Celebration

[finehoe]

Come off the six-lane highway at the spaghetti junction where Interstate 4 meets Highway 192, go past the ornamental water tower, and you are in Celebration, a town of the sort that America stopped building in the 1950s. Most of its 4,000 homes are small by suburban standards, jutting up against narrow streets. Children walk to school. The small downtown has no chains, apart from an obligatory Starbucks. Its 10,000-odd residents are mostly white, white-collar and Republican. In some ways it is a vision of America's past. Yet Celebration is only 20 years old.

The town was developed by Disney as an antidote to the isolation of the suburbs. As an investment, Celebration was a blockbuster. Demand for the first set of lots was so high that Disney had to hold a lottery. Prices started at $120,000 for the smallest homes and at $300,000 for bigger ones; the median house price in the surrounding area was $80,000. Disney invested $100m in the project but it had bought the land for next to nothing. Construction was left to contractors, and money for roads and lighting came from municipal bonds that were paid back by residents.

Judged as an attempt to recreate a quasi-mythical past, things did not go so smoothly.  Yet for all its failings, Celebration has changed America. It provided a prototype for mixed-use development that encouraged more permissive zoning laws, says Robert Steuteville of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Baldwin Park, a successful residential development with a commercial heart, in nearby Orlando, was a refinement of the idea. Celebration demonstrated that suburban cities could market themselves to house-buyers by evoking urbanity. These days almost all suburban developers talk about "place-making" and "urban-style" living, and fostering a sense of community. Celebration got them talking that way.

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21712156-utopia-i-4-what-disneys-city-future-built-look-past-says-about

[thelakelander]

I grew up 20 minutes from Celebration. While pretty, it always came off as fake to me. A true town includes industry, which Celebration never had or made provisions for. The commercial component was never realistic either. The office park and medical center is suburban and I feel they missed out on the integration of those uses into making a true central business district for a community of +20,000. Same goes for the high school, which is pretty disconnected and sprawly.

Last, the commercial component was always strange to me. Yes, there's a small strip of shops in the center of town, along a man-made like (that has an AMC theater...another chain ;-)). However, most get in their SUVs and drive to the Walmart, strip malls and fast food restaurants along US 192, between I-4 and Kissimmee.

Growing up in Central Florida and seeing the various TND projects going from proposals to what they are today, I've tended to like a lot of the Post Properties infill TND projects like Tampa's Harbour Island moreso than some of the larger projects like Celebration. With that said, Baldwin Park is a much better example, as the article states.

Here's a tour of Baldwin Park I did a few months ago:

http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-nov-new-urbanism-15-years-later-the-aging-of-baldwin-park