VOLUME 24 NUMBER 11JULY-SEPTEMBER 1994

RESIDENTIAL

LAGUNA WESTSACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA

PROJECT TYPE

A 1,045-acre neotraditional plannedcommunity centered on a 100-acre towncenter and a 73-acre lake. The plan calls for3,370 residential units—of which 300 arecompleted—as well as retail andemployment uses, including a recentlycompleted Apple Computer facility. Thedevelopment has a pedestrian-friendlyenvironment, including attractivestreetscapes, an accessible lakefront, and aplanned mixed-use town center featuringshops, a village green, and a communitycenter.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Neotraditional plan and developmentstandardsTransit-oriented designLake as amenityHomes with front porches

DEVELOPER

AKT Development Corp. 7700 College Town Drive Sacramento, California 95826 916-383-2500

SITE PLANNER

Peter Calthorpe Calthorpe Associates 246 First Street, Suite 400 San Francisco, California 94105 415-777-0181

PROJECT MANAGER

River West Developments 2424 K Street, Suite 200 Sacramento, California 95816 916-446-1115

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Laguna West is a 1,045-acre planned community taking shape outside Sacramento, California.The project incorporates neotraditional planning and design elements to emulate a classicAmerican small town and uses a large lake as the focal point for the various neighborhoods.Designed to be transit-friendly, the community is built around a town center that will includeresidential, school, work, civic, and retail uses within easy walking distance of each other.Upon buildout, Laguna West will include approximately 3,370 residential units (2,170single-family homes and 1,200 multifamily units), a 73-acre lake (divided into severalsections), parks, daycare facilities, an elementary school, and a church, as well ascommercial, office, and industrial uses.

Approximately 300 homes have been completed as of August 1994, ranging from1,100-square-foot homes on small lots to custom homes of more than 3,000 square feet. Allhomes thus far are single-family attached, although multifamily units are planned for thefuture. The project offers a unique combination of lakefront living and a traditional townsetting that has appealed to homebuyers within a tough California market.

THE SITE AND DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

The community is located just south of the Sacramento city limits and ten miles south ofdowntown Sacramento, adjacent to Interstate 5, a major north-south highway running thelength of central California. This Sacramento corridor is known for offering a range of housingtypes, including many affordable and starter homes. To provide direct access to the site, thedeveloper paid for and built a $5.6 million interchange off of I-5. Before the start of theproject, the site was largely open grazing land with few trees.

Immediately to the east of Laguna West is the nearly completed planned community ofLaguna Creek, which was the first project undertaken in this location by the developer.Laguna Creek was developed according to typical suburban residential development principles,including wide curvilinear streets and typical suburban home designs with prominent garagefronts. A similar approach was planned for Laguna West, and an initial subdivision plan wasdeveloped along these lines before it was scrapped for a new plan developed by architectPeter Calthorpe, a major proponent of neotraditional planning and pedestrian-friendlycommunities. Calthorpe has since designed some of the lakefront homes and serves as aconsultant to the developer to ensure that new homebuilder plans meet the spirit of theoverall community concept. The new plan was inspired in part by older Sacramentoneighborhoods such as East Sacramento, Land Park, and Curtis Park, which were well knownto Phil Angelides, president of River West, the project manager for Laguna West.

The developer—AKT Development Corp. in partnership with River West Developments—hasdeveloped the plan and the infrastructure, including the lake, streets, and community center,and sells parcels to homebuilders. The community center and central open space weredeveloped first, and the eastern half of the project, including roads, infrastructure, communitylandscaping, and part of the lake, is well underway. Bank of America served as the primarylender for a portion of the project; the balance was developer-financed.

The developer submitted the current plan to the county in 1989; the county supported theplan and approved it within 12 months, even though many variances were required forsetbacks and street width standards. The county has since hired Peter Calthorpe to write itsguidelines for transit oriented development as part of its new comprehensive plan.

PLANNING AND DESIGN

The overall plan consists of a mixed-use town center surrounded by the lake on three sidesand connected by radial boulevards to parcels on the other side of the lake. Whileneotraditional planning concepts often involve the use of grid streets and discouragecurvilinear streets and culs-de-sac, Laguna West uses all of these concepts. The town centerfollows a rectilinear pattern, but the other areas of the community include many curvilinearstreets and culs-de-sac. However, the streets do provide many connections and a variety of

choices for going from point A to point B, unlike many community plans that restrict internalcirculation patterns. The plan also provides numerous access points—seven total—to LagunaBoulevard, the main arterial connecting the project to I-5.

