Planned Communities – great or cultish?

This lifestyle doesn't appeal to me at all-- but to each his own.

Something can be both great and cultish.

My parents plan to relocate and retire in just such a community. They're pretty excited about it. The idea of living in this kind of environment sounds pretty awful to me, but I can see how it would be appealing to those who are about to retire and, after a lifetime of work, feel like they've earned the privilege of living in a place where all these leisure activities are not only in easy reach but are essentially personally catered to them. Again, not my cup of tea, but I'm sort of happy for my parents. They've worked themselves to the bone their whole lives; to the extent that this kind of lifestyle is "rewarding," I'm glad they're finally rewarding themselves.

Planned communities tend to have pretty strong convenantal agreements. If you're the type who wants to design your own landscaping, pick your own exterior colors, put up a fence, etc., then you should read the community rules before you buy. They run much more like a condo association with neighborhood fees that pay for the communal spaces and they have a Board of Directors who make sure everyone follows the rules.

There are some really nice ones springing up here around the MAX (commuter train) stations. The typical one has about a four block square "downtown" with shops (including necessity stores like pharmacies and dry cleaners and grocery stores and the like) and restaurants. There are apartments for rent above the shops. Surrounding this area will be a block or so of townhouses, backed by open spaces then houses.

I think they're great, almost like small towns. The fact that they are very pedestrian and commuter friendly would be a big selling point for me over the traditional suburb where you can't get anywhere without a car.

Actually, most - if not all - new houses in most parts of Europe are in planned communities ...

The oldest, btw, are the bastides in south-west France: built both by the English as well as by the French.

Planned communities have been around since the late 1940s when Levittown was built. And, there have been simple suburban tracts with "a la carte" houses, and the more elaborate settings which attempt to provide all the amenities. The most cogent comment was this:



I think that would be the best basis for judging a particular neighborhood. One thing i hated about the area when i briefly lived in the Orlando, Florida suburbs was that it was completely pedestrian/commuter hostile. I had a car, but you had to have a car to go get a pack of smokes, or a quart of milk. If you got up and didn't have eggs for breakfast, or milk for your coffee, you ended up driving to a diner because there just wasn't time to do anything else before work. It also seemed almost "inhuman" to drive down a road and see no sidewalks, no one walking on the side of the road or in the neighborhoods, no kids playing along the street--it was spooky.

That is what I was finding when we looked at new construction. It seemed that all were planned communities - at first I didn't like it - the cult feel, but then when I saw some personally that weren't "so planned" - in other words the land parcels were all planned out and they were close together with a few amentities, but not the entire planned town feel - it seemed a bit less cult like.

Depends a lot on what the town's/county's/municipality's/region's plan offices decide(d).

While in the 50's and 60's (as well as between 1880 and 1930-ish) here (=Germany) everything looked more or less the same, now it's changed to an "indivialistic planning": you even can various grounds, plan your own individual house type - but all within some sort of limits.

Yeah, there are a lot of things I love about the general concept of a place that is pedestrian-friendly and community-oriented; it's the covenants that freak me out.

There was an article in the New Yorker about a place in Florida -- Celebration? -- that was scary. Conformity generally gives me the heebie-jeebies, enforced conformity (on the level of complementary external house colors) sends me running in the other direction.

But I think there is something very sad about cars taking people up to their doorways and the lack of interaction with neighbors that comes from walking around. We live in a very pedestrian-friendly community now and I just love that aspect, how you have to budget in extra time to get anywhere because it's very likely that you'll run into someone you know and stop and chat for a while.

Naperville, for all of it's faults, was really great that way. I got to live in a century-old house and walk a few blocks to the grocery store, or the spice store, or the butcher, or the bakery... not to mention the river walk and the beach. We had only one car for our first year there and E.G. took it to work every day, but I was able to get pretty much wherever I needed to on foot, with a baby in tow. That was great.

In Florida, i lived for a while with a friend who was getting radiation therapy for thyroid cancer, and had trouble swallowing, so he couldn't eat much, and that meant he had trouble with is business. He had several small landscaping contracts (mowing, edging, trimming hedges, shrubs, cleaning ornamental ponds--pretty routine stuff), and he was getting tired easily because he could hardly eat enough to provide the energy he needed to keep up. So, instead of hiring casual labor a few days a week, i showed up and worked full time for him for several months, until he was through with his therapy and back to normal.

We lived in Winter Springs, which is a suburb of Winter Park, which is a suburb of Orlando. Where we lived was a gated community--gated, patrolled and completely bizarre. No sidewalks, except those which a house had for its gardens and pools. Every house had a fence around it, which made sense actually, because almost all of them had pools, and pools are "an attractive nuisance." You can be sued if someone drowns in your pool unless it is fenced in. So you never saw the neighbors, and wouldn't have recognized them if you did see them. The privacy was great, but you might as well have been living miles and miles out in the country with no neighbors. You had to drive out to the highway for everything, even a pack of gum. Because my buddy had so much trouble eating, we often went to buffets. Florida abounds with these, at a not unreasonable price, and often of very good quality. He could get enough food in his belly to satisfy him if he could take hours, literally, to eat--but you can't do that at home and still be eating hot food.

But even after the tumor was gone, and he was making a dramatic and strong come-back, we still drove everywhere--there was simply nothing else to do--not a shop in sight, no movie theaters, no clubs, bars, pool halls--it was just a massive, grotesque bedroom.

Every "55+" retirement community is a planned community and people that live in them don't seem terribly dissatisfied. I've seen them run the gammut. Colorado Springs has (had?) several dozen of them and they were livable although the houses tended to be right on top of each other (no front or side yards with big back yards).

