In a down time, Diane Dorney reduces publishing; reflects

Kentlands-based entrepreneur says the time has come for smaller houses and less elaborate developments. Nearly everyone connected with real estate development has been hurt by the economic calamities of the past two years, publishers included. It’s now been 15 months since Diane Dorney’s New Towns last arrived in new urbanists’ mailboxes. Another publication of Dorney’s, The Town Paper, which developers have relied on to explain their projects to the public, appeared only infrequently during 2009. That represents an enormous pullback from a few years ago, when as many as three or four Town Papers appeared in a single month. New Urban News spoke with Dorney recently about her activities and about the direction of New Urbanism in today’s shrunken economy. What quickly became clear is that Dorney, a bright, high-energy presence in new urbanist endeavors for more than a decade, is far from defeated by recent events. She is still busy working, but now less on publishing and more on Corner Markers — a property ownership and management firm in which Andres Duany is a partner. She spends a good deal of her time managing and renting the partnership’s 16 properties. “Some of them we built out together,” Dorney notes. “Others are just houses in DPZ [Duany Plater-Zyberk] communities.” The newest addition to the portfolio is a fourplex that Dorney, Duany, Mike Watkins, and Dan Slone completed last fall in East Beach, Norfolk, Virginia. How she got started It was concern over her community — Kentlands, the DPZ-planned traditional neighborhood development in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where she and her husband Mark have lived since 1993 — that propelled Dorney into civic activism and publishing. “I was a stay-at-home mom for many years,” Dorney recalls. “Then I got involved when Joe Alfandre [Kentlands’ initial developer] went under. The plans of the bank that took over Kentlands were not good.” That led her to found her first paper, The Kentlands Town Crier, in the mid-1990s. A year or so later, “Andres asked if I’d thought of doing this for other neighborhoods.” That impressed her as an interesting idea. Thus she started The Town Paper (later the name was changed to New Towns), using it to deliver information about community-building and urbanism to a diverse audience, including universities, members of the Congress for New Urbanism, and the public. “A lot of the information about New Urbanism was in a very expensive book,” she says. “I wanted to reach [a wider audience] and make it available to them for free.” In 10 years, the press run for New Towns totaled 362,000 copies. “We tried to keep New Towns going as long as we could,” she says. But the periodical, edited by Jason Miller in its later years, was not a profit-making enterprise, Dorney says. “It was always something I subsidized from my other work.” Her principal profit source was The Town Paper, of which roughly 1.3 million copies have been printed since 2000. Developers have loved these usually eight-page periodicals — which appear mostly as pre-charrette and post-charrette editions. The Town Paper benefits from “the charm and authenticity of the newspaper format,” says sales and marketing consultant Monica Quigley. “The Town Papers enable us to fully describe and control the ‘message’ of our projects versus having local reporters produce articles that usually get details wrong or ‘spin’ to enhance controversy,” says Keith McCoy of Urban Community Partners, which has commissioned ten Town Papers since 2001. “By incorporating articles from various stakeholders in the community, local politicians, articles about the local area and history, we can ‘tell the story’ in a way that is not overtly selling the project.” The most recent issue was produced this February for the Laurel traditional neighborhood development, which Urban Community Partners is managing in Yuma, Arizona. Not many other Town Papers are in the works at the moment. “When development stops, my paper stops,” says Dorney. When activity picks up, publication will revive. Dorney continues to publish newspapers for New Town at St. Charles in Missouri, and she owns community papers that appear one to three times a month in or near Kentlands. Among other activities, she has published 10 New Urban Posts on topics ranging from modernism to street networks, has brought out seven Council Reports, and has produced 10 special publications — predominantly pattern books and SmartCode guides. New Urbanism’s future “I think I’ve seen just about everything that could possibly go wrong happen in Kentlands,” she says, including the handover of the development to a bank. “It’s given me a huge education.” After observing shops and services in Kentlands and the adjacent Lakelands development, she has concluded that a community’s retail area is better off not being controlled by a single owner or management company. It’s wiser, she believes, to have eight salons competing intensely than to have one salon selected by a management company. “It’s messier, but over time, you’ll end up with better businesses.” She thinks recent economic troubles could be beneficial if they cause people to rethink how large their houses should be and if they motivate developers to scale back community facilities. “Do you really have to have a 7,000-square-foot clubhouse?” she asks. “As I get older, it starts to look very excessive to me,” Dorney says. “We need to concentrate on small units. ... We need to go back to something more modest.” Her ideal: a community in which “nothing can be larger than 2,400 square feet.” If someone really needs more space, she suggests, “do an outbuilding of 1,200 square feet.”