Oliveira tells me that Ryan has been having success selling houses in a small subdivision called Country Walk, which is just behind New Daleville. “One of our models there is the Savoy, which is basically a Sheldon with a different exterior. It costs thirty thousand dollars more, but it sits on a much bigger lot,” she says. On the way home, I drive over to Country Walk. The property originally belonged to the irate landowner who complained at the township supervisors’ meeting about the proposed zoning change but whose development plan was subsequently approved. The subdivision consists of nineteen lots, arranged around a loop road. As at New Daleville, there are sidewalks, and half the site has been kept as a nature preserve with walking trails.* The similarity ends there, however, for the lots are large, between one-half and a full acre. There are currently a dozen houses in various stages of construction. Their architectural style is what builders call “contemporary,” with fieldstone accent walls, oversize arched windows, and many overlapping gables. With room to spread out, most of the houses are larger than those at New Daleville, set well back from the road, with long driveways, big yards, and plenty of privacy. Several have three-car garages. Altogether, an unremarkable development, but that may be precisely its attraction. I remember what Joe Duckworth told my students: “People want what everyone else has.” That’s what they get at Country Walk. The houses are selling briskly; according to Oliveira, only a handful remain unsold.
*Basements are a standard feature of production houses in the Northeast and Midwest, less common in California and the South.
*The Londonderry planning commission has insisted that the walking trails of the two developments be connected, a small but telling example of planning coordination.
27
Competition
Why model homes are provided with plastic bundt cakes and memory points.
The Ryan sales office displays a plan of New Daleville covered with colored dots showing which lots have been sold, which are being held for potential buyers, and which are available. By late May there are four more red “sold” dots — three new homes as well as the Carroll model — and three green “holds.” Sales reps sometimes add fake dots to encourage buyers, but Kristi Oliveira assures me that the new sales are real. Does this mean things are turning around? “I’m not sure,” she says cautiously. “We now have more product to show, which is good. On the other hand, traffic is still light. We’re not seeing many qualified buyers.”
Dave Della Porta is worried about the slow sales. He has already given the builders a $5,000 concession on the price of the first lots, in exchange for a higher price later. Anticipating that NVR may demand to renegotiate the sales contract further, he commissions Brad Clason, a real estate consultant, to analyze the housing market in southern Chester County. Clason compares New Daleville’s prices, features, and house sizes with those of fourteen other new subdivisions currently on the market. In the competing projects, lots vary from a third to one acre, and houses are three thousand square feet or larger. Builders in southern Chester County are selling large houses on large lots — no surprise there. Prices are higher than in New Daleville, the average being about $385,000, compared with Ryan’s $329,000; however, the per-square-foot selling price is actually less. In other words, the competition is offering buyers more house for their money — on larger lots and in less remote locations.
“You’re introducing a brand-new small-lot concept into a rural housing market accustomed to one-acre lots,” Clason reports to Della Porta. “With their smaller lot sizes, the New Daleville products should be positioned more competitively relative to the traditional single-family market in southern Chester County.” Clason doesn’t think that buyers here are ready to pay more to live on small lots. He recommends that Ryan drop its base prices by $15,000 to $20,000, and NV by $30,000. His analysis also reveals that, with the sole exception of an active-adult retirement community, the fourteen competing subdivisions are all selling fewer than two houses a month. No wonder Ryan and NV have been struggling — the real estate market in southern Chester County is currently stalled. It is unclear why. The national economy is strong, and although interest rates are going up, they are still reasonable. It may be that the three-year-old Iraq war has sapped people’s confidence, or that all the talk of bursting housing bubbles has made buyers skittish.
Clason believes there may be another reason for the slow sales at New Daleville: the neotraditional concept is not well-represented. He does not mince words. “The site does not look good, the entrance is a mess, and the lack of a mass of completed homes in one section of the community prevents prospects from getting any sense of the curb appeal and lifestyle that a TND is all about.” Normally, Arcadia would have taken care of these details, but the yearlong saga of the water supply, and the flurry of everyday crises caused by the subsequent delays, has diverted everyone’s attention.
At the end of May, Rick King, NVR’s land manager, and Mike Linthicum of Ryan ask Della Porta to reduce the price of the lots. “In some of our earlier meetings I suggested that we might lower the price now in return for a higher price at the back end,” says Della Porta. “But when we got the results of Brad’s market analysis, I realized that was not going to happen. The market has definitely softened. We’re going to reduce the price of the next ten lots, five each to Ryan and NV, by a straight fifteen thousand dollars per lot.” In return, the builders have agreed to Della Porta’s demand that the ten discounted lots all be on the boulevard. “Hopefully, by the fall we’ll have enough houses in one area to create the buyer experience that is so critical to the TND concept,” he says. “Sales will pick up, and we’ll go back to our original prices.” The builders have also agreed to Arcadia’s request to emphasize the neotraditional lifestyle in their marketing. “It’s a give-and-take,” Jason Duckworth tells me. “This makes sense in terms of our relationship with NVR, since we want to be able to attract them to our other projects. And we definitely want New Daleville to be a success.”
