Experts in Land Use Export Southland’s Ideas to Texas

Land-use consultant Robert De Almeida describes Orange County as a “living laboratory of planning.”

The planned communities of Irvine, Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita with their lushly landscaped town houses and single-family homes, their luxuriant greenbelts, their golf courses, equestrian trails, lakes, and recreation centers, are all land-use concepts pioneered by Orange County developers and planners, De Almeida said.

De Almeida’s partner, Michael Azeka, insists that “examples of almost every good and bad idea of planning in the last 20 years” can be found somewhere in Orange County.

But while those trend-setting developments remain, there simply isn’t room in the county for new planned communities of the same scope as Irvine or Mission Viejo.

“We’re bumping up against the foothills,” De Almeida said, “and the game is going to change. We’re running out of land to develop that’s politically feasible and land that’s financially feasible. There’s just a handful of pockets left.”

And so private firms like Azeka De Almeida Planning in Costa Mesa are searching for other areas of the country eager for the large-scale projects of Orange County’s halcyon days. Some firms, like the Planning Center in Newport Beach, which De Almeida co-founded in 1974, have opened branch offices in Arizona and other high-growth regions of the Sun Belt. Azeka and De Almeida have chosen to export the best of Southern California’s planning concepts to Texas.

Export Hybrid Ideas

But what Azeka and De Almeida actually export is a hybrid, a new creation. Texas developers who have simply plunked down a California-style subdivision have “lost their shirt in San Antonio and Austin,” De Almeida said.

While the strategy, marketing and concept of their out-of-state projects are essentially Southern Californian, Azeka said that every plan they create must take into account the community life style. Or, as Azeka said, the plan must “dial in community expectations,” he said, and “not turn up the planning knob too much.”

Both Azeka and De Almeida worked for the Planning Center before opening their own firm in December of 1984--taking the firm’s Texas clients with them. In 1985, their 14-employee firm garnered revenues of $500,000. This year they anticipate $1 million in revenues. The two planners have consciously kept their firm small, they said, to maximize the time they can devote to projects.

“Our clients,” De Almeida said, “are master developers who hire us to solve social and political problems” of their proposed developments. In Texas parlance, that does sound a bit highfalutin, but the service the two planners provide is more than simply drawing up plans, collecting their fee, and walking away.

On its face, branching out into Texas might seem a curious choice. Although, on the whole, land prices are cheaper there. The Texas real estate market was dealt an ugly blow in 1983 when oil prices dropped and was nearly KOd early this year when prices plummeted again. Horror stories abound, chronicling up to 30 years worth of empty office space in Houston. But as De Almeida and Austin-based real estate analyst John Lindley point out, not every city in Texas is suffering like Houston.

The two cities in Texas in which Azeka and De Almeida do most work are Austin and San Antonio. So much of their current business is in those cities that they have opened an Austin office. On the average, De Almeida spends two days a week in San Antonio and three in Costa Mesa. Azeka spends two days a week in Austin.

Makes Comparison

Lindley draws a rough parallel between Austin and Orange County. Austin’s economy, Lindley said, is service-oriented as is Orange County’s. Austin’s largest employers, Almeida said, are the Texas state government, the city government and the University of Texas. The cost of living is higher than in other Texas cities. The median price of a home hovers on the high side of $100,000.

And, in contrast to Houston where there is no zoning and any analysis of potential traffic impact from a project is financed by the developer, the city of Austin is very environmentally conscious--”strained” in its relationship with developers, Lindley said.

“Austin’s like Santa Barbara or La Jolla” in its concern about the ill effects too much growth might create there, Azeka said.

In Austin, Azeka and De Almeida are planning the Metro-Tech development, which is being built by Nash Phillips/Copus, Austin’s largest home builder. The project is a 360-acre mixed-use business development in the environmentally sensitive Walnut Creek area. The plan calls for 3.4 million square feet of retail and commercial development and 1,200 residential units. It is opposed by several community groups.

That’s where the California experience of Azeka and De Almeida pays off, Lindley said. “The planners who come from California,” he said, “are used to strict environmental rules. They have the patience to sit through these negotiations that are necessary for success.”

Willing to Negotiate

The willingness to negotiate, to go beyond what Azeka called simply “creating eyewash and pretty pictures,” is what distinguishes their planning firm from some of their competition, they claim. In California and in Texas, the firm has never had a project not approved.

“Our report card is not only when a project is approved by local government, but when it sells. Because if you design something that’s opposed (by the community), it will sit there,” De Almeida said.

Basically, Azeka and De Almeida operate on the principle that the plan they create for a land parcel should increase that land’s value. Currently, two of the planning firm’s largest ventures are in San Antonio--a very different city, Lindley said, compared with Austin.

San Antonio, 75 miles to the south, is a larger city and “extremely pro-growth,” Lindley said. More than 1.2 million people live in the two-county area around the city. The size of its blue-collar work force has helped San Antonio attract business.