At one point in the early 1980s the town of Black Forest, CO (a few miles north of Colorado Springs) planned their entire community with minimal fuss. The roads, water and swer systems were laid out and everything else was left to the buyers. The only limitation at the time was that lots were 20 acres each. You could do pretty much whatever you want on your 20 acre parcel.

You'd be hard pressed to find any community that isn't planned anywhere in the U.S. at this point ('cept maybe remote Alaska). The key is finding the level of planning that you are comfortable with.

I live and work in a planned community.

I dunno. do Bear and I seem like cultists?

Other than the single women hitting on you at the Friday Social, did you feel like you were in a "cultish" community, Thomas?

I didn't even live in a tract house until I was 58, and that was a rental - urban girl here. Now in my mid sixties I live in a tract of duplexes, nobody nohow following no rules that I can tell. (I didn't see the rules until after I bought, oh well). Alternately, I've done a lot of landscape design on tracts, but tracts, city requirements, and cc&r's vary.

I've studied the history of planned community and am attracted to, or at least not repelled by, many of the older ones. One I have personal experience of is the Baldwin Hills village in LA - I think I posted on it or tried to at a2k once. I remember it being a bit hard to post links to photos. Anyway, I really liked that place,
graciously spacious apartments (condos later, I think) set around greens of sycamores and grass... garages set in rows somewhat in back of the apartments back well fenced patios.

Generally for me, when you get into paint colors and fences and whether or not you can have terra cotta pots on your front patio, I get freaked.

There was an old LA tract that my cousins' family bought into in the early fifties, one of the Rattery tracts. Over the years people did all sorts of renovations on what were pretty great houses to start with, and the houses don't look cookie cut any more - in this case, much for the better.

I hate my location for reasons Set mentioned, it's f'k'n hostile to pedestrians (though in some ways I like it). I missed that, as I'd looked at the bus routes, but not the times, before I bought, and not observed the lack of expectation that any human would want to cross Coors Blvd. on foot to get to a store. My bad, as I know better. I had looked in a different part of town, more urban, more pedestrian friendly, but in my window of looking, there was nothing I wanted to buy at my price range. Pfui.

The whole manufactured community thing basically creeps me out, much as I understand the comfort appeal. But given this is happening, I want our squinney in place!

Re the US, Radburn was early, 1929, but some european communities were sparks for that.

http://www.radburn.org/geninfo/radburn-intro.html

a link about Ebenezer Howard..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Howard

I lived in a planned community for a bit. Just outside DC.

It was eerie.

The whole thing was absolutely huuuge. Way bigger than that thingie that osso just posted.

There was a planned city square with a park. There was a planned main street, with shops of all kinds, restaurants, and a Safeway. There were planned ponds and creeks, with picturesque bridges, benches and pagodas. There were planned streets, planned sidewalks, planned lights, planned swimming pools and planned community centres. Access was via a couple of main roads, and huge signs would tell you that you were about to enter Something City (forgot the name... not very imaginative... maybe Park City or something...)

But the really weird thing were the houses... There were apartment complexes and houses. They were all a bit colonial in style. But they all looked as if somebody had taken just a couple of variations for each element, and mixed them together anew for each house. For example, there were only five kinds of doors. Or three kinds of columns for front porches. Four variations for windows. And two for garage doors. All the same colours.

Sure, you'd get lots and lots of different houses, but they all were, uh, not very individual. And I found really weird were the exterior shutters: they weren't real shutters. Just screwed on, decorative elements (the windows really had automated, interior blinds). But all the windows had them! It made me feel like living in some kind of film set - reminded me of the tour at Paramount Studios. Definitely weirded me out. (Walking down the streets, I wondered whether the chairs on the front porches had come with the houses. They, too, looked all the same to me...)

The nice thing was that everything was there. You could use the community centre. You had all the shops there. You could use the swimming pools. You had lots of parking space available. You could just put the trash outside the door (I was living in an apartment complex), and somebody would take it away. Nifty.

But the definitely eerie episode for me was when I was trying to go to the movies with some friends, and went on the internet (the Planners had forgotten to implement a cinema): so, I went on Google maps to get my bearings. Wondering why no streets would show up, I switched to the satellite view of the area.

Nothing showed up. Well, there were some fields. But there was no city. No houses, no city square, no roads, no pools, no community centres.... nothing.

Spooky.

Funny - when I saw the link to the planned community this guy sent me the first thing I thought of was Celebration. It has that same creepy feeling. I actually visited Celebration when I went to Orlando - we had dinner there. It was very nice, but creepy.

I guess not - bear can seem a bit peculiar at times, but I would be worried that he would lead the cult rather than be a member of it.

Good points...

When I think of communities I've seen in Florida..no way in the world would I live in one.

I lived in South Fla for about 10 years, for a couple of them rented a townhouse and had to put up with the "condo commandos" those people who had nothing better to do but measure your grass and make sure you weren't parked too close to the curb. Same thing when I'd visit friends who lived in condos...I'd be sitting by the pool with a friend, he she would go to use the bathroom, and if they were gone more than 10 minutes I'd start to get questioned about being there.

There are some planned communities being built around here. Some as small as a group of apartments, condos with stores, restaurants situated at the ground level, to a large one being built from the former location of the Austin airport (which moved a few years back). Haven't been out there to see it, but the concept sounds great...stuff for kids, community, business.

I personally like the idea of being able to pop downstairs or right across the street to pick up milk, or go for a swim. Or, in a larger community, walk a few blocks to the park. Really the first though.

The older I get, the more I feel I would do well in an urban setting.