The Celebration Chronicles

by Andrew Ross, Ph. D.

  SPREADING THE GOSPEL

  However they feel about the involvement of a company like Disney, many of the advocates of New Urbanism hope that the success and the visibility of Celebration will tilt the housing industry in a more responsible direction. Herrington believed that the bulk of the industry “was hoping we will fail, because we’ve raised the bar into very uncomfortable territory for developers. Most developers will worry about what ‘values’ are going to cost them,” not to mention the “high concept stuff” that involves—schools, churches, nonprofit foundations, and wellness centers. Unlike Levitt and Rouse before, this project was not associated with a single figure, and so the option of spreading the gospel lay with members of the original development team who broke off to pursue their own careers elsewhere. From an early point, many of them had assumed that the research that went into Celebration would be used within the company on future projects. In the fall of 1996, a decision was made within Disney to take its name, and therefore its brand, out of the development business. The Disney Development Company (DDC), as it was then known, was folded into Walt Disney Imagineering, and TCC was created to manage Celebration alone. Adams admitted that this decision “really took some of the wind out of our sails.”

  Todd Mansfield, senior VP and general manager of DDC, left a few months later. When I reached him in London, he was working as head of European operations for Security Capital, a real estate venture capital group, but not involved in community development, “the riskiest business of all in the property field,” as he put it. Mansfield acknowledged that, shortly before his departure, he had made a proposal for Disney to sell TCC to himself and other members of the development team. The proposal made sense for several reasons, not least as a response to Disney’s squeamishness about bad press. Under the proposed arrangement, Disney would be able to avoid media exposure by having the development team take any public flak for residents’ malcontent. The parent company would retain its economic interest, preserve its profits, and enjoy credit for the project. Lastly, the sale, brokered by third-party capital, would allow the team—ninety strong at that point—to stay together and extend the Celebration R&D to other development projects, providing some portion of royalties to Disney.

  The proposal never got very far. At the time, Disney was smarting from the PR debacle generated by its plans for Disney’s America, a three-thousand-acre history theme park in Virginia’s hunt country. The America project, located six miles from Manassas National Battlefield, site of the battles of Bull Run, had run into enormous resistance from influential landowners, environmentalists, and Civil War historians, and had been shelved. To sell TCC, at that point, might have been interpreted as an open acknowledgment of the project’s liability, perhaps even its failure. Given the perception, subsequently, that the company had sold out anyway, Mansfield evidently felt it was a missed opportunity.

  In the months following Mansfield’s departure, Peter Rummell, Charles Adams, Don Killoren (and, eventually, Chris Corr and Joe Barnes) all moved on, leaving TCC with a leadership vacuum that would injure its relations with residents. Each became engaged in the Celebration spinoff business. Rummell (who later recruited Corr) was headhunted by the St. Joe Corporation, Florida’s largest private landowner, to “start managing their assets more aggressively.” Having sold off its sugar and pulpwood businesses, St. Joe was gearing up to move into large-scale real estate development. In a bittersweet twist, one of Rummell’s first moves as CEO was to buy up Arvida, his pre-Disney employer, to move the development plans ahead. Thirteen years earlier, Arvida had been the first company acquired by Disney, largely as a way of staving off corporate raiders in the bloody fight over control of the company. It was sold three years later, in 1987. A Florida leader in master-planned community development, Arvida’s know-how was absorbed into the realty plans that would culminate in Celebration.

  In May 1997, Rummell announced plans to develop 800,000 acres of St. Joe’s land holdings in North Florida in the form of upscale Celebration-style communities. Among other properties, the company owns 500 acres around Seaside and will be building around the neotraditional enclave in the Panhandle. With huge tracts of land at its disposal, the company is in a position to take on the challenge of regional planning. “We have found that people welcome big thinking,” reported Rummell, after six months on the job. “I’ve had meetings with everyone from the governor on down, and they are all thrilled that we are attacking things at a large scale and dealing with both the macro and micro.… The worst planning comes when everybody owns their own lot and tries to maximize their own piece. So I hope we will be able to solve some of the regional problems.” Rummell, like many others, fears there “will be a lot of bad copies” of Seaside and Celebration, built on the concept of an isolated, affluent pocket. Regional planning, with the capacity to coordinate residence, workplace, traffic, and recreation, is clearly the key to altering the industry’s appetite for sprawl. But for all intents and purposes, only a large corporation or landowner like Disney or St. Joe is in a position to coordinate any of these factors on such a large scale, since public planners long ago lost the power or the will to do so. The result may be the nearest thing to a regional plan, but is it the best plan for the region? Would it have been planned this way in the absence of a large corporate interest? In both cases, the private developer leads and the public planners respond, taking their cue from the market. Invariably, as the Disney example shows, it is the transportation needs of the company, rather than the public, that are served.

