The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  There is some truth on both sides. With the average price of a production home in Phase One running at about $220,000—almost twice the median for a single family home in the Orlando region—there is a manifest concentration of equity wealth in the community. If you included estate homes, the first nine months of 1997 showed an average house sale of $330,000, and in the first half of 1998 this figure rose to $377,300, almost $150,000 more than the average for any other top-selling development in Central Florida.9 While it was not kosher to flaunt your fortune, Celebration had a good slice of wealthy, and professionally successful, residents.10 On the other hand, there were many families in town who were living beyond their means, who certainly could not afford the private school fees customary in upscale developments in Florida, and who had to budget hard for family meals and outings. In the frenzy to buy into the Phase One lottery, too little attention was paid to the fine print. Some who had moved from different kinds of housing were dismayed to learn they would be hit for hefty assessments and other maintenance fees in addition to their mortgages.11 Closing costs were high, and many out-of-state pioneers misjudged the difference between Florida property taxes based on the value of their land, in the first year, and those based on their house value that kicked in a year later.12 Some claimed they were unaware they would be paying additional premiums for desirable lots (up to $50,000 for production homes and up to $200,000 for estates). In retrospect, they felt that the hard financial information provided by Celebration salespeople was played down in the rush of sales hype. Such discrepancies are commonplace in the world of real estate, but they came as a shock to residents sold on the credo of “In Disney We Trust.”

  The thin myth of financial egalitarianism aside, there was talk aplenty about the “millionaires on Golfpark Drive” (the road that boasts the most expensive estate houses in the central village), but even they were commonly described as “regular people.” I was often informed that some millionaires had chosen to live among the downtown renters, but their modest lifestyles meant that they escaped detection by me. The rumor of their existence was important, however, for it helped erase the ingrained bias against downtown—the habitation of the nonenfranchised and potentially transient renters, with no need to respect the cardinal rule of maintaining property value. Knowing my own location, homeowners frequently commented on how nice it would be to live in a downtown apartment, although those who had done so (while waiting for their house to be built) were usually not among their number. For all the good faith about ignoring income differences, every so often, class assumptions about renters were confirmed. One evening, Linda Frayn, a homeowner who works part-time as a server at Chef Mickey’s in the Contemporary Resort (and who earns more in three days than she could in a week locally in her profession as a teacher), waited on two customers who were proud to declare that they had just moved onto Golfpark Drive in Celebration. The couple asked her where she lived. “I’m from Celebration, too.” “Really?” they replied, momentarily off guard, but quickly recovering, “Do you live in an apartment?”

  To be sure, the financial pinch was felt most among renters. Twenty-four percent of my fellow renters had household incomes of less than $30,000 (21 percent had incomes above $100,000). They included tenants like Miriam Blake, a single mother with three children, who told me she could barely afford to shop in the Goodings grocery store, the one merchant that everyone in town frequented. The apartments hosted several tenants, like Blake, who had come to realize they could not afford a house, but had decided to stay for the school and for the friendliness of the community. Other pioneers, like John Crawford, a retiree prominently featured in the sales center’s promotional video, had been faced with a similar dilemma, sharpened by what he saw as excessive annual rent increases, and had opted reluctantly to move into an adult community in Lake County to the north. Like many of the renters, both Blake and Crawford had found part-time jobs in the theme parks.

  Celebration has its working class, young and elderly. In local parlance they are referred to as “people on a budget.” So, too, the high cost of making ends meet was hitting middle-income dwellers. The school’s volunteer pool, overflowing in its first year of operation, suffered noticeably as many homemakers sought employment to meet mortgage payments and hiked property tax assessments.

