Celebration is center of attention

Disney’s new town is three years old; many debate its significance to society, the real estate industry, and the New Urbanism. Three years ago, the first residents moved into the Town of Celebration in Osceola County, Florida. Now 2,200 people live there. When it is complete, Celebration will be home to about 20,000 people. Celebration is the biggest, most comprehensive, and best known, attempt at traditional neighborhood development (TND). The town’s downtown, school, health center, part of its office complex, and most of four residential phases have been built. About 665 single and attached homes have been sold to date, and 266 apartments are occupied. Celebration’s downtown has 67,000 sq. ft. of retail space with more than 20 merchants, including a movie theater, restaurants, retail shops, and a small grocery store. It has nearly 40 professional offices and a 115-room hotel under construction. A real estate development and social experiment of Disney Corporation, Celebration has come under more critical media and academic scrutiny than any other new community in the US. Articles have appeared in just about every major publication. Some writers criticize Celebration as 1) fake (it’s Disney, after all), and 2) heavy-handed and controlling. Other writers come away favorably impressed, despite themselves. “I like the place,” confessed Boston Globe architectural critic Robert Campbell. “You’re not supposed to, really. Not if you want to be hip.” Two books due out in September will keep Celebration in the spotlight, at least in the near future. Both are by New York area writers who came to Celebration to live, study, and record the experience. These books, to be reviewed in the September/October issue of New Urban News, offer the most in-depth analyses of life in a neotraditional community yet written. Many new urbanists are ambivalent about this upscale Disney project on the urban fringe. On the other hand, Celebration embraces many of the principles of the New Urbanism. And there is no denying the project’s cultural, and probably historical, significance. streetscapes What makes Celebration special? Disney has not done any one particular thing better than any other developer of a new urbanist project, but it has done many things well. Celebration is a high-production project that has still maintained attractive, traditional streetscapes in both its downtown and residential areas. Its town center and central boulevard include some of the best looking multifamily units ever built in a TND. The home exteriors are appealing, although complaints have been made about shoddy construction of interiors. The 100-acre central neighborhood is a fairly complete package — with a downtown, a K-12 school, community center, neighborhood parks, civic buildings, and diverse housing types surrounded by a golf course and lake. This central neighborhood is 7.6 gross units/acre — fairly dense considering all of the uses that are packed in there. Celebration does have the look and feel of a bustling little town (see aerial photo). Downtown Celebration’s downtown is probably the most complete neotraditional town center built to date. The downtown consists mostly of three and four story buildings with retail on the first floor and apartments and offices above. The mixed-use, multistory nature of the buildings downtown are notable, because few neotraditional town centers have built a substantial number of these kinds of buildings. For example, retail buildings in Kentlands, another well-known TND, primarily are one-story, single-use structures. In many other TNDs, the town centers are planned or only partly built. In building Celebration’s downtown, Disney made some decisions that would bankrupt many other developers. The downtown is located at least a mile from an arterial road carrying a significant volume of traffic (new urbanist retail guru Robert Gibbs says downtowns need 20,000 to 25,000 cars driving by daily to support shops). Large initial outlays were made for civic and other buildings for which Disney will receive no rent, including an elaborate Preview Center designed by Charles Moore, a Town Hall by Philip Johnson, and a community and recreation center. Other big name, postmodernist architects were hired to design the movie theater (Cesar Pelli), the bank (Robert Venturi), and the post office (Michael Graves). The mixed-use “background” buildings were designed by Robert A.M. Stern and Jaqueline Robertson. The use of name architects came with a significant price. “We lost two or three years in terms of cost and time,” says Todd Mansfield, former executive of The Celebration Company, as quoted by Andrew Ross, author of the soon-to-be-published The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town. But probably the biggest gamble was building and opening all of this retail space when two percent of the homes were complete. Only a developer with Disney’s reputation could bring in tenants for such an enterprise, and only one with Disney’s public relations resources