Two of the key planning goals are to create a true sense of community and to focus on publicspaces. The lake, finished parks, waterfront promenade, jogging trails, and pedestrian bridgesare accessible to all residents of the Laguna West community; about half of the lake frontageis accessible to all residents. Throughout the project, streets have been designed forpedestrians as well as cars. Wide walkways make the streets safe, neighborly, and pleasant towalk on. Eventually streets will be lined with more than 15,000 shade trees.

The highly walkable 100-acre town center includes the Laguna Town Hall, the Town SquarePark, medium-density housing, and a transit stop at the town hall, which became operationalin September 1994. Future plans call for more medium-density housing, including multifamilyunits; shops along Laguna Main Street; and a church. The centerpiece of the communityconsists of the town hall and the park, which features a playground, basketball court, and rosegarden and connects to the lake. The town hall, one of the first elements completed,combines the functions of a community and recreation center with classrooms and an indoortheater/outdoor amphitheater. The indoor multipurpose room can accommodate 500 persons;the outdoor amphitheater can hold more than 2,000. A daycare facility—underway now—anda church are planned for adjacent sites.

The lake provides a waterfront ambience while achieving several important environmental anddesign purposes, including open-space preservation, nonchemical water quality treatment,flood detention, and irrigation. The lake is actually a series of six separate lakes—three thatare completed—divided by roadways. Lake water was pumped in to create the lake, which isnow fed primarily by runoff. Special plants are used to manage nutrients and pollution. Onceor twice a year, an aquatic plant harvester cuts the plants, thereby removing the metals, oils,and nutrients typically found in drainage waters from developed areas.

One of the key principles of housing design in Laguna West is avoidance of a streetfrontpattern dominated by two- and three-car garage fronts. The number of homes with prominentfront garages is restricted within each neighborhood, and in general garages must be recessedso they are not the most prominent feature of the house. The design guidelines specify thathomes must be constructed with either front porches or strongly articulated entrancefeatures. Housing units are allowed a lesser frontyard setback for front porches and entriesand a 20-foot setback for the garage; the garage must be at least five feet behind the buildingline. In general, homes are placed 12 to 15 feet from the street, and each single-family homehas an average of two shade trees per lot, planted in a row along the sidewalk, to create ashady canopy.

One innovative planning concept is the use of short culs-de-sac bumped into the lake alongBenedix Way and Daylor Way. While many lakefront communities surround the lake withprivate homes, this plan allows the developer to provide attractive custom lots on the lakeand still maintain visual and physical access to the lake for all community residents.

Five housing products are currently available. Four of them are production homes ranging insize from 1,100 to 2,650 square feet. Custom lots are also offered, ranging from 8,500 to20,300 square feet. Edgewater, one of the first neighborhoods started, consists of homesdesigned by Calthorpe and located on small lots in the town center. The houses are orientedtoward the lake and include small porch/patio areas facing the water. A public walkway linesthe lake in front of most of these homes, which are raised several feet above the walkway toprovide lake views and privacy for their frontyards. One design problem to be overcome wasthat these houses backed up onto a prominent street; to avoid a wall of garages on thatstreet, designers placed garages perpendicular to the street facing each other.

Designers encountered a similar problem with the Lakeshore homes built on one of the twoplanned islands. These homes faced an internal street on the island, with their backs to themain boulevard, East Lake Drive. Designers decided to hide the backyards from this boulevardwith an attractive wall.

Another of the housing types consists of porch-front houses with access to garages throughalleys. The county has limited this type of development, however, because of concerns aboutsafety and security.

Landscape corridors and other public spaces are planted with vegetation that uses 30 to 50percent less water than traditional landscaping. Guidelines describe how to use native shadetrees, flowering shrubs, groundcovers, and flowers to design gardens that use less water. Oneexperiment is the use of tree boxes placed in the parking lanes and occupying part of thestreet right-of-way. These tree boxes define the parking areas and narrow the street, slowingthrough-traffic, but they are not completely successful visually and are a potential drivinghazard, as they could easily be hit by a passing car. The developer has limited their use in themore recent sections of the community.

MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT

The marketing theme for Laguna West is "An Idea Whose Time Has Come. Again." The projecthas been featured in many national media such as Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC-TV's Good Morning America. This free publicity has helped greatly in positioning the project within the market as a unique andexceptional place to live.

The target market is largely middle-income buyers, but the project has been able to captureupper-income buyers as well through its custom lots. Production homes are priced from$139,950 to $224,990, and custom lots from $70,000 to $185,000, usually resulting inhomes from $300,000 to $500,000. Homebuilders active in the community include PulteHome Corporation, Richmond American Homes, Lexington Homes, Sunland Communities, andElliott Homes. Nearly 50 percent of the land developed for single-family housing has been soldto homebuilders thus far, and homes have been selling at the rate of approximately ten amonth; so far more than 300 homes or lots have been sold.