  For many strapped homeowners, the starkest pill to swallow was a much smaller house and lot than they could get elsewhere for the same price. However hard to stomach at first, most could see that the sacrifice of lot size was connected to the “sense of community” they had bought into. The volume of their public life, gauged in social interaction with neighbors and passersby on the street, was supposed to be directly and inversely related to their lot size. This is a basic assumption of New Urbanist planning, extended to the town as a whole. Could it also help explain the underdecorated state of the interiors? One resident who thought so was Ramond Chiaramonte, a savvy town planner with the Hillsborough County Commission in Tampa. Ray and his family had moved to town for a trial run, and they had become New Urbanist converts within a matter of months. He was one of the few residents who responded vigorously, in the press, to presumptuous attacks on Celebration, giving hell to journalists and architects jaundiced against the town.13 In response to my question, he speculated that the rich public life of Celebration may well translate into a certain indifference to the domestic environment, as residents spend less and less time in the home. “People are not working less,” he added, “but they are spending more time together, primarily because you don’t lose time driving everywhere.”

  All the same, Chiaramonte, among many others, drives substantial distances to work outside of Celebration, and a serious shopping trip entails driving well outside the orbit of what the town’s own stores can offer. In a place designed for walkability, it is also surprising how often residents still use their cars to drive downtown and elsewhere. Virtually every private party I attended was easy to locate by the small throng of cars parked outside the house. Geographically marooned in a tourist sector, Celebration is probably not the best gauge of the New Urbanist promise of reduced car use, and, as I would later discover, the Disney regional plan, of which Celebration is a cornerstone, was actually based around upgrading auto access to the theme parks. As for the superfluous traffic within the town’s property line, that seemed to me to have more to do with the complex and persistent habits of daily auto dependence, a psychology that street planning alone would not alter easily. Adopting the profile of a resolute pedestrian, I regularly turned down offers of rides from one part of town to another. I found it was easy to provoke auto guilt, and harder to detect auto-free pride, among my fellow residents. But the design of Celebration did offer a choice between walking and driving, and choice, dethroning necessity, is the first step toward peacable coexistence with the automobile.14 Largely because of its location, I found few families for whom the town’s walkability had allowed them to give up one of their cars (according to Andres Duany, the average car in suburbia costs its owner $6,400 a year, which translates into $60,000 of housing purchase).15

  What do residents feel they get for the 35 percent premium paid on their houses or apartments? For a very few, the Disney name is sufficient, even though this is a high price to pay for a town where Disney is nowhere to be seen. Celebration is the only place for miles around where you cannot buy a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. For others, the promise of high resale value justifies their outlay. Property appreciated about 15 percent annually in the first few years, and as much as 30 percent in some cases. In addition, the public school is a payoff for parents, representing a huge savings on private school bills. Many such parents tend to treat the educational offerings accordingly—as an investment on which they expect to see a quarterly return in the form of improving test scores. A substantial minority see the premium as the price to pay for the town’s common amenities, and the chance to enjoy the fellowship of the people who have been drawn to the town. It is a generous subsidy for the public affluenc
e of Celebration’s streetscapes, parks, trails and promenades, fountains, squares, lakeside access, and downtown ambience, accessible not just to residents but to all who choose to motor into town.

  This public realm is real enough, despite the lingering effect of a stage set. But what about the infrastructure behind the brightly painted verandas, expansive porches, gleaming picket fences, and gingerbread eaves? There lies one of the town’s most calamitous stories. Unlike the controversy surrounding the school, the jerry-rigging of Celebration never made it into any press headlines.

  BUTCHER BUILDERS

  Once I started doing my rounds of house visits, I discovered there were few buyers of production houses who did not have atrocity stories to tell about the shoddiness of the construction work on their homes. Some were almost apoplectic when the subject was broached, and found it difficult to recount calmly everything that had gone wrong: porches and roofs that had to be torn down and rebuilt, tilted beams and uneven rafters, plumbing leaks, fissures, and holes, drainage nightmares, doors that won’t close, cracks in the foundations, collapsing floors and driveways, interior walls and fireplaces where they should not be, chronic delamination, loose braces, and improper nailing, vapor barriers installed on the wrong side of walls, chimneys out of plumb, and so on. Complaints about builders are legion in any new development, but it was difficult to imagine that so many things could have gone wrong on so many occasions. The way that some of the aggrieved talked, it sounded like one big lawsuit waiting to happen.

