July 2000

OUTSIDE CHICAGO, A MODEL FOR COUNTY'S AG RESERVE

By STEVE FRIESS
Staff Writer

You look out your back window, and all you can see is field. Acres and acres of neatly planted field. The same verdant field that spawned those organic tomatoes on your kitchen counter, that lettuce.

Then you sit out on your open-air front porch, gazing at the small cluster of two-story homes with tiny yards and short driveways. You wave at a neighbor who coasts by on a bicycle, two small children in tow enjoying the Mom-made breeze. She answers, pedaling to a bike path along the lake.

It's an idyll of an upbeat, agrarian America, and the Palm Beach County Commission and its planners can picture something like it materializing west of Boca Raton, Delray Beach and Boynton Beach in the 21,000-acre region known as the Agricultural Reserve.

It's the view that reminds Michelle Winchester why she fled urban Chicago for a place 40 miles north called Prairie Crossing.

She could have moved her family to any number of cookie-cutter suburban communities ringing the Windy City. She and her options-trader husband easily could have afforded a big spread at the end of some cul-de-sac, as many of her friends did.

But Winchester, 35, chose Prairie Crossing, a so-called "conservation development" that's so quaint, it's cutting-edge.

The developers have decreed only 362 houses will ever stand on its 668 acres, no two neighboring houses will be of the same color or model; none will have playground equipment in their scant back yards; no fence will be other than white picket or taller than 3 feet.

The aim is to turn neighbors into intimates, a development into a community. By barring private playground equipment, for instance, planners ensured parents must send their children to a public park to play with other kids.

"The defining difference between a Prairie Crossing-style development and a typical subdivision is that there's something there besides lawns and cul-de-sacs," said planning expert Randall Arendt, the Rhode Island-based author of Conservation Design for Subdivisions: A Practical Guide to Creating Open Space Networks.

"This is a golf-course development without the golf course," Arendt said. "People want neighborhood parks, farmland, village greens, places to walk on trails, places to play games, community centers to walk to. You get that in a conservation development."

Winchester has virtually no back yard, but she paid a premium nonetheless -- $456,900 -- for this 3,122-square-foot blue-gray home. Like the 177 other "prairie-style" dwellings built here, it features horizontal siding as neat as lined notebook paper. Her house borders the 150-acre farm area, most of it sown by a commercial grower. Eighteen acres are currently set aside for organic production.

The community-building amenities include a restored 100-year-old barn used as a public meeting space. There's also a charter public school that must allow equal access to children from Prairie Crossing and the two surrounding school districts. A small shopping plaza is coming soon.

What's most distinctive -- what makes Prairie Crossing an intriguing model for future development in Palm Beach County's Ag Reserve -- is that the neighborhood is anchored by that huge farm and wide regions of open space of natural prairie landscape.

The recently approved Ag Reserve master plan, in fact, reads like a page ripped from the list of "guiding principles" touted by Prairie Crossing -- keeping land in farming, encouraging old-style architecture and fostering neighborly contact.

Among ways cited to keep agriculture alive, the Palm Beach County Commission has endorsed efforts to further organic farms and farm stores like the one that's open twice a week at Prairie Crossing.

"We must adapt the standards of a Prairie Crossing to South Florida," said Palm Beach County Planning Director Frank Duke.

"You're not going to replicate the exact same thing in South Florida as you get in Illinois," he said, "but the ideal of trying to ensure that we maintain open space, cluster the development on smaller lots, mix the uses to accommodate the immediate neighborhood are very much the ideals of the Ag Reserve plans."

Sixty percent of the Prairie Crossing property is preserved for such purposes, the same proportion the county requires developers to set aside for open space when building large subdivisions.

But Prairie Crossing didn't happen because a law forced developers to do it. In fact, this same land was close to becoming a rather ordinary subdivision of 1,600 homes in the mid-1980s. Then a wealthy Chicago conservationist, Gaylord Donnelly, bought it.

When Donnelly died in 1992, his nephew, George Ranney Jr., took over the land with his wife, Vicky. The pair's vision of using the environment and open space as an enticement for a suburban, and not just rural, lifestyle was so novel at the time the Ranneys had trouble getting loans to start construction.

The banks "couldn't predict how well we would do because there was nothing comparable on the market," Vicky Ranney noted wryly.

Turns out, Prairie Crossing isn't just eco-friendly but enormously profitable, too. While most developers don't like to discuss their profit margins, the Ranneys gleefully disclose that they're making a killing in the hopes that other developers will try it, too.

To wit, homes here sell for $139 per square foot, 33 percent more than similar-sized houses in the rest of the suburban Grayslake region, according to a 1999 Prairie Crossing marketing report. Thirty-five homes, ranging from 1,140 to 3,428 square feet, are sold each year at an average base price of $335,000 and rising.

Prairie Crossing routinely receives glowing write-ups in such publications as The New York Times, Chicago Chicago Tribune and Wall Street Journal. It's become a staple of pamphlets and lectures by planning theorists promoting alternative, more pro-environment development.

That should whet the appetite of some South Florida developer, said Matthew Sexton of The Conservation Fund, which was hired by Palm Beach County to handle land purchases in the Ag Reserve using $100 million from a 1999 voter-approved bond issue.

"We need to spread the word to developers that open space and the environment as an amenity can more valuable than just a golf course as an amenity or more valuable than just packing the land full of houses," Sexton said. "People are willing to pay a premium to build in a place where they have access to good, quality open space."

But with the prices, will only rich people be able to buy in? The question vexes both devotees of Prairie Crossing and Ag Reserve planners.

One of the Ranneys' "guiding principles" for Prairie Crossing was to foster economic and racial diversity, but the only family living in their subdivision with a relatively modest income is the one hired to tend to the organic farm and market. They rent their home; no other rentals are allowed.

"The wealthy everywhere choose certain places to live, surrounded by nature, usually up on a hill with views of verdant landscape," said Peter Katz, Washington D.C.-based author of The New Urbanism, and a leading advocate of denser development in urban cores.

"That's why wealthy people live in country estates," he said. Conservation development "doesn't sound to me like an affordable housing strategy."

Planning Director Duke acknowledged the Ag Reserve faces the same dilemma: the regulations that encourage Prairie Crossing-style subdivisions raise the cost of building homes.

Yet Duke said that if more areas existed like Prairie Crossing, the increased supply of this option would result in lower housing prices. He acknowledged, though, that no local developers have approached him about trying it.

"As government, we need to say, `OK, how do we encourage this kind of innovation?'" Duke said.

"Now you are beginning to have some sort of track record in this country for some developments like this. And developers are starting to say, `Yeah, these things aren't some crazy idea. They work.'"

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