The importance of maintaining flexibility

With their variety of housing types, TNDs potentiallyare able to respond to changes in demographics and market demand better than conventional subdivisions. With that advantage in mind, savvy developers like to keep their plans as flexible as possible. Vermillion in Huntersville, North Carolina, is a case in point. In the early stages of planning, developer Nate Bowman did not expect that public transportation would enter into the deliberations. With a light rail link to Charlotte now on the horizon, Vermillion can support higher density than anticipated. To stay flexible, Bowman has worked with the town to rezone the property and clarify the original plan. Lot lines have been erased and replaced by color coding that classifies sections as center, general, and edge neighborhoods. Each type of neighborhood has an upper density limit, but otherwise Bowman is free to make changes without having to rezone the property on a regular basis. “I can change products,” he says. “I don’t want to be locked into lot lines on townhomes and then decide I want to use a completely different look.” In Orenco Station, the zoning of the property resulted from negotiations between developer PacTrust and several local, regional, and state agencies. PacTrust committed to building 1834 dwelling units on 210 acres, all within a half-mile radius of the light rail station. “The result was a radial density formula that had no organizing features other than the station itself,” says Mike Mehaffy, PacTrust’s project manager at Orenco Station. “We made the point that we needed flexibility to be able to create a strong neighborhood design with a sense of place, and that blindly following a density formula was a very bad idea.” Several developers stress the importance of being able to tweak lot sizes to adjust to demand. With the freedom to use fractions of lots and combine them, Robert Kramer in Haile Village Center has gained enough experience to predict what kinds of lots will be in greatest demand. In Avalon Park (Orlando, Florida), developer Beat Kahli says he is continually making small changes in the plans to accommodate fluctuations in lot sizes. “Five years ago, buyers wanted square footage,” Kahli says, “but now we find that more people want smaller homes with more options.” The first village in Avalon Park has an even distribution of lots 45, 50, and 70 feet wide, but with demand picking up for smaller homes, a full two thirds of the lots in the second village will be 45 feet wide, Kahli says.