could hope to bring in shoppers. Even so, merchants struggled for the first year to year and a half. Two stores, New Generations, a pricey children’s clothing store, and M Fashions, a clothing store targeted at a narrow market (young, slender women), went out of business. The others survived, and most now are doing well, reportedly. One of the most successful businesses is Cafe D’Antonio, an Italian restaurant owned by Greg Gentile. While Disney cut separate deals with every merchant, many were enticed with breaks at the start. Gentile, who pays a base rent and percentage of the gross, spent months negotiating a deal whereby Disney would not charge the percentage until the establishment turned a profit. “The business was there right from the start, I didn’t really get much of a break,” he says. Now the restaurant is bringing in sales of close to $600 per square foot annually, according to Gentile. Goodings, a 5,000 square foot grocery, is the one store in town that everyone frequents, according to Ross. Run by a regional supermarket chain, Goodings carries most basic foodstuffs, household items and liquor. While not exorbitant, Goodings is certainly more expensive than “big box” stores. From a public amenity standpoint, Goodings is perhaps Celebration’s key merchant. Restaurants like Barney’s, Max’s Cafe, and Max’s Grille have become popular hangouts for the locals. The spaces between buildings — the streets, passageways, and courtyards — are the downtown’s best physical assets. Pedestrian paths leading from the streets to the interior parking lots are particularly interesting. “The pedestrian environment in Celebration’s downtown goes beyond good street architecture,” points out urban design critic Todd Bressi, executive editor of Places magazine. Bressi also is impressed with the flexibility of the downtown, and its potential to change over the years. For example, the Seminole Building — a block to the east of Main Street — is designed to accommodate housing, offices, or retail, depending on the demands of the market. “It’s extremely rare to see buildings designed like that anywhere anymore,” he says. Small sites on the interior of downtown blocks were reserved for future shops, which will create more interesting nooks and crannies in the downtown, and allow it to evolve. Celebration’s apartments above stores add a lively, 24-hour feel to the town center. They are tastefully designed, and they don’t have the balcony-for-every-unit look that screams “ apartments.” The balconies in Celebration have a traditional look, and they aren’t repeated on every floor or every building. Apartments along the central avenue, Water Street, are varied architecturally and have a similar massing to many urban townhomes. The apartments add density to the downtown and create a transition between the downtown and residential areas. Residential neighborhoods Home styles in residential neighborhoods are governed by a pattern book created by Urban Design Associates in Pittsburgh. The pattern book is described by former Celebration town architect Joe Barnes as a “kit of many parts” governing the appropriate details of eaves, porches, windows, and doors. Massing and proportions of homes, and architectural styles are spelled out. French, Mediterranean, Coastal, Colonial, Classical, and Victorian styles are allowed. Barnes adds that the pattern book has been an “unequivocal success” from a marketing and communication standpoint. The pattern book goes into much greater detail than codes in many TNDs, such as Seaside. The greater level of specificity of design control is necessary in a project where 200 to 300 homes are build per year, Barnes says. Given the wide range of builders, from custom to production, operating in Celebration, the diversity of housing types and pleasant streetscapes are impressive. Homes in Celebration are commanding a premium — selling for $100 or more a square foot. Homes in Hunter’s Creek, a master planned community a few miles to the west, are selling for closer to $75 per square foot. The least expensive homes to sell in Celebration were $129,000 townhomes, available only in the first phase. Luxury townhomes now start at about $200,000. Garden homes on very small lots now start at about $180,000. Cottage, Village, and Estate homes range from $200,000 to $1.2 million. Homes representing a wide range of prices are located in very close proximity. Residential streets in Celebration range from a comfortable 21 feet wide (parking on one side) to 28 feet wide (parking on both sides). Porches are required on most homes, creating a transition between public and private space. Many of the lots are 130 feet deep, deeper than those in many TNDs. Homes in Celebration with detached garages therefore have fairly generous backyards, at least by TND standards. White garden fences add to the privacy in back. By suburban standards, Celebra- tion’s lots are small, ranging from 39 ft. by 75 ft. (2,925 sq. ft.) for garden homes to 90 ft. by 130 ft. (11,700 sq. ft.) for estate homes. Away from the central