Affordability with style

With patience, traditional craftsmanship, and a love for maximizing space, builder and developer Dan Camp has given new life to the dilapidated Cotton District neighborhood in Starkville, Mississippi. The Cotton District rebirth beganwith one building and eight apartments in 1969. It has since become Dan Camp’s life project. One building at a time, the neighborhood has grown to encompass six city blocks with close to 200 dwellings and a newly constructed retail building, the District Exchange. With a coffee shop, a deli, and a beauty salon in addition to 10 apartments, the District Exchange creates a new center of activity for the students and faculty from the adjacent Mississippi State University who make up the majority of the neighborhood’s inhabitants. Plans to add a further 3,000 square feet of commercial space are on the drawing board. The Cotton District includes a variety of housing types, from simple wooden cottages to new and renovated mansions divided into rental apartments. Architectural styles range from Greek Revival to Italianate to rural Mississippi styles. The only for-sale housing in the district is concentrated in Planter’s Row, a block of zero-lot-line townhouses on a narrow street. The facades are subdued, well-proportioned, and the homes look like they have been there for much longer than 15 years. A former shop teacher at Mississippi State University, Camp has no formal architectural training, but he is an accomplished craftsman and a keen observer of traditional styles and neighborhood structures. As a young man he visited pre-Civil War cities like Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Savannah where his interest in vernacular architecture was awakened. “I asked myself: ‘How come you can’t build the same thing in a new environment?’” Camp says. The opportunity presented itself in this district of neglected housing adjacent to an abandoned cotton mill. By 1969, property values had fallen to a level where houses on lots 45 feet by 90 feet sold for less than $3,000. Camp secured construction financing for his first building, rented the apartments to students, and used the profits to finance his next building. Fiercely independent, Camp has followed his mother’s advice: “Never have a partner and never sell anything.” Where other developers might have sold some of the successful rental properties to speed up construction of more units, Camp has held onto everything he has developed, and in recent years property values have risen steadily. For Camp, keeping the competition out is more than a question of money. He maintains that anything another developer would introduce would not be in “good taste.” Small is better One of the guiding principles behind the Cotton District has been to maintain affordability by keeping buildings and apartments small. “I get off on building small things,” Camp says. “You get the elements in better proportion when you build on a smaller scale.” Apartment floor plans range from 230 square feet to 800 square feet, and while rents are now slightly higher than in the rest of the market, units in the Cotton District are on average 30 percent smaller. The apartments in the District Exchange rent for $580 for 480 square feet. Camp maximizes space in his designs with high ceilings, sleeping lofts, and outdoor living space on porches and in courtyards. Camp is currently developing a concept he calls “tiny houses,” rental units measuring 10 feet by 16 or 18 feet. Designed as student housing, the the tiny houses would include a 5 feet by 5 feet kitchen with a full range of appliances, lots of window space to make the dwelling light and airy, and a sleeping loft. The City of Starkville has been supportive of Camp’s dense redevelopment. “This was such a deplorable slum that the city gave me a lot of leeway.” he says. Building Director Larry Bell says the city has routinely granted Camp exeptions to lot sizes and other minor variances, but the allowed density of 22 units per acre has stayed constant. “The city has profited from the increase in tax revenues,” Bell says. “Success breeds success.” The good news for the city is that the improvements have been accomplished without any major public infrastructure investments. Controlling quality With a staff of thirty craftsmen and maintenance workers, Camp controls almost all aspects of the building process. Subcontractors take care of plumbing and electrical installation, but all other work is done in-house. The workshop in the Cotton District handles concrete casting and exotic mill work, as wellas installation of heating and cooling systems. Camp says he can’t find contractors with innovative ideas that can be adapted to fit the tight spaces in the Cotton District housing, so he finds his own solutions. Unlike other new urbanist neighborhood developments, the Cotton District has grown without a master plan. “How can you have a master plan when you are buying one piece at a time and you’re not sure if people will sell to you,” Camp asks. “If you have a master plan, you’re going to pay three times what the property is worth.” Instead Camp has built as opportunity allowed, and the slow pace has enabled him to achieve greater variety in the streetscape as his tastes and interests evolve. The recently constructed “Temple” building is a good example of how Camp has begun to expand the palette of styles. The building is modeled on a classical Greek temple, complete with a colonnade and statues on the roof line. While he’s supportive of the New Urbanism in general, Camp says the architecture in many developments is fake and too uniform, and he deplores that some have become havens for the rich only. Camp has contributed designs for affordable cottages in Silver Oaks Village in Zephyrhills, Florida, and currently sits on the design review board in the TND Aragon in Pensacola, Florida, where he will also design several homes. Even though the Cotton District is the product of one man’s commitment to high-quality design and construction, Camp believes that other small university towns can use his neighborhood as a model. “In most university communities they are building multistory dormitories, but they are not trying to create interesting places off campus,” he says. “It’s a wide open field.” It would, however, take a developer with skills comparable to Camp’s and a willingness to forgo short term profit in the interest of building a neighborhood that can stand the test of time. Camp is convinced that his life’s work will last. “When the dust settles a hundred years from now, what I’ve done in Starkville, Mississippi, will stand out.”