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By
STEVE FRIESS Sun-Sentinel Web-posted: 12:44 a.m. May 23, 2000
DELRAY BEACH -- As a top executive
of the nation's largest homebuilder, Tim Hernandez once looked
at open fields and saw development opportunities.
Today, parking lots catch his
eye.
"I just decided there's
got to be a better way to do this," said Hernandez, recalling
his 15 years with Pulte Homes Corp., where he eventually served
as vice president for marketing, land acquisition, and land
development in South Florida. "There had to be a more creative,
more responsible way of creating communities that could make
me feel better about what I was doing."
Earlier this year, Hernandez
defected from Pulte, a company vilified by anti-sprawl advocates
for the way it chews up open land in Broward and Palm Beach
counties to churn out tracts of identical suburban single-family
homes.
Instead of supervising yet another
"formless, shapeless and placeless" gated development, Hernandez
watched Monday as crews demolished a vacant bank drive-through
lot south of Atlantic Avenue in downtown Delray Beach. He
and Kevin Rickard own a jagged acre of asphalt along Federal
Highway where, by next year, 31 three-story yellow townhouses
will stand.
The Courtyards of Delray is
a textbook case of the housing advocated by "smart-growth"
activists, who lecture to both developers and those who govern
decaying cities. Rather than encourage sprawl and create traffic,
cities bounce back by restoring downtown cores and urging
people to live there, they say.
It's a philosophy called New
Urbanism, which Hernandez and Rickard embraced with gusto
by naming their company New Urban Communities. From Delray
Beach to Tamarac, Hernandez seeks to prove he's graduated
from the Pulte world of standardized suburbia and, now on
his own without a clunky corporate bureaucracy to weigh him
down, will be "building communities where people say 'I love
living here.'"
Pulte officials did not return
calls Friday or Monday.
Hernandez may sound self-promoting,
but he's doing something new -- and of immense social importance,
said James Murley, director of the Florida Atlantic University/Florida
International University Joint Center for Environmental and
Urban Problems. Among the virtues, Murley noted, new urbanism
makes use of vacant property in areas that need investment
and reduces car use because shopping, work and play are within
walking distance.
"This type of development represents
only maybe 5 percent of residential development in our region,
but that's 5 percent more than it was 10 years ago," Murley
said. "The in-fill projects that Tim is starting to work on
are extremely important because if they're successful, people
are going to recognize that. The ultimate judge on this is
what the consumer does, and if the market shows there's a
strong demand for that kind of product, other people will
do it."
So far, demand is enormous for
Courtyards. Eleven units sold in the past three weeks, before
a shovel moved an ounce of dirt and before Hernandez and Rickard
even contacted local newspapers about advertising.
The townhouses are priced just
shy of $300,000 each for between 1,670 and 2,137 square feet,
a two-car garage and, in an artist's rendering, balconies
that overlook a lush common patio.
"When I have people come in,
this is where I'm going to put everybody," enthused Bernard
Molyneux, a Boca Raton antiques dealer who bought one last
week and brought in a friend on Thursday. "This is really
unique, and it's very reasonably priced."
Actually, Courtyards isn't unique.
Developer Cary Glickstein, who
is building 22 townhouses just a block north, noted his Ironwood
Properties Inc. has built 70 residential units in the downtown
Delray area in recent years. Glickstein said he's turned off
by the competing Courtyards, which he believes will be crowded,
ugly and exposed to street-traffic noise. In fact, Glickstein
said, it betrays Hernandez's Pulte roots.
"All you have to do is look
at the size of the property (to see) their first analysis
is, 'How many units can we get on this property?'" Glickstein
said. "It should be, 'How many can I get and make it look
good?' We could've shoehorned three times as many units on
our property, but I don't need to squeeze the last dime out
of it. Pulte is known for exactly that."
Hernandez, 41, dismissed Glickstein's
critique as a rival's sniping, insisting density alone does
not reflect how nice a complex will look. That mentality,
he countered, is a stumbling block to making in-fill development
successful and popular because people instantly cringe when
they hear "multi-family" and "higher density."
A Michigan native, Hernandez
started as a city planner for a Chicago suburb in the early
1980s. Repulsed by "crazy, ugly designs" brought before him
in that role, he got a business degree and then a job with
Pulte. First in the Chicago suburbs and eventually in South
Florida, he became responsible for such standard Pulte fare
as Villages of Renaissance in Miramar, Plum Bay/Plum Harbor
in Tamarac and St. Andrews Grand in Boca Raton.
Yet it was a risky Pulte venture
in Delray Beach, a townhouse development called Kokomo Key
along Federal Highway, that gave Hernandez his shot at seeing
whether in-fill could be profitable. He convinced the company
to let him turn a rundown trailer park hangout for prostitutes
into a middle-class place to live, and discovered all the
New Urbanist rhetoric he'd heard could actually work.
"Tim got his feet wet with that
and saw it had potential," said Delray Beach City Planner
Diane Dominguez. "Hopefully he's doing this now because he
believes in good planning and that we need to redevelop older
areas instead of taking up more land where services don't
exist yet."
Dominguez is concerned
that $300,000 units will price out middle-income families,
a concern Hernandez and Rickard share. They're working on
less expensive in-fill ventures in Tamarac and Lantana and
have their eye on a redevelopment project planned for just
west of the tennis complex is Delray next. "This is what I
always wanted to do," Hernandez said. "I'm just fortunate
to have the ability to give it a try."
Steve Friess can be reached at sfriess@sun-sentinel.com
or 561-243-6636.
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