A Community With Real Connections
The people in Orange County’s newest subdivision will click a computer mouse to order pizza for dinner before heading to an old-fashioned ice-cream social at the town green.
They can invite all the neighborhood kids to a birthday party via e-mail--because every kid here has e-mail--and then stand on the front porch on their tree-lined street to welcome the children, who have all walked to the party instead of being driven.
This, at least, is the world according to the planners of Ladera Ranch, the biggest development to open in Orange County in the last decade. The eventual 8,100-home community opens its first phase this week.
The development is designed for people who yearn for the charm of the past but are inexorably tied to the future, who crave Main Street but can’t get through the day without eBay.
To start with, Ladera Ranch will be wired. High-speed cable modem is only the start. Every resident will be given an e-mail address and access to a network that acts like a Ladera-only Internet. Residents will be able to check their children’s school lunch menu or bus schedule, reserve golf tee times, alert others to soccer practice changes or order items from neighborhood businesses. They can arrange for their dry-cleaning to be picked up, schedule their lawn to be mowed or learn about their church’s next group event--all via computer.
While people in many communities can equip their houses with cable modem and shop nationally on the Web, Ladera brings high technology home by making it a built-in, and wiring in the local shoe shop and house of worship.
‘We Want to Know Our Neighbors’
At the same time, nostalgia reigns supreme in the physical details. It’s all part of developer Rancho Mission Viejo LLC’s promise to create that real sense of community everyone’s been complaining about missing, the kind of place where people porch-sit and neighbors borrow one another’s tools.
Garages are tucked behind Craftsman-reminiscent houses, pedestrian paths weaving everywhere to encourage walking. The designers plan for trees on the grassy medians to someday spread out canopies of leaves above and charmingly buckle the sidewalks underfoot (while, in contrast, many older cities are pulling out their root-cracked sidewalks for repair). The covenants, codes and restrictions won’t even ban basketball hoops above the garage.
You can have it all, the Ladera Ranch vision promises. The best of the past, the best of the future, and all of it simultaneously. Thousands are buying into that vision--about 9,000 potential buyers have signaled interest in the first 960 homes, available for sale starting Saturday, at prices from $200,000 to more than $500,000.
Among them are Jay and Robin Turner.
“We want to know our neighbors. What a concept,” said Robin Turner, 36, a part-time insurance broker, who along with her husband, a financial consultant, hope to be among Ladera’s first residents. “It sounds so basic when you say it, but it’s so hard to do.”
The Turners thought they had found that ideal community, the kind of place where people stroll to the store and know all their neighbors, three years ago when they moved into Irvine’s Northwood area. But the community never jelled for them--people still spent all day outside the neighborhood and the rest of the time driving to whatever family activities they had planned. Besides, the Turners might want old-time neighbors, but they also want cutting-edge technology for their children. So they are planning to sell their nearly new house to buy into Ladera Ranch, south of Rancho Santa Margarita near Mission Viejo. Although Ladera represents a first for this region, its packaging of folksiness and built-in technology actually lifts a page from Walt Disney Co.’s master-planned Florida community called Celebration.
Certainly, people driving off to work won’t be as big an issue in Ladera--the developer’s market research shows that a hefty 40% of potential buyers--no doubt drawn by the high-tech computer access--work from home.
Should the Turners be among those who land a house, on moving day they and their two boys, ages 6 and 9, will receive e-mail addresses along with a visit from Ladera’s own Welcome Wagon--courtesy of the developer--with goody baskets and information on local clubs.
“When is the last time you had someone come down your street and personally welcome you to the area or introduce you to your neighbors?” said Diane Gaynor, a spokeswoman for Rancho Mission Viejo LLC.
Many suburban developments have community centers or clubs set up by social directors. But Ladera has gone to new heights to create, instantly, the sense of small-town neighborliness that historically evolves slowly.
One way to encourage friendliness is by discouraging use of cars. In the first village, for example, the developer devised dozens of walking trails and greenbelts that will curl around 17 neighborhoods, linking them and leading residents to a central clubhouse. Streets will have traffic circles, bringing speeds down the old-fashioned way, without the use of speed bumps.
Planners also hope the 19 “pocket parks,” each about the size of one residential lot, will promote chance encounters among neighbors. At least half the houses will have front porches, along the theory that porch-sitting promotes casual conversation.
But will people actually sit on those front porches? Can a social mixer programmed by the developer-hired social director bring out the deep-seated folksiness that people remember from their childhoods?
Urban designers and developers have their doubts.
Some say today’s new home buyers long for a neighborhood like the one they grew up in--or they are Generation Xers who spent most of their lives in master-planned communities and don’t really know how older neighborhoods functioned.
“Homeowners think they want it all these days,” said Ray Watson, vice chairman of the Irvine Co. “They don’t care if they actually use the front porch or not. They want it because it’s a symbol.”
