This community evokes the past but adds modern amenities
By Susan Caba
You’ll either love this brand-new town in St. Charles County, or you’ll hate it.
Built by Whittaker Homes on 700 acres, the development follows the principles of “new urbanism,” a 25-year-old design movement that suggests community is knit from personal connections formed on the front porches, narrow streets and wide sidewalks of small-town America. Rather than build miles of suburban housing developments connected by highways and served by shopping malls, proponents of new urbanism want to replicate the scale and appeal of towns that evolved over decades. The first and best-known example is Seaside, Fla., built by new urbanism pioneers Duany Plater-Zyberk and Co.
Critics complain that the new urbanism towns are sterile copies, about as authentic as Disneyland’s Main Street. And it’s true that New Town lacks the patina of age—it will be another decade or two before the landscaping disguises the fact that the place was cut from a swath of flat farmland. The architecture is studiously old-timey, as though the last half of the 20th century never took place.
But developer Greg Whittaker has gotten the scale right, with a mix of housing and building styles that will accommodate everyone from senior citizens looking for a small (650 square feet) garden apartment, priced from $120,000 to $200,000, to those who want a large (2,800 square feet) three-story townhome, priced from $450,000 to $650,000. There are small cottages, rental townhouses and large single-family homes, as well as lots for custom-built homes costing as much as $1 million. Some of the three-story townhomes are designed to accommodate offices or retail space on the ground floor. The $1.5 billion project, just north of St. Charles, will eventually include 5,700 residential units.
A central business district already contains a white-steepled church, a hot dog stand, the Prancing Pony Café and Book Store and an amphitheater park. There are no individual mailboxes but rather a centrally located mail center meant to encourage mingling (it could be that, with the Internet, individual mailboxes are obsolete anyway).
“Right now, the trend is toward older style neighborhoods,” Whittaker says. “People are buying in New Town because they’re looking for something different. Many of them would like to live in St. Louis, but they work in St. Charles, and this gives them a chance to live in a more urban environment. People also want the choice to not drive so much. Last Thursday night, we had a jazz trio playing at the Prancing Pony, and I’d say two-thirds of the people came to have a glass of beer or wine and listen to some music—and they all walked up.”
Whether you love it—or hate it—for its newness and its human scale and artifice, The New Town at St. Charles does represent a new point of view in the American dialogue about housing and urban planning.
Community: The New Town at St. Charles
Price range: $120,000–$650,000-plus
Developers: Whittaker Homes, www.newtownatstcharles.com, 636-949-2700, 636-849-2715
Display hours: Daily 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
