people with kids and didn’t realize how many younger and older people would want to live here.”
Inhabitants and visitors of New Town are pretty darned white. But St. Charles itself is one of the most segregated areas in America, with 93.3 percent describing themselves as white on the 2000 U.S. Census report. African Americans make up only 3.5 percent of the area and Asians and Hispanics 2 percent each. It’s unlikely that any development would buck the homogeneous status quo.
Another issue: the tiny front and back yards of even the more expensive houses. Yes, there are parks and playgrounds just a few blocks away, but, as my wife put it, “If I’m making dinner, I’d like to see [the kids] out the kitchen window.”
“New Town is a positive development for the area,” says Terry Jones, professor of political science at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and author of The Metropolitan Chase: Politics and Policies in Urban America. “Tomorrow’s successful metropolitan area has to offer at least one of every housing option currently available in the United States. It is prudent for St. Louis to have one of each on the shelf.
“The jury is out as to whether you can build incentives for interaction in a community design,” Jones continues, “but we won’t know until we try. I’m hoping New Town works. We already have two ‘old’ New Towns: Kirkwood and Webster Groves.”
But what if we’ve outgrown— evolved out of—this idea of neighborly social interaction? Former St. Louisan Scott Trowbridge, who builds theme parks for Universal Studios, is well versed in the art of creating artificial environments that provide group experiences. “Communities used to be based on geography: You knew and interacted with the people in your neighborhood, and that’s who you had the most in common with,” he points out. “Today’s communities are based on interest, with no geographical bounds. You might not have time to talk to your neighbor, because you’re spending all your time in an online chat room with someone from Austria talking about your particular breed of dachshund.”
Another common criticism of these communities is their artificial feel (the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show was filmed in, and gently mocked, Seaside). And it’s that criticism that seems to sting the most. On a walk, Whittaker insists that I “just try to pick up” a beautiful wrought-iron bench. “It’s not chained down,” he says as I huff without budging it. “It’s from the Cast Iron Co. in Twickenham, England. It’s the real deal.”
Town architect Tim Busse says, “I was told New Town felt unreal, like a Hollywood stage set, but it’s pretty difficult to get around that claim when everything is being built at the same time.” When the trees grow in and it all ages a bit, it will look more real, more lived-in. Busse says that a deliberate effort was made to make New Town look “grittier,” which meant varying the architecture and making things three times denser, in terms of people per square foot, than the normal suburbs.
One thing that’s impossible to debate is the enthusiasm, and it starts at the very top. Whittaker has just moved his family into the development, as have 16 of his co-workers.
“I had never heard of the concept, and when I tell people about this community, they are really curious,” says Linda Huning, who lives in a 2,125-square-foot four-bedroom house—one of the community’s largest— with her husband and four daughters. A kindergarten teacher, Huning says that the architects tweaked the original plan to fit her family’s needs. “They were very open to our ideas,” she adds—so it’s not a cookie-cutter, take-it-or-leave-it proposition. (Once you’re in the community, however, the zoning laws are stricter than Colonial Williamsburg’s in terms of what color you’re allowed to paint your house or what kind of fence you’re permitted to put up.)
For Huning, the experiment is working. She loves getting to know her neighbors, and the proximity encourages that, as does the pioneering feel the place has now. “We are in the beginning stages,” she says. “We have a Friday movie night at the outdoor amphitheater, and the mail building gets you out meeting people. We can’t wait until they open an ice cream shop.” She pauses. “This will be our last home. This is where we’re going to retire.”
I glance up and see a family biking together. Leave It to Beaver plays well here. There are the typical iPod-enslaved teen skateboarders, their shoulders bowed under the weight of an enormous amount of attitude—but I also meet plenty of fresh-faced kids straight out of central casting.
“Sir, is the playground open?” a young boy calls to Whittaker, who nods yes. As Whittaker walks away, he’s still smiling.
“It’s been a long time since a little kid called me ‘sir,’” he says with a chuckle.
It’s one of the perks of building a New Urban community.
What about WingHaven?
Right about now, you're thinking, "We already have one of these communities: It's called WingHaven." But purists will tell you that WingHaven only incorporates some of the principles of New Urbanism. Only in the third of three phases did it turn pedestrian-friendly, and even then a bit haphazardly (a sidewalk will end suddenly and start up on the other side of the street).
WingHaven does have beautiful homes, some of which are within walking distance of the "downtown" area. But developer Paul McKee, who built the 1,200-acre project in O'Fallon, Mo., has gone on record saying that WingHaven's first two phases were planned and marketed around the luxury golf course.
St. Louis does boast another DPZ-designed community, albeit a small one: the Gate District on Eads between Compton and Pennsylvania. Sited in an economically depressed residential district, the redeveloped housing is modest and affordable—and, aesthetically, a major asset to the neighborhood.
Before the flood
Questions have arisen about this development's location on a floodplain. "We've been looking at that from day one," says New Town architect Tim Busse. "Competitors are saying it was flooded, but it was dry in 1993, and that carries a lot of sway."
Oliver Gosejohan, the flood administrator for St. Charles who grants permits for such developments on the basis of Federal Emergency Management Association rules, could not verify that the entire New Town site was bone dry in 1993. He does say, however, that the houses being built now are not located on the 100-year floorplain.
"They are borrowing dirt, digging out canals and using that to raise the level of the buildings," Gosejohan says. "There was water in that general area in 1993 and in the parts they plan to build in other phases, but where they are building right now is 3 feet above the 100-year floodplain."
The "100-year flood" concept was created by FEMA, and is based on a percentage of the odds. "It sounds like we've going to Las Vegas," says Gosejohan, "but the government goes back into history, looks at the largest rainfall and the surface-runoff area and bases odds on that.
Those living in a 100-year flood zone would be foolish to think that just because it happened 12 years ago, they are safe for another 80 years, he adds: "It might happen twice in one year; it might not happen for more than a thousand."
At New Town, even that challenge was turned into the proverbial lemonade. "We were required to have 95 acres of lake and waterways for stormwater detention," Busse says, "and DPZ suggested that we spread the water across the site and make it a focal point, creating a place connected by these wonderful waterways."
