Wildwood sticks to its vision

After the city has spurned several conventional project proposals, developers are now breaking ground on the first mixed-use development in the future town center. The seeds were sown back in 1996, when the newly incorporated City of Wildwood, Missouri, adopted a new urbanist master plan that envisioned three new neighborhoods and restricted all high-density and commercial development to a 1,200-acre town center area. It has taken five years of patience and persistence on the city’s part to get a project going that can begin to set a new standard for development. The $35 million project, to be called The Village at Wildwood, was shaped in almost two years of negotiations between city planners and developers Koman Properties and MLP Investments. Wildwood initially turned down a single-use power center proposal by Koman, but instead of moving on, the company’s owner Jim Koman decided to find a way to make the project fit into the city’s plan. The key was a collaboration with MLP, a residential developer, where Vice President of Development Chris Ho had a strong interest in new urbanist planning. The company’s bread and butter is garden style apartments, but Ho says MLP has recognized the downside of sprawl and increasingly turned to building on infill sites in the St. Louis area. The development team hired Suttle Mindlin of St. Louis to do the planning and architecture for the approximately 15-acre project, scheduled to be completed by the fall of 2002. The plan includes 171 residential units in rowhouses and apartments. The Village at Wildwood also features some vertical integration of office and retail uses and approximately 60,000 square feet of commercial space. The commercial area will be anchored by a 15,000 sq.ft. Walgreens drugstore. Three buildings front the two major streets bordering the project, but the internal street in the commercial area is lined with surface parking. According to Wildwood’s Director of Planning and Parks Joe Vujnich, the city has given Koman the option to fill in the parking area with more buildings in the future. During negotiations, the city struck a compromise with a parking ratio of 4 spaces per 1,000 square feet, instead of the preferred 3 spaces per 1,000. The hope is that Koman will find that the leasable area is more valuable than the parking spaces. Learning curve Vujnich notes that the city works hard to stay close to the ideas proposed by Duany-Plater Zyberk & Company (DPZ) of Miami in their 1996 master plan. The city deliberately sought out a new urbanist firm with a nationwide reputation, because it would make it easier to convince developers that this kind of departure from the status quo was feasible. “People will argue with us, but they usually won’t argue against Duany,” he says. But it is still a long road from theory and principle to a project that makes economic sense to a developer. Vujnich acknowledges that he learned from Koman about aspects of marketing that land-use planners usually don’t look at. “We authorize square footage and create restrictions on how that is developed, but it may not create a good retail environment,” he says. “Koman and MLP took it down to the details, explaining how they had to negotiate with tenants and how to make it a win-win situation for everybody.” Koman also had an impact on the city’s plans for storm water management. The principle behind the DPZ plan was that a town center would create an area where every square foot of land has a high potential for use, making it essential to reduce water detention areas on the site as much as possible. Vujnich says the concept of spreading detention over a wider area seemed to make sense, but Koman’s engineering analysis revealed that such a system would require the cooperation of many landowners and review authorities and would become prohibitively expensive. The city agreed to detaining storm water runoff on the site. The process of forging compromises is a two-way street, however. City planners taught Koman that traditional town planning practices do more than create a pretty streetscapes — that when applied correctly, they utilize land more efficiently and create real neighborhoods. Koman acknowledges that the mix of residential and commercial uses has made the project “very exiting.” The developer has already been approached by three other towns, which want to encourage similar development. “We’ve made them [the city] smarter, and they have made us smarter,” Koman says. “They had to push their dream for us to believe in it, and we had to fill in a lot of holes. Now we are on the same page.” The Village at Wildwood prompted the developer of an adjacent supermarket to return to the drawing board for a more pedestrian-oriented design. And the negotiations with Koman and MLP have shown developers that the city is not in the business of impeding development. “The city basically said to Koman, ‘we’re on your side.’ And that was probably the hardest lesson for him to learn,” Vujnich says.