neighborhood, Celebration will consist of a series of satellite villages that are hybrids of new urbanist and conventional design. North Village, the first to be largely completed, offers the same housing types and similar streetscapes as the central neighborhood — but no businesses. The village is built around a long park with recreational facilities and a pool. On the outskirts of the North Village are estate homes that lose all urban form, being placed on long cul-de-sacs that wind into the golf course. Some residents worry that as villages are built out, Celebration will lose some of its cohesiveness. This “village” development pattern is partly dictated by Celebration’s site. Large areas of wetlands and and Interstate 4, which bisects the property, all work against an entirely interconnected design. Celebration Health, the clinic, and Celebration Place, the office development, are pods with nice architecture — disconnected from the rest of the town. Celebration is only a “town” in its central neighborhood — at least in terms of the physical design. Social life Although complaints about the school — where progressive education programs proved to be controversial — and/or the quality of home construction have been common, most residents are fiercely devoted to the town. Generally they are convinced that the new urbanist layout facilitates social interaction and improves quality of life. “We know all of our neighbors on the entire street, not just a few houses on either side,” says Douglas Frantz, who coauthored, with his wife Catherine Collins, the forthcoming book Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town. “There is a real sense of community, a real sense of place. That comes from the design and layout of the town.” Echoing a common statement about Celebration, Frantz adds: “You have to work hard not to know people.” Frantz calls the new urbanist design “the most successful aspect of the town.” Frantz and Collins moved from Westport, Connecticut, where they needed two cars, even though Frantz commuted to Manhattan by train. Upon moving to Celebration, they sold one car and now clock fewer than 1,000 miles a month on the other. Frantz estimates that their automobile usage is less than half of what it was. As a parent of two teenage children, he believes that the layout of the town gives both parents and kids “enormous freedom.” Children walk, bicycle, and rollerblade all over town in relative safety, and parents are released from their role as chauffeurs. “One of the biggest surprises to us was the positive impact of the planning,” Frantz adds. “You actually can do social engineering through good planning.” Celebration has been criticized for looking artificial, or contrived. Some of that criticism is probably baggage associated with the developer, Disney. But it is also due to the fact that Celebration is new, squeaky clean, and master planned. Although Celebration is designed to function like a historic town, it hasn’t had 100 or more years to mature and evolve. Frantz complains that such criticisms are “easy and superficial. Scratch below the surface and Celebration is just as real as anyplace else. It has real problems, and real strengths.” Market success Without a doubt, Celebration is more upscale than most developments in its market — despite the fact that it includes a lot of rental units, starting at about $650 per month. The reason is that Celebration properties are commanding a significant premium. During the town’s first two years — 1997 and 1998 — Celebration overwhelmed its competition in total sales. During the first half of 1998, Celebration averaged $377,300 per home, about $150,000 more than any other top-selling development in Central Florida, reports the Orlando Sentinel. The average price is boosted by Celebration’s high-priced estate homes. Resales are hot also. In 1998, 11 existing homes sold in Celebration: on average the homes were 16 months old, and they had appreciated 15 percent — almost 1 percent a month. Owen Beitsch, an Orlando real estate researcher, believes that Celebration’s premiums are driven, in part, by the project’s high front-end infrastructure costs. He notes that homes prices in Celebration are way beyond the normal market range in Orlando. “Despite its success,” he says, “people don’t yet know what to make of Celebration. I love the place — I think it is wonderfully designed. Yet as a person knowledgeable in the development industry, I don’t think it has a lot of application in this town.” Other TNDs in the Orlando area, e.g. Avalon Park and the Orlando Naval Training Center, are in early stages of construction and/or planning. Beitsch and other developers will be closely watching the performance of these projects, aimed at different markets, to evaluate the financial viability of TND. Frantz argues that Celebration’s price premium proves that the neotraditional planning adds real value. “Given what I have seen, the New Urbanism should have legs, and lenders should be aware of the increased value that comes from this new urbanist design.”