Thaddeus Herrick, of the Wall Street Journal, notes that Fake towns are rising, offering urban life without grit:
Legacy Town Center is one of dozens of faux downtowns popping up across the country, from Kansas City to Washington, D.C., spurred by a demand for urban living scrubbed of the reality of city life. A careful mix of retail, residential and office space built with traditional materials such as stone and brick, Legacy looks like a city but has neither panhandlers nor potholes. Many residents rarely venture even to downtown Dallas, which has been trying to turn itself into place to live for almost a decade.
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In Flagstaff, Ariz., buyers have snapped up almost all of the 125 residential units on offer at Presidio in the Pines, a town center under construction on 91 acres of forest. North of Charlotte, N.C., on the site of a former dairy farm, is Birkdale Village, which consists of 52 acres intended to recall a New England coastal town. It features 320 apartments, most of which are stacked above shops and restaurants.Even though these faux downtowns contain tinges of suburbia, they’re taking advantage of a growing backlash against the sprawl that rings Dallas and other U.S. cities. The reaction began in the 1980s with the rise of New Urbanism, a movement of architects and planners calling for a return to traditional towns where people work, shop, live and play.
Among the most prominent of those theorists was Andres Duany, a leading figure behind Seaside, a planned pedestrian community on the Florida Panhandle that was the setting for the 1998 movie, “The Truman Show.” Suburban growth, Mr. Duany argued, was unsustainable because it consumes land at a high rate while creating horrendous traffic.
In the 1990s, Americans started venturing back into cities that had emptied out in prior decades. Basking in the glow of falling crime rates and glamorized by television shows such as “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” cities themselves began to woo residential and retail development.
For a developer, however, it’s much easier to make a fake city than it is to work on real downtowns with their patchwork landholdings and planning restrictions. The developers of Legacy were able to carve up the land pretty much as they pleased. The result: more than 1,500 apartments and town houses, some 80 shops and restaurants, two mid-rise office towers and a Marriott Hotel.
The concept also attracted developers looking for alternatives to malls, a concept rapidly losing favor among shoppers. Only one mall has opened in 2006, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a New York City-based trade group. By contrast, more than 60 so-called lifestyle centers — outdoor shopping areas with plazas, fountains and pedestrian streets — are planned to open this year and next.
To attract more shoppers, and therefore retailers, developers started building homes on these sites. Steiner + Associates of Columbus, Ohio, a leading builder of town centers, initially included only retail and office space at the $300 million Easton Town Center near Columbus, which was completed in 2001. When another developer added apartments across the street, Yaromir Steiner, chief executive of Steiner + Associates, noticed the low vacancies and high rents. “We realized how a commodity apartment could turn into a specialty product,” he said.
Interesting:
Like many such projects, Legacy began to slide back into the classic suburban mold. Fehmi Karahan, whose Karahan Companies developed the retail portion of the project, wanted to lure national retailers, even though Legacy Town Center is sandwiched between two giant malls in Frisco and Plano.One big out-of-town retailer, furniture chain Robb & Stucky of Fort Myers, Fla., had little intention of following the New Urbanist playbook. The company wanted more than 100,000 square feet for a store, plus surface parking. The upshot was a compromise: The Robb & Stucky store was built at an angle to the road to disguise its size, and its facade was covered in various textures to mitigate the big-box feel.
At the demand of other prospective retailers, Mr. Karahan built surface parking lots in front of shops facing six-lane Legacy Drive. Built in four phases, The Shops at Legacy opened in April 2002 with about a dozen stores, including Starbucks. Mr. Karahan also went after established Dallas retailers and managed to attract popular restaurants such as Bob’s Steak & Chop House and Mi Cocina.
Retailers that pushed for surface parking turned out to be wrong. Today, the hottest location isn’t Legacy Drive but the narrow Bishop Road, where the stores are a sidewalk’s width from the curb. Nancy Chesser closed her “vintage vogue” boutique Ambrosia, which was on Legacy Drive. “The (foot) traffic was terrible,” she says.