In addition, the development has appealed to companies looking for new locations. AppleComputer opened a $20 million facility at Laguna West in 1992, with 450,000 square feet ofspace and 150 employees. The facility quickly expanded to include manufacturing, with morethan 1,200 employees, and Apple became the region's tenth-largest employer. Apple recentlypurchased 40 adjacent acres of land at Laguna West for further expansion.

The Elk Grove Community Services District owns and manages the town hall, which was builtand financed by the developer. It has proved to be an attractive community asset and is usedfrequently for community events, serving the larger Laguna Creek and Elk Grove communitiesas well as Laguna West.

EXPERIENCE GAINED

The principles of neotraditional and pedestrian-oriented planning in large-scaledevelopments do not necessarily conflict with the need for effective automobilecirculation; at Laguna West the street design actually provides better circulation forautomobiles than in many typical subdivisions. The streets are laid out in a more linearand connected pattern with fewer dead ends, blocks and neighborhoods that are easy tounderstand, and numerous options for going from one place to another.

While the developers wanted to create a variety of housing types and a somewhat urbanfeel in the project, they quickly recognized that their plans for attached townhousesalong the lake were not as marketable as small-lot, single-family houses. In California,homebuyers tend to prefer single-family homes, even on very small lots, over attachedhouses.

While community marketing offices and centers can be useful in many projects, thecommunity information center in the town hall at Laguna West has been closed, for thedeveloper found that most potential buyers prefer to seek out the various builder modelswithout visiting the general office.

PROJECT DATA

LAND USE INFORMATION

Site Area: 1,045 acres Total Dwelling Units Planned: 3,370 Total Dwelling Units Completed: 300 Gross Density: 65 units per acre Average Net Density: 8.0 units per acre

LAND USE PLAN

Acres Percent of Site

Residential 533 51%

Lake 73 8

Parks 38 3

Office 95 9

Daycare and school

16 2

Commercial 53 5

Industrial 237 22

Total 1,045 100%

DEVELOPMENT COST INFORMATION (TO DATE)1

Site Acquisition Cost Not available

Site Improvement Costs2

Excavation/grading $10,000,000

Sewer/water/drainage 15,000,000

Paving/curbs/sidewalks 8,000,000

Landscaping/irrigation 8,300,000

Fees/general conditions 2,000,000

Town hall 1,700,000

Total $45,000,000

Soft Costs3

Architecture/engineering $500,000

Project management 1,000,000

Marketing 2,500,000

Legal/accounting 500,000

Taxes/insurance 6,000,000

Construction interest and fees 4,000,000

Total $14,500,000

Total Development Cost (to date)1: $59,500,000 Construction Cost per Square Foot (single-family residential): $40

RESIDENTIAL UNIT INFORMATION

Current Unit Type

Lot Size(Square

Feet)

Unit Size(Square

Feet)

Number of Units

Planned/Built

Range of Sales Prices

Single-family 3,650-6,200 1,100-2,000 1,100/175 $130,000-$180,000

Single-family 8,700 1,800-2,650 770/125 $170,000-$234,000

Custom 8,500-20,300 1,800-4,000 300/15 $250,000-$500,000

Multifamily NA NA 1,200/0 NA

DEVELOPMENT SCHEDULE

Site Purchased: June 1990 Planning Started: June 1990 Construction Started: June 1990 Sales Started: March 1991 First Closing: May 1991 Phase I Completed: December 1995 (estimated) Project Completed: 2005 (estimated)

Notes

1Excluding land cost. Costs do not include any homebuilding costs. 2Includes construction-related soft costs. 3Includes nonconstruction-related soft costs only.

DIRECTIONS

From Sacramento Metropolitan Airport: Take Interstate 5 south to the Laguna Boulevard exit,approximately ten miles south of downtown. Turn left on Laguna Boulevard. Entrance is onthe right.

Driving Time: Approximately 25 minutes in nonpeak traffic.

The Project Reference File is intended as a resource tool for use by the subscribers in improving the quality offuture projects. Data contained herein were made available by the Development team and constitute a reporton, not an endorsement of, the project by ULI - The Urban Land Institute.

Copyright 1994, 1997, by ULI - the Urban Land Institute1025 Thomas Jefferson Street, N. W. Ste. 500w, Washington, D. C. 20007-5201

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