  Over two hundred production builders had applied for the prestigious Celebration contract, and after extensive reviewing Disney had chosen two: Chicago’s number one home builder, Town and Country, which earned the lowest points from Celebration residents; and David Weekley, from Houston, which performed better but did not escape unscathed. Ironically, David Pace, director of residential real estate development for the Celebration Company (TCC), noted early on that “our biggest risk at Celebration wasn’t financial,” it was selecting builders who wouldn’t tarnish Disney’s name.16 With so little competition among builders (six more were chosen to offer estate homes) and with seemingly minimal oversight from TCC, the price of construction appeared to soar as the wage floor sank. It was easy to suspect price gouging on Disney land. Indeed, when the estimated construction cost for the school came in at $134 per square foot, as compared to an average of $80 elsewhere in the county, school board members were more than curious to know why subcontractors felt they could charge such inflated prices to work in Disney’s town.

  The big builders both came with national prize-winning reputations, but all construction, like politics, is local. Accustomed to a union labor force in the Midwest, Town and Country made it known that they were having difficulty locating skilled workers in the boom construction economy of Orlando, where unemployment in the building industry is minimal, and where Weekley, already building homes in the region, had cornered the labor market in the vicinity of Celebration. Several residents familiar with the industry suggested that Town and Country had been unwilling to pay the bonuses necessary to attract craftsmen from well-known area contractors, nor did they offer to help defray their commuting expenses. Others felt that, as newcomers to the area, the builder simply got “slamdunked by subcontractors.” Understaffed and overworked, county building inspectors had a tough time keeping up with the construction boom. As a result, many of those who began to build Celebration were undocumented Mexican agricultural workers, unskilled in construction and underpaid for the semi-skilled work for which they were hastily recruited. Workers proficient in planting crops were learning how to do stucco jobs overnight. Jorge Comesanas, formerly in the building trade, who was one of the first residents to move into town, warned me early in the fall: “If the INS came in here and rounded up the illegals, Celebration wouldn’t exist.” Sure enough, in February, U.S. Border Patrol agents raided one of the town’s construction sites and arrested sixteen undocumented workers. A whistle blower claimed that as many as ninety of the site’s one hundred workers were undocumented. The employer, Gables Residential, builder of the site’s luxury multifamily apartments, blamed the Orlando labor shortage. The workers were deported south of the border. In common with INS practice—too many cases, not enough manpower to file charges—the company escaped being cited by the agents.17

  Not a few of Celebration’s homebuyers were so relieved to move in after waits, in some cases, of almost two years from the promised completion date, that they overlooked, or decided to forget, many of the flaws in their homes. Others gave up long before the closing date and allowed the builders to sell their houses at an inflated price. One Cottage homeowner on Jasmine Street confessed that he lost sleep every so often mulling over potential structural defects, and imagining that his house might simply fall apart some day, or be felled by a Florida storm. The quality of construction was a running joke around town. Several of my fellow apartment dwellers decided to stay put after watching the carnage on some of the construction sites. When I asked when they would be buying a house, the answer was always something like “Right after you do,” or “When a good builder comes to town.” Given TCC’s one year anti-speculator rule (requiring sellers to relinquish any capital gains within that time to the nonprofit Celebration Foundation), many buyers said they felt trapped, and there was a general expectation of residential flight once the probationary period was over. A good few residents I knew seized their first chance to move, after the year was up, but no mass exodus occurred, as had been widely feared.