Joe Duckworth, who didn’t take part in the negotiations but approved the new arrangement, takes the long view. “We’ve been caught in an economic cycle. It happens. It’s obvious to me now that the housing market peaked last July, which was just when the builders opened their sales office. They set their house prices aggressively, assuming that the increases of the past year would continue, but instead of going up, prices went down, which put them way out of line. In addition, their costs have been going up in terms of building materials and interest rates, so their net yield is lower. They’re getting squeezed.”
On the boulevard, the selling price of the Sheldon will be $20,000 less, which means that New Daleville now starts in “the mid-$270s,” rather than “the upper $340s,” the price nine months ago. The price of the Melville is reduced by $10,000, and the Fitzgerald by more than $40,000. Oliveira is pleased, not only about the reductions but also about the prospect of having a group of houses on the boulevard. “If we can just show people how it’s going to be, it’ll make such a big difference,” she says. What about the buyers who have bought houses already, I ask her, remembering Duckworth’s admonition about not lowering prices once a project is under way. Won’t they be upset? “It’s not something I’m going to tell them, but they may see our ads. We haven’t sold any lots on the boulevard, so it’s not a direct issue, although they could say that they would have bought one of these lots if they had known. We’re definitely not going to give them a discount, but I don’t want them to feel badly. It’s going to be a difficult conversation.” In fact, only one owner notices the price change and complains. He is satisfied after learning that the reductions will be limited to the lots on the boulevard, and that the prices of the unsold edge lots, like his own, are now slightly higher. For Ryan, increasing the premium on the popular edge lots not only mollifies the previous buyers but also slightly offsets the lower prices on the boulevard.
A few weeks later, Oliveira gets her furnished model. The Michener will be Ryan’s largest house
in New Daleville, more than 2,500 square feet. Fitted out with all the options, it sells for more than $400,000. A model home is a compromise between an idealized dream house and something realistic enough that the prospective buyers can imagine themselves actually living in it. In the Michener, the rooms are furnished and decorated with small touches to make them appear occupied: area rugs, floor lamps, framed pictures on the living room credenza. The illusion is reinforced by a dining room table set for dinner, complete with candles and a floral centerpiece. The feeling of a stage set continues in the butler’s pantry, where a granite serving counter holds a coffee set and an iced bundt cake. In the kitchen, a cookbook is propped open to a recipe for onion-zucchini bread next to a mixing bowl filled with batter and a cutting board with — two onions. Like the bundt cake, the batter and the onions are convincing plastic imitations, as realistic as the sushi samples displayed in some Japanese restaurants.
The imaginary owners of the Michener seem to sit around a lot: the living room, the family room, and the morning room are all furnished with sofas and easy chairs. The furniture is traditional — no black leather and stainless steel here — without being overtly old-fashioned, the sort of thing one sees in catalogs from Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware. The bedrooms continue the comfortable theme. The walls of one are painted a cheerful apple green with stenciled flowers — it could belong to an older daughter; the second has a tray with a coffee cup and a pecan tart on the bed and appears to be a guest room; the third is Oliveira’s sales office. The hall, with a varnished wooden floor, chair rails, and crown moldings, overlooks the foyer below. Since New Daleville is still waiting for its water connection, the fixtures in the hall bathroom, as in all the bathrooms in the house, are inoperable; a colored ribbon is discreetly tied across the toilet seat.
The master bedroom is entered through double doors. A king-size bed is piled high with pillows, shams, and throws in various shades of brown to complement the hand-painted striped walls. (What do people do with decorative pillows at night? Pile them on the floor?) The room is huge — the largest in the house — with space for a sofa and coffee table at the foot of the bed, facing a flat-screen television mounted on the wall. The owner hasn’t been watching a daytime soap, though; a pair of reading glasses and a half-open book lie on the bedspread.
The book is Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, an erotic thriller. The unlikely title is an anomaly — the Pittsburgh firm that decorates NVR’s models buys used books in bulk. Which is not to say that the Michener’s décor isn’t designed with a particular customer in mind. “We thought that the buyer would be somewhere in between a traditional and a contemporary,” according to Ryan’s Carmela Bond, citing common marketing categories. “Trendy at a moderate price.” That explains the comfortable, middle-of-the-road furniture and the colorful but unostentatious accessories.
The trendy part of the Michener is in the basement, which is furnished as a game room, with a trio of framed Indiana Jones movie posters and a large sectional couch facing a television cabinet. Beside the sitting area is a baize-covered pool table with racked-up balls. Like the long, built-in, granite-topped bar, it is what model-home decorators call a “memory point,” a dramatic feature that is intended to catch visitors’ attention and differentiate this from other model homes they may see while house hunting. Beyond the bar, at the far end of the room, is the so-called sample area, which includes a mock-up of a kitchen cabinet showing various wood finishes, a display of different brick, siding, and shutter samples, and an entire wall devoted to bathroom tiles and swatches of carpeting and vinyl flooring. After the carefully arranged décor, it’s like going backstage.
28
The Spreadsheet Buyers
Even though production models are standardized, between exterior materials, siding and trim colors, interior upgrades, and various options, the buyer of a typical new house has to make fifty to a hundred individual choices.
