How Folks in the ‘90s Get That Neighborly Feel

When communities were small, people gathered around town centers identifiable by shops, a drugstore, church and town hall. But how do you develop a sense of community that has been lost in expansive Orange County?

“You develop public gathering places,” says Hank Baker of the Irvine Apartment Communities, which owns 48 apartment communities in Irvine, Tustin Ranch and Newport Beach.

A clubhouse in a housing community can serve as a focal point, “something you can create formal activities around,” says Loyd White, a behavior-management consultant in Laguna Niguel. “The more compressed our culture has become and the more emotionally distant we become from each other, [the more] people long for community.”

The downsizing of newly built homes created a need for a larger space to host friends and family.

“From a pragmatic standpoint,” says White, who has worked with community associations in Orange County, “the clubhouse became a place to invite large groups of people. As we lose space, we create communities within communities.”

Today, getting satisfaction from your life and feeling connected to others are status symbols, says Toni Alexander, owner of Intercommunications in Newport Beach, whose company markets large-scale communities.

“People need an opportunity to laugh. Neighborliness is essential to well-being. We’ve been hearing over and over that people want a sense of community. The best way for that to happen is for there to be ‘people places,’ centers where people can congregate.”

How a clubhouse is decorated varies from property to property and is largely determined by the needs of the people who live there.

The clubhouse in Newport Ridge in Newport Beach, whose residents tend to be people who moved out of a large house into a 1,200-square-foot apartment, has been designed to serve as an extension of a living room, replete with overstuffed furniture. This allows residents to entertain as they did when they had their larger home.

Park West, in Irvine, serves a different market. Family needs are taken into consideration, and the clubhouse--with cleanable surfaces and durable furniture--is used more for kids’ functions.

Complexes geared toward seniors offer clubhouses with libraries, ceramic shops and a billiards room, says Don Jacobs, president of JBZ Dorius Architectural and Planning in Irvine.

With the increase in home-based businesses, the needs of the home office worker are now being considered in planning clubhouses. Irvine Apartment Communities has begun to include business centers in its properties, complete with fax machines, computers and copy machines.

“Amenities are dependent upon the price point,” says Baker, of IAC. “As you try to hit lower price points of rent, the amenities necessarily have to get less fancy. But if you can afford to pay more, you can get those bells and whistles.”

Many of the new master-planned communities in Irvine, Aliso Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita will have one large center rather than many smaller community buildings, Jacobs says. “With one larger one, residents will get lots more.”

It takes more than just having a clubhouse plunked down in the middle of a community to make it work, says marketing consultant Alexander. Many clubhouses have at least one staffer who programs activities.

“Often it’s thought that having a large building is what’s important,” she says. “But the clubhouse is only going to be as good as the personnel who staff it. Clubhouses fail when programs are put together that worked somewhere else but weren’t created to suit that particular community.”

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To get to know their neighbors, IAC sends out a monthly newspaper that profiles residents and lists activities, such as a wine-tasting club, bicycle club and, coming in the fall, a theater club. It also organized a membership program with cards accepted by area merchants offering discounts to residents.

Residents can rent their clubhouse--usually for a small fee and a refundable security deposit--and create a community event that draws people out of their homes and into a place where they can get to know one another.

“When you have happy residents, negative issues don’t escalate into full-scale wars because people understand neighborliness,” Alexander says. “Issues can be brought up in a casual setting instead of residents meeting with lines drawn down the middle. People get to know each other as human beings.

“Too often we live behind gates, gates into the community, gates surrounding our house. We’ve gated ourselves to death. The opportunity for these community centers to break down the barriers and dictate what community is all about is tremendous. It adds value to the homes because people don’t want to move out of these neighborhoods--they’re so nice.”