  Unable to believe that such mishaps could occur on Disney’s watch, it took a while for residents to react publicly. One exception was Town and Country homeowner, and ex–building contractor, Ron Dickson, who was active in the community from an early point. In the summer of 1997, he began to circulate an extensive “Checklist for Inspecting a House,” designed to help residents look for construction flaws on their own. A straight-talking Carolinian, with a sideline as a merry prankster, Dickson was an old hand in this area of community service. While working as a facility manager for Unysis in Charlotte, he had devoted his after-hours office time to writing (on the company’s “$6 million personal word processor”) two book-length documents, Buy a Home Without Losing Your Assets and The Management of Homebuilding, for the benefit of employees and area residents likely to be fleeced by rapscallion builders and realtors. In these manuals, Dickson offers his services as a Sherlock Holmes interpreting the clues of “crimes of construction” for the “potential fools who rush in where agents fear to tread.” Both books are a gold mine of tips for the unsuspecting. His other publications include The Joy of Checks—on how to balance your bankbook—and The Great American Moon Pie Handbook—dedicated to the virtues of “the noble snack” of the marshmallow sandwich, for which he was a ceaseless advocate around town as self-styled president of the elusive Moon Pie Cultural Club.

  Dickson was a fix-it kind of person, and his literary ventures had an equally practical flavor. He expected no less of me, and often lectured me about how my book should set things straight in this town and others like it. A master of deadpan, his “checklist” of flaws bore a faintly whimsical tone. In a slight twist on Celebration’s family-oriented ethos, he invites homebuyers to go through his list with the help of the whole household: “Make it a fun thing for the family. Let kids spray water on the windows and doors. Use a round brass nozzle, not the pistol grip style, to get a long stream of water. Look for the ‘Flying Turkey’ test and the ‘Old Faithful Geyser’ test.” What follows is an exhaustive inventory of common defects he had found in neighbors’ houses in the areas of plumbing, HVAC, appliances, carpentry, electrical, irrigation, and exterior construction: “If the stove is free standing (sits on the floor), open the oven door all the way and push down hard on it to see if the stove will tip over. If the stove tips, it could send a large turkey flying across the room. An ‘anti-tipping’ device is supposed to be installed behind the stove to stabilize it.” “Flush all toilets and d
rain all tubs and showers as simultaneously as possible. Station an observer at a toilet on the first floor (powder room). See if water backs up into the bowl of this toilet or leaks at the floor under the toilet. Be prepared to cut off all water quickly if sewer backs up.… You do not want your toilet to resemble Old Faithful.”

  By the fall of 1997, Town and Country’s (by now nicknamed “Town and Homeless”) record of construction, completion, and warranty repair was so hapless that Dickson (“If the ground slopes down towards the house, walk away”) teamed up with a neighbor, Donald Jones, a retired Bible studies teacher and evangelist pastor (“I am under orders from my Commander-in-Chief to promote the life of Jesus wherever I go”) to organize homeowners into a pressure group, with legal backing if necessary. Several residents had already contacted personal injury lawyers on their own, and there was talk about class action lawsuits. Dickson collected and typed up thirty pages of common complaints from a questionnaire survey, and established a pattern of sizable discrepancies between what homebuyers felt they had been promised by the developer and what had been delivered by the builders. The leading edge of their grievance was that Disney and/or TCC had “misrepresented” the housing quality in their sales process, and had failed to adequately supervise the course of building. Most residents, after all, had acted on their trust in the Disney name, and not that of the builder, in deciding to buy. Dickson made several suggestions for improving the situation: more company supervision of builders’ performance; adoption of a set of standard building practices; provision of detailed plans and specifications to buyers before contracts are signed; a specified completion date; and a “mediation board” to “evaluate complaints from home buyers” and “resolve disputes before they reached the levels of formal arbitration and law suits.” He also assembled a media kit, with extensive photo documentation of the construction disasters, and threatened to go to the press. At Town Hall, Dickson reported that he was told “to quit behaving like Moses coming down from the mountain with stone tablets and telling Disney what to do.”