Scott and Meghan Andress are among the first buyers at New Daleville. They currently live in Sadsburyville, about ten miles away, in a three-year-old Ryan town-home development, where I visit them in April. The hundred houses in their development are arranged in groups of four, five, and six. The façades are vinyl, stucco, and stone, but the variety only emphasizes the fact that the houses are basically the same. There is not much landscaping. It is a classic starter community, where architectural niceties are sacrificed for the sake of low prices, enabling first-time buyers to get a toehold in the market.
I talk to Meghan in her kitchen — Scott is at work. The rooms are mostly empty, the furniture in storage, since the house has been sold and settlement is in about two weeks. She says that they will move to an apartment. “We don’t yet know exactly when our new house will be ready. We hope June or July. It depends when they get the water connected. I’ve also heard that there is some problem to do with an emergency water tank.”
A tall, freckled redhead in her late twenties, Meghan grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, and studied forestry at Virginia Tech, where she met Scott, who was an engineering student. He was born in southern Chester County, not far from Londonderry, and now works for a local consulting firm. They’ve been married five years and have a fifteen-month-old daughter, Kendal.
Meghan is a project manager for an environmental consulting company in Phoenixville, a forty-minute commute. She is on the road a lot — her company pickup is parked in the driveway — since she oversees the construction of sewage treatment systems all over southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. “Actually, the fact that there was a community system rather than individual septic tanks was one of the things that attracted us to New Daleville,” she says. “Since I design drip irrigation for a living, I understand how it works.”
The Andresses’ town home is twenty feet wide, with a garage and playroom on the first floor, living room and eat-in kitchen on the second, and three small bedrooms on the third. There is an eight-foot-square deck off the kitchen, above a similar size patio. “We bought the house brand-new, three years ago, thinking we would keep it for two to five years,” she says. “Now we want a proper yard and a bit more space. We’re ready to move.” They sold their house for $215,000, an increase of $65,000 over what they paid.
What attracted them to New Daleville, I ask. “We like Londonderry because it’s in the Octorara school district. The district where we live now is not great, and if we didn’t move we’d have to send Kendal to a private school.” Was the relative remoteness of Londonderry an issue? “It means a slightly longer commute for both of us, maybe ten minutes or so. There’s a good supermarket seven minutes from New Daleville. Exton Mall, where we usually do our larger shopping, is about half an hour away, which is a bit far, but since we both work, we tend to stop there on the way home, so that’s not really a problem.”
I ask her how they heard about New Daleville. “Last October, we got a flyer in the mail, offering a thousand-dollar credit to Ryan homeowners who bought there. We were thinking of moving, and we were pretty happy with our house, so we liked the idea of living in another Ryan development. The problem was the price. The cheapest houses were three hundred and twenty thousand, which seemed high to us since this was far out in Londonderry. So we didn’t bother following it up.”
They forgot about New Daleville until three months later, when Scott’s mother called and said that she had been researching new developments in Londonderry for his sister, who was also looking for a new house. She had investigated Country Walk and New Daleville. “Your sister has decided to buy in Country Walk,” she told him. “She likes the large lots and the privacy. But I can see you and Meghan in New Daleville. Did you know that they’ve just reduced their prices?”
“That’s when we decided to take a look,” says Meghan. “One of the things we like about where we live now is the closeness of the community and getting to know our neighbors. So the village arrangement appealed to us.” Had they heard of traditional neighborhood development, I ask. “I wish I co
uld say we had, but we were unaware of neotraditional planning and new urbanism. Of course, Oxford, where Scott grew up, is a small town, so that was familiar.” I mention that Colonial Williamsburg, near where she grew up, is one of the models for neotraditional planning. “The part of Williamsburg where I lived wasn’t like that,” she replies. “It was very spread out, with two-and three-acre lots and gated communities.”
How often did they visit New Daleville before making up their minds? “Once a day for two weeks,” she says. The Andresses give new meaning to the term conscientious consumers. They looked at different lots. They took a measuring tape and string and staked out the house and the perimeter of the lot. They focused on the lots at the edge of the site. “We didn’t like the back lanes,” Meghan says. “We have three vehicles, my big company pickup, my Jeep, and Scott’s Buick, so we knew that parking was going to be a problem. We chose the option with a detached garage behind the house, which gives us a nice long driveway.”
After all Joe Duckworth’s strategizing, Bob Heuser’s ingenious planning, and Tom Comitta’s and Jason’s efforts to follow neotraditional orthodoxy, it has come down to this: where do we park? Despite the sensible arguments in favor of small lots, narrow streets, walkability, and density, buying a house is not, for most people, about ideology. It’s about fulfilling personal dreams and practical needs: Do I really want a Jacuzzi in the master bathroom? Are the kitchen cabinets large enough? Would I like a front porch? And, at least for Meghan and Scott Andress, is there sufficient parking? Negotiating large vehicles through narrow rear lanes didn’t appeal to them. Most Americans park in their driveways, either because they use the garage for storage or because the driveway is more convenient. There is no space to leave your car outside in the back lanes at New Daleville, so those owners will have to park inside their garages — every time.
Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Page 24