  When they left TCC, Adams and Killoren set up shop as Celebration Associates, in the business of community development consulting and management. The Celebration name proved a valuable calling card and attracted interest from developers as far away as Abu Dhabi. Their first large projects included Morgan’s Harbor, a resort property in Bermuda; Liberty, a master-planned community in California’s Riverside County; and Baxter, a huge neotraditional development in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Clients can cherry-pick from a menu of elements and cornerstones similar to those that went into the making of Celebration. In each case, a pattern book is customized to fit with local architectural traditions, and local pricing. In South Carolina, for example, the “simplicity” of Upcountry styles would keep the price points down. Adams and Killoren are applying the lessons learned from Celebration. Plans for downtown retail cores are being kept to a modest or manageable minimum, and builders are being integrated at a much earlier planning stage to keep costs down and to ensure quality.11

  Celebration’s New Urbanist design had not lit any fires underneath Osceola’s developers or planners, but the landscape to the north, in Orlando and Orange County, was another matter. While Disney’s town was playing weekly host to curious planning teams from all across the country, Orlando had forged ahead with several ambitious New Urbanist neighborhood plans. The most high profile of these involves the decommissioned Naval Training Center, three miles east of downtown, the largest New Urbanist infill project ever undertaken. Plans for integrating the base facilities into surrounding urban fabric in the form of a large residential community, with a village center and distinct neighborhoods, involved a substantial degree of public participation. The design standards for a mixed-use, transit and pedestrian-oriented community attracted proposals from the most prominent New Urbanist firms.12 Far from being an isolated pocket, this urban infill project is designed to emulate the civic feel of Orlando Metro’s traditional city neighborhoods, like Winter Park, Thornton Park, and College Park. The Orlando planning department has also moved ahead with the Southeast Plan, a regional plan by Peter Calthorpe, along similar lines near the international airport. The site, on more than 12,000 acres, is fifteen minutes from downtown and may house more than 75,000 residents at buildout in the year 2040. Its size will allow city planners to adapt a sizable traffic and transit network to its pedestrian-friendly core. The scale also provides for a permanently protected ecological system to maintain the integrity of on-site draina
ge and wildlife corridors. Other New Urbanist projects in the Orlando area include the inner-city Parramore Heritage District, to be redeveloped by Dover, Kohl & Partners.

  Beginning in 1985, when the city reinstated the 1926 zoning standards, private developers have been buying back into urban neighborhoods. In 1999, Orlando would become the first Florida city to institute a Traditional Neighborhood Ordinance “as a matter of right.” That new code, designed by DPZ, will make a default setting out of the New Urbanist way while making it more difficult for developers to operate in conventional ways. Rick Bernhardt, Orlando’s director of planning and an ardent New Urbanist, explained how the ordinance entirely changed his perception of his job. “I have moved from the realm of regulation back to the realm of community building.” In the recent past, he acknowledged, something “was only good if it hadn’t been done before. In the last ten years, we’ve understood there’s a lot to learn from the way cities have been built for the last two thousand years.”

  The capacity of central city planners like Bernhardt to coordinate large-scale projects is envied by their counterparts in county and rural areas, where growth is elastic and where developers can jump from one jurisdiction to another until they get the best deal. Nonetheless, Orange County’s planning department had recently approved Horizon West, a massive 40,000-acre development of several villages at the southwest edge of the county. Hundreds of orange growers, ruined by the hard freezes of the late 1980s, had banded together and requested county cooperation with developing the site on their land, near to Disney World. David Heath, Orange County’s planning director, explained to me that the site addressed the public policy need to locate housing near to employment. But would the housing actually be within the income range of Disney workers? “It’s going to be moderate,” he predicted, “but not exactly affordable.” Aside from a scattering of multifamily rentals, nothing would be under $120,000 ($83,000 counts as affordable in Orange County). Horizon West will be a good deal for junior executives, but the bulk of the region’s tourist workers will still have to look elsewhere.

  The planning department in Polk County, to the west and south of Celebration, had also been influenced by New Urbanism in drawing up a Select Area Plan with several town centers grouped in the corridor between the county line and the interstate. But Merle Bishop, the planning director, acknowledged how difficult it was to persuade multiple developers and landowners to go along with a plan that required higher density and a degree of homogeneity that would undercut competition with each other. The biggest headache, he reported, was the prospect of becoming a bedroom community for Disney service workers, as Osceola’s affordable housing crisis spilled over into his county. It would not be easy to reconcile the currently high premiums of New Urbanism with the challenge of affordable housing.