But that’s not to say there isn’t some affluence there.

One of Azeka De Almeida’s San Antonio projects is the Dominion, a 1,400-acre planned resort community that will eventually include 2,800 homes and, De Almeida estimates, cost $50 million in improvements. Those improvements include two golf courses, a clubhouse, utilities, roads, a sewage treatment plant and cost of marketing. As an example of the city’s pro-growth stance, De Almeida said, the project required only two building permits--one for a bridge spanning a flood control arroyo and another for the sewage treatment plant.

“We tapped into a dormant market,” De Almeida said. “There’s a lot of dusty money in San Antonio and no place to move up to from the existing country clubs. We were able to create that.”

Increases Land Value

The plan for the lavish recreational community takes a page out of the playbook of many of Orange County’s developers. The plan increases the land value, De Almeida said, by, first, selling the most expensive lots--the $350,000 to $2-million ‘estates’--and then gradually “layering down” to comparable homes on smaller parcels and, finally, condominiums.

By selling the most expensive lots first, the Dominion achieved a kind of status that makes buyers eager to live there. Additionally, De Almeida said, the cheaper-priced condominiums in the development “met the demands of a market that didn’t expect to be able to own that product.” And, because there are more condominiums to the acre than the detached estates, the condominiums raise the land value per square foot from $2 to $8, De Almeida estimated.

A well-positioned piece of commercial property on a busy Texas arterial, De Almeida said, sells anywhere from $5 a square foot to $8 a square foot. Through their development plan, De Almeida said, “we were able to get commercial prices for residential land, which is unheard of. But if we’d just gone in and made a subdivision, we couldn’t sell it for more than $2.50 a square foot.”

Their grandest project--and the one that best demonstrates their Orange County roots--is Westover Hills near San Antonio.

Located in the hill country overlooking the city, the 4,050-acre project will eventually house the 500-acre Sea World of Texas, two 5,000-employee Motorola factories, a 2,400-employee Compaq manufacturing facility, 9,000 residential housing units, a 90-acre commercial center, a resort hotel complex, and two golf courses.

It will take 25 to 30 years before the project is completely built, De Almeida said, but initially the challenge for him and Azeka was to create a mixed-use plan that would increase the value of the secondary and tertiary property surrounding the Sea World complex. Normally, De Almeida said, Sea World would be a one-day walk-through attraction, which might have boded ill for the surrounding commercial center and hotel complex.

Planning Challenge

The planning challenge was to make people stay for two or three days, thereby increasing the land value of the surrounding property.

By changing the design of the golf course from championship to resort to attract more people, by creating a convention center in the hotel complex, and by designing a road system that links the different elements of the project together and showcases the different amenities, De Almeida said he and Azeka have “put certain forces into motion that will help create a demand” for the other parts of the Westover Hills development.

With a project the size of Westover Hills, a lot of give-and-take is involved between Azeka and De Almeida and the developer. First the transit and access questions need to be resolved, Azeka said, and then comes the crafting of various alternative plans for land use. Those alternatives are refined and combined into one overall plan. Once the overall development plan is created, detail on specific sites is generated, then comes landscape design and finally guidelines for creating the buildings themselves.

And it’s in the creation of those buildings that the two planners must “dial in community expectations,” to use Azeka’s phrase. The Southern tradition is very strong in Texas, De Almeida said, and “you can’t just introduce a bunch of date palms and pink stucco.”

By understanding the community expectations and life styles, Azeka said, the firm then knows roughly the scope of the project they will design--they know how high they should “turn up the planning knob.”

Some Principles Remain

Some California principles remain constant, though. One concept the planners export that remains virtually the same is designing model home complexes. Siting of the homes, landscaping them, making the interiors look as attractive as possible is “so greatly refined in Orange County, it’s an art,” De Almeida said.

But the different attitudes and life styles in other parts of the country--areas not used to the “number of choices” Orange County has, Azeka said--demand planning modifications to accommodate those differences. Buyers want the choices open to Southern Californians, Azeka said, but they want to retain a link to their own regional traditions.

Although Lindley said “there is a desire for California-type design and amenities” in Austin and San Antonio, De Almeida said half of the residential units he and Azeka design in Texas use California’s more ‘open’ floor plan while the other half utilize the more traditional ‘parlor-style’ floor plans Texans are used to. For the most part, building facades are brick--a style avoided in California because of seismic concerns.

In Texas, homes are still built with hardwood floors, paneled libraries, a lot of carved stone and brick which De Almeida said runs counter to Orange County where, he said, people are more infatuated with “location and prestige” than quality of construction.

“It’s not unusual to find the same materials used on a $100,000 home here as on a $250,000 house. That would kill you in Texas,” De Almeida said. “We could use more of that Texas style and tradition of real value, particularly in exterior design.”