The development’s sheer size--4,000 acres divided into five “villages,” each with roughly 1,000 to 2,000 homes--will make fostering sociability a daunting task.
Porches and old-town lampposts like those that will line the streets of Ladera are “marketing concepts” to make people feel they’re in a more neighborly setting, Watson said.
“Times are different; people’s lives are different,” he said. “They want this comfy-cozy feeling in their neighborhood, but they also can’t live without garage door openers and 85-inch TV sets.”
Also unclear is how a plot-sized “pocket” patch of green will attract neighbors--especially if they’re all busily messaging one another on their universal e-mail. And having sidewalks, urban landscapers say, hardly is a guarantee that people will forsake the speed and convenience of cars.
Urban designer Peter Calthorpe said many builders latching on to the latest trend of “re-creating nostalgia” are simply dressing up the status-quo, car-dependent suburbs. He doubts whether families will choose the 10-minute walk over the two-minute drive when they want to go to the community pool.
Ladera’s designers respond that their magnum opus comprises countless other innovations that will make the community work.
For starters, they planned two business districts, one with an old-fashioned main street, complete with parking behind the stores instead of the strip malls more commonly found in Orange County.
In one district, called Township, houses will encircle a town green, where a band shell will offer evening picnic-style concerts and the community Christmas tree will be ceremoniously lighted each year.
Ladera’s developers also will build four schools to ease the strain that thousands of new families will put on the already-crowded Capistrano Unified School District. A new high school and elementary school will open in the fall of 2001, with a second elementary school and middle school dual campus to follow.
Homes Designed to Encourage Interaction
When designing the homes, planners shifted living areas--kitchens, family rooms and breakfast nooks--from the rear to the front, hoping residents will spill outside more often instead of pulling into their garages and retreating to the back of the house.
They also diversified the architecture of each home, promising that no two models will look exactly the same on any given block. And they added grassy strips between sidewalk and street.
“When you look down a street in Ladera Ranch, we don’t want you to see one single garage,” planner Steve Kellenberg said. “We want you to see trees. And families.”
The traditional CC&Rs; of new developments have been simplified too. Melinda Masson, CEO of Merit Property Management, said they will “leave out the Thou Shalt Nots” of master-planned communities and let neighbors decide for themselves what rules and restrictions they want to impose.
“We want to give them some flexibility for a change,” she said. “It’s an unusual approach because it involves some trust, and some risk, yes. But it also encourages people to actually talk to one another and figure these things out for themselves.”
With more potential buyers than there are homes, builders will be forced to set up priority lists for pre-qualified families or hold lotteries to avoid camp-outs. Their market research shows Ladera’s buyers are mostly couples, ages 31 to 40, with combined annual incomes of more than $80,000. Most have children in elementary school and are looking for four- or five-bedroom homes. And they want it fully wired for Internet access and e-mailing the neighbors.
The risk, of course, is that all those high-tech-oriented families will use their wiring to create a virtual community, replacing the face-to-face meetings that Ladera’s designers have strived so hard to foster.
Richard Gollis, principal of the Concord Group real estate advisory firm in Newport Beach, wonders how Ladera’s network will factor in to the overall goal of old-fashioned, personal interaction. More important to the community’s outcome will be good design, good parks and schools, he said.
“Will it add to the community fabric? Will it truly be a factor in building community?” Gollis said. “The intranet will be a small element in the overall picture of what makes the community successful.”
Ladera’s Kellenberg said the network is about having a choice in how one wants to socialize--digitally, in person, both or not at all.
“Yes, I can e-mail the guy next door and say he hasn’t brought my hammer back,” he said. “But does that mean I won’t talk to him when I see him out getting his mail? I don’t think so.”
Ladera’s community network will allow residents to find out they share interests with someone living only a block or two away, said Brent Herrington, director of the Arizona-based company that will manage Ladera’s community network.
“We could live three blocks apart for 15 years and never realize we share an interest in pre-World War II stamp collecting,” he said.
That, and the very real craving for a “sense of neighborhood” expressed by the Turners and other families, will be key to Ladera’s future, planners said. The bet is that residents themselves will make the community work, if only because they want that neighborliness so badly.
“We’re making a town here, one with the best of the old and new,” Ladera planner Dan Kelly said. “Can you have both worlds? We think so. We’ll see.”
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Cutting-edge folksiness
The first phase of the county’s newest development, Ladera Ranch, opens July 31. Each of its 17 neighborhoods was designed to have a single entrance, traffic circles and narrow, curving roads to promote a “neighborhood” feeling. When completed, the 4,000-acre development will have 8,100 homes, retail and business areas, four schools and a regional park. A look at types and prices of homes in each neighborhood:
Source: Ladera Ranch
Graphics reporting by JANICE JONES DODDS / Los Angeles Times