  After talking to these planners in three counties, I had to conclude that the biggest obstacle to sustainable development in the region remains the chronic low-wage economy. People with little access to income cannot generally afford a sustainable environment or lifestyle. This point is often made by environmentalists in developing countries. Given the high cost of land and the equally high profit margins of builders and developers, it is just as true in Central Florida. With much fanfare and no lack of good faith, Disney had built its own ecological showpiece in Celebration. No glossy magazines, however, would be running stories about the flow of foreign minimum wage workers to the gates of the Magic Kingdom, with little prospect of decent housing, let alone the chance to live in state-of-the-art healthy communities. Charles Lee, vice president of Florida’s Audubon Society, once described Disney World “as a green place … where the water is well managed. If you could replicate Disney a thousand times over, you’d basically have the environmental plan for Florida.”13 Locals swamped by the armies of the Mouse disgorged daily from Orlando International Airport had a different story to tell about the carrying cost upon non-Disney land of that green place. From a more responsible environmental perspective than that offered by Lee, it was easy to see that the two hands of the company were working at cross-purposes.

  Neotraditional residential development is not the only domain in which the city of Orlando has come to compete directly with Disney. Like many cities looking to revitalize a languishing downtown, Orlando’s business and political elites had invested in an orderly package of themed entertainment—the Church Street Station retail complex, which hosts the branches of national chain restaurants, bars, stores, and clubs. For a while, it drew some of the teenage tourist clientele in the area, eager for a nightlife alternative to Disney World’s offerings. In the fall of 1997, the opening of Downtown Disney, on the Reedy Creek property, undercut some of these efforts. The massively popular complex includes a twenty-four-screen multiplex, several restaurants and speciality stores, a House of Blues, a Cirque du Soleil, DisneyQuest (a high-tech virtual reality arcade), and the sales magnets of Planet Hollywood and a Virgin Mega Store, in addition to the nightclubs of Pleasure Island. Breakdancers are paid to spin around in the streets to simulate urban spirit, and the neon and video signage is not so much decorative as in-your-face. Downtown Disney is Celebration’s bad sister, a gaudy pleasure zone where the high-octane burn of consumer culture carries an intensity quite at odds with a small-town Main Street milieu. This is a different kind of new urbanism—more attractive, certainly to Celebration teens, whom I saw there almost as frequently as in Celebration itself—and it has been flourishing for some years now in cities like Baltimore, Atlanta, New Orleans, Cleveland, New York, and Denver. In these and other centers, media Goliaths like Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, Universal, and Sony are putting their footprints all over traditional downtown real estate.

  To make room for its own entertainment retail zone, Orlando had acceded to a corporate makeover of the entire downtown area. In common with the New Urbanist residential developments, city managers of this zone put a high priority on maintaining good civic order and minimizing spontaneity. But the downtown development had also spawned a rich spectrum of offbeat nightlife that flourished on the margins of the compact, corporate quadrant. Alternative Orlando soon featured one of the most vibrant club cultures in the country. The Seattle of the rave scene, youth here dreamed of being hotshot DJs rather than indie rockers, and they had the good fortune to witness their idols live. For a couple of giddy years, Orlando clubs were a favored destination for the world’s top DJs. In the summer of 1997, the city cracked down on the nightclubs, imposing a 3 A.M. curfew and truncating the mercurial rise of the Orlando scene. Like Times Square, the new corporate presence in urban entertainment retail would give birth to a semi-controlled mall that zoned out the maverick verve of nightlife in the name of civic order, moral security, and tidy profit. Alternative Orlando was in mourning by the time I got to sample its clubs, but they were still as lively as you could wish for in a town where the attack dogs of the American Family Association were always on the prowl.

  STITCH AND GROUT

  Unless you earn your living outside of town, there is no real need ever to leave Celebration. Since I did not fall into that category, I could have spent my entire year inside the White Vinyl Fence had I not found some social alternatives for myself in Orlando. Not too many residents have any appetite for life on route 192, and, for the rest, the self-contained design of the town does not equate with social isolation. But there is no escaping that Celebration, far from an island, is a nodal point on many networks. Aside from its steady stream of visitors and the omnipresence of media and professional scrutiny, the global reach of its developer’s activities supplies the flavor of far and wide connections. Disney has partially de-annexed the company name, but the town remains a showy jewel in the crown of the company’s assets, and its medium-term destiny is locked into Disney’s doings and fortunes. Celebration may be the one place where you cannot buy Mickey Mouse T-shirts, but that does not stop anyone here from wearing them or from benefiting in some small way from their sales elsewhere. There is no visible remin
der of the continuum between the stitching in the seams of the T-shirt and the packing of grout between the bricks of Celebration, but the links are there and we lose our sense of perspective by ignoring them.