Orlando picks plan for Naval Center redevelopment

After probably the most extensive public process ever to initiate a new urbanist development, the City of Orlando selected Orlando Partners to redevelop the 1,100-acre Orlando Naval Training Center (ONTC). Orlando Partners, led by Mesirow Stein Real Estate Inc., Carter & Associates and Atlantic Gulf Communities, submitted a master plan by Skidmore Owings & Merril (SOM) with assistance from Cooper Carry and Miller-Sellen & Associates. This team beat out plans designed by some of the biggest names in the New Urbanism, including Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) and Nelessen Associates; Cooper-Robertson & Partners and UDA Architects; and Calthorpe Associates. The selection came down to a very close choice between Orlando Partners and Oakhurst Park Partners — the proposal designed by DPZ and Nelessen. Oakhurst offered what many would consider a superior land plan. Orlando Partners won with a good land plan and the quickest proposal for demolishing military structures and infrastructure, which means that the new neighborhoods will get out of the ground quicker. Also, members of Orlando Partners previously had won contracts to redevelop two military bases, both in the Chicago area. Never before have so many large-scale, mainstream developers and real estate firms vied for the right to build a new urbanist project. The result may be the largest example yet of what truly can be called new urbanist infill — the plan is connected on all four sides to the city’s existing urban fabric. The winning plan The Orlando Partners plan includes 3,158 housing units, with 788 single homes and the rest multifamily (see images below). The plan also envisions 1.3 million square feet of free-standing office buildings; a town center with 350,000 square feet of retail, 200,000 square feet of professional office space and apartments; parks and civic buildings. Most of the town center will be built in the first phase. It includes a quarter-mile long main street (see rendering on page one), four mixed-use urban blocks and frontage on two lakes. It will be designed by Cooper Carry, the firm that planned Mizner Park in Boca Raton — one of the better examples of a new urbanist commercial district yet built. The rest of the plan is divided into neighborhoods with a mixture of single and multifamily residential on a modified grid block and street layout. The neighborhoods, organized around the five-minute walk principle, center on small parks with civic buildings. Most of the neighborhoods will be within a 10-minute walk of the town center. Orlando Partners will spend the next 16 months tearing down nearly all of the 251 buildings currently standing on the site. The group also will pay the city $5.8 million for the tract — most of which will go to the Navy, which is selling the base to the city. The master plans that did not win are shown on page 13. All of the plans included extensive detailed drawings and figures not included here. The City of Orlando has been moving in the direction of adopting new urbanist principles for more than a decade (even before the term was coined), and this culminated in the ONTC planning process. Richard Bernhardt, the head of Orlando’s planning department, convinced city officials in 1985 to revert to a 1926 zoning code in historic sections of the city. Modern zoning, with suburban standards and setbacks, was not working in the older parts of town, and was resulting in an inordinate amount of variance requests. Bernhardt figured that reverting to the original code was the simplest solution — a brilliant strategy that new urbanists would endorse. In more recent years, Bernhardt has steadily introduced new urbanist designers and concepts into the city’s planning framework. In 1994, Dover, Kohl & Partners was brought in to create a new urbanist redevelopment plan for a 900-acre, blighted, historic section of the city called the Parramore Heritage District. In 1995, The city hired Peter Calthorpe to put together a regional plan for 18,000 acres in Southeast Orlando opening up to development. Orlando also has been lucky in that some of its suburban planning has been designed by new urbanists. DPZ designed the new towns of Avalon Park (recently under construction) and Southlake (partly built) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1996, Disney opened Celebration, a new town with neotraditional design, about 20 miles southwest of Orlando. But the ONTC may be the city’s biggest planning achievement in coming years. The current plan is the result of four years of work, beginning with a ONTC Base Reuse Plan in 1994, which looked at various options for the site, and then a business plan was created in 1995. In 1996, the city set the design course by advertising for a consultant to create a plan based on the principles of the New Urbanism. As a result, Nelessen Associates was hired to create a vision plan in 1997. A Visual Preference Survey was conducted by the firm to get the residents’ input on the design. “With the vision plan and design guidelines we were able to say to developers, ‘this is what we want, here’s the bar that you have to clear,’ ” explains Bernhardt. The city then challenged developers to improve on the vision plan. “We did not just ask developers for a good plan,” he explains. “We were not dumb enough to think that our vision plan was the best that we could do.” The result was multiple ambitious development proposals, all striving to improve upon an already good vision. After Orlando Partners was selected, the city hired Stephanie Bothwell, a landscape architecture professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, to represent the city in helping SOM to refine the plan and create design guidelines. These guidelines “will be a key to making sure the elements of the New Urbanism are carried through” in the built project, Bernhardt says. It will take five or 10 years before observers can pass judgement on the results.