My Kind of Town

Every night is like Saturday night at The Villages' Spanish Springs downtown.

There are people everywhere—dancing around the gazebo, eating at outdoor cafés, shopping in quaint boutiques and perching on benches while watching all the activity.

The lively town center scene is one of the main reasons more than 100 people each week buy homes in this huge active-adult mecca—the fastest-growing master-planned development in the country for the past two years.

"There's no question about that," says Gary Lester, spokesperson for The Villages. "The town center is an important part of the small-town lifestyle and atmosphere here."

In fact, the town center concept is so integral to the popularity of the development, which straddles rural Lake, Sumter and Marion counties, that a second one, dubbed Lake Sumter Landings, opened last year. Yet a third town center is planned.

The Villages, however, is far from the only local development attracting buyers by creating nostalgia-drenched downtowns. There's Baldwin Park, east of downtown Orlando; Avalon Park in east Orlando" target="_blank">Orange County; Veranda Park in MetroWest; and Victoria Park in western Volusia County. Several others are slated for large, master-planned communities that have not yet broken ground.

Some town centers are more elaborate than others, and some exist only on paper at this point. But all seek to create places where residents can have dinner on Friday nights, shop on Saturday mornings, stroll on Sunday afternoons and drop off their dry cleaning mid-week.

And while Celebration's picturesque town center is dominated by charming boutiques, the new breed of town center typically offers a more practical tenant mix, including such staples as grocery stores and hardware emporiums.

DEVELOPMENTS WITH A HEART

"The town center is the heart of the community," says Ross Halle, director of town architecture for Avalon Park. "Subdivisions have had no heart for so long, they became kind of like the Tin Man. Town centers have given us the opportunity to bring back the heart to the communities we build."

Like many town centers, Avalon Park's started as an amenity that Be? Kahli, president and chief executive officer of Avalon Associates, expected to subsidize.

Kahli built the buildings and offered attractive incentives for businesses to lease space, knowing that it would be several years before there would be enough residents in Avalon Park to make a town center financially viable. In fact, the entrepreneurial Kahli even went into the restaurant business to get an Avalon Park eatery opened.

The development's town center has since evolved into a vibrant community hub with small shops and restaurants as well as a Publix supermarket, a gas station and a freestanding bank. Businesses wishing to be a part of Avalon Park are now buying tracts and building their own buildings or joining Kahli in joint ventures.

"With town centers, sometimes the developers have to assume the risk up front to get them started, and to show what they intend to do," notes Halle. "But in our case, with the growth we've had on this side of town, it's a real business now."

Indeed it is. The Avalon Park town center currently has about 100,000 square feet of retail space and another 25,000 square feet of office space. At build-out, Halle expects to have 225,000 square feet of retail space and 400,000 square feet of office space.

But every development approaches building their town centers differently. In Celebration, the Walt Disney Company built an elaborate, picture-postcard village and filled it with businesses almost before the first residents moved in.

Disney knew the town center would lose money for years, but its presence was necessary in order to illustrate the Celebration concept to homebuyers. The result: Celebration was perhaps the region's most successful real estate development of the past decade.

Baldwin Park, however, took the opposite approach when planning its town center. Rather than building it themselves, Baldwin Park Development Company sold off its town center tracts to companies specializing in commercial and retail development.

More than 100,000 people already lived within a three-mile radius of the property, which once encompassed Naval Training Center Orlando and was surrounded by established neighborhoods. That impressive number was all Publix had to hear for it to buy into Baldwin Park, while drug stores, a liquor store and, hopefully, a hardware store, will follow. A few restaurants are already open, with more are set to open soon.

"People want to get out of the malls and into the town centers," says Doug Freedman, Baldwin Park's director of development. "People have been craving this."

SIZES AND STYLES VARY

While most town centers carry off an Americana theme, others are trying more eclectic approaches. Veranda Park, now under way in the heart of MetroWest on Orlando's west side, will feature a meticulously detailed town center with a distinctly European ambiance.

The center will include condominiums, shops, restaurants, a hotel, a lakeside amphitheater and an all-digital movie multiplex. There will also be 400,000 square feet of office space on-site, so professionals who work in Veranda Park will also be able to live there.

"This project will still be beautiful in hundreds of years," says Joseph W. Seebach, a principal in Veranda Partners. "There's nothing like it in North America."

And not all town centers are particularly large. Depending upon proximity to existing office, retail and entertainment districts, some developers are opting for more compact town centers that exist more for convenience and ambiance than for necessity.

Victoria Park is waiting for a few more rooftops before building its town center on the south side of Orange Camp Road in the middle of its four neighborhoods, says Phil Berger, vice president of sales.

Although he points out that Victoria Park is located near a grocery store and historic downtown DeLand, Berger still contends that an on-site town center—even a small one—is a potent selling tool. "It's almost a requirement to have a pool, some sort of fitness center and a golf course, if you have the land," he says. "But what completes the community, I think, is the ability to walk or to take the golf cart, or your car, for a short jaunt to pick up lunch at the deli."

Berger expects the first buildings in Victoria Park's town center to come online in 2007. Ultimately, there'll be about 80,000 square feet of offices, shops and restaurants.

A NATIONAL TREND

Although Central Florida has an unusually large number of developments anchored by town centers, the trend is national in scope.

"Certainly the creation of town centers is growing and we think it will continue," says Michael Beyard, a senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute. "Town centers offer this new opportunity for people to get out of the house and to intermingle with other people. They also provide the convenience of having the goods you need on an everyday basis nearby."

Increasing traffic congestion as well as the desire for a sense of community is also driving the town center trend, he notes.

"Suburbs don't have the same kinds of public places that older cities take for granted," Beyard says. "Most suburbs were designed to be very private places. Now there's this nostalgic desire for a sense of community, to create a public realm in places that have not historically had a public realm."

John Norquist, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, sees town centers as a return to the way people lived before the advent of suburbs and shopping malls following World War II. In fact, Norquist notes, people lived for eons in close-knit communities, where housing and commerce were intermingled.

"You had thousands of years of human history [with marketplaces near housing] and then came the mall," Norquist says. "People got bored with that, and they're basically going back to what has been part of life since ancient history—the city marketplace."

Downtown Winter Park and College Park—developed in the 1880s and the 1920s, respectively—are ideal examples of commercial districts that are conveniently located, walkable and welcoming.

But it's taking developers a while to figure out how to design and build town centers as nice as the original ones, according to Norquist. "Developers need to re-learn how to build places like that," he says. "It's like they've had a stroke that caused them to forget how to do it."

Now, big-time retailers have caught on to the town center trend, and many are actively looking for locations in town centers. "Target, Nordstrom's, Kohl's and even Wal-Mart are all looking for terminated vistas on streets in these developments," Norquist says. Wal-Mart, which has been blamed for the demise of downtowns across the country, has offered to build a compact, two-story store in a town center in upscale Long Beach.

Of course Norquist doesn't expect town centers to replace sprawling, enclosed malls—but he does think they offer a pleasing alternative.

"I think people still want the convenience of the malls, the clean sidewalks, the proper management, security, the public amenities," he says. "But they were repelled by the sterility of it, the artificial nature of it.

"People want it all. They want the nice street. They want to feel like they are going some place kind of cool. And they want to feel like they are getting quality at fair prices."