Planned Developments - North America - United States

United States

In the early history of the United States, planned communities were quite common: St. Augustine, planned in 1565, Jamestown, New Haven, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, Annapolis, and Savannah are examples of this trend. Washington, D.C.; Jackson, Mississippi; Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; Madison, Wisconsin; Salt Lake City, Utah; Tallahassee, Florida; and Austin, Texas are unusual, having been carved out of the wilderness to serve as capital cities.

Pullman, now incorporated into Chicago's South Side, was a world-renowned company town founded by the industrialist George M. Pullman in the 1880s. In Beaver County, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, American Bridge Company founded Ambridge, Pennsylvania in 1905 as a company town for American Bridge; American Bridge is still based near Ambridge today in nearby Coraopolis, Pennsylvania.

Another well known company town is Gary, Indiana, which was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation as a home for its new steel mill, the Gary Works, and named after Elbert Henry Gary, the chairman of the company. For many years the Gary Works was the largest steel mill in the world, and it dominated the town, the main entrance being at the northern end of Broadway, the city's main thoroughfare. The fortunes of this planned city have historically risen and fallen with those of the steel mill: prosperous in the 1930s, the city has lost 55 percent of its population since 1960.

Riverside, Illinois, Radburn, New Jersey, and Kansas City, Missouri's Country Club District are other early examples of planned communities. Established in 1912, Shaker Heights, Ohio, was planned and developed in by the Van Sweringen brothers, railroad moguls who envisioned the community as a suburban retreat from the industrial inner-city of Cleveland. Kohler Company created a planned village of the same name west of the company's former headquarters city of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which incorporated in 1912. In 1918, the Aluminum Company of America built the town of Alcoa, Tennessee for the employees of the nearby aluminum processing plant.

During the Florida land boom of the 1920s in Southern Florida, the communities of Coral Gables, Opa-Locka, and Miami Springs, now suburbs of Miami, Florida, were incorporated as fully planned "themed" communities which were to reflect the architecture and look of Spain, Arabia, and Mexico respectively, and are now considered some of the first modern planned communities in the United States. Oldsmar, located in west central Florida, was developed by automobile pioneer Ransom E. Olds.

In 1928, San Clemente, California was incorporated by Ole Hanson who designated that all buildings must be approved by an architectural review board in order to retain control over development and building style.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, several model towns were planned and built by the Federal government. Arthurdale, West Virginia, a federally funded New Deal community, was Eleanor Roosevelt's project to ease the burden of the depression on coal miners. The Tennessee Valley Authority created several towns of its own to accommodate workers constructing their new dams; the most prominent being Norris, Tennessee. Three "Greenbelt Communities", Greenbelt, Maryland, Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wisconsin, built by the Federal government during the 1930s were planned with a surrounding "belt" of woodland and natural landscaping.

During World War II, the Manhattan Project built several planned communities to provide accommodations for scientists, engineers, industrial workers and their families. These communities, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Richland, Washington and Los Alamos, New Mexico were necessary because the laboratories and industrial plants of the Manhattan Project were built in isolated locations to ensure secrecy. Even the existence of these towns was a military secret, and the towns themselves were closed to the public until after the war.

The Levittowns—in Long Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey (now known as Willingboro, New Jersey) -- typified the planned suburban communities of the 1950s and early 1960s. California's Rohnert Park (north of San Francisco) is another example of a planned city (built at the same time as Levittown) that was marketed to attract middle-class people into an area only populated with farmers with the phrase, "A Country Club for the middle class."

Many other places, such as Orange County, California, the Conejo Valley in Ventura County, Valencia in Los Angeles County, as well as Phoenix, Arizona and Northern Arizona also have many master planned communities following the housing boom in the 1960s, which is when the fathers of Scottsdale, Arizona foresaw a huge amount of growth in Arizona. Some of those communities include Anaheim Hills, Rossmoor, Irvine, Ladera Ranch, Mission Viejo, and Talega, Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village, Newbury Park, Valencia in California and (in the Phoenix area) Marley Park, Talking Rock Ranch, McCormick Ranch, Rio Verde, Tartesso and Verrado in Buckeye, Arizona. The neighborhood of Warren in the city of Bisbee has the distinction of being Arizona's first planned community. In the Conejo Valley, which is the in East County Area of Ventura County, all cities were master planned. Most notably, the Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, and Westlake Village area was master planned by the Janss Investment Company, which was also responsible for the development of Westwood Village, part of the Westside in Los Angeles. Valencia is an area that is a master planned community that incorporated into the City of Santa Clarita, developed and planned by the Newhall Land and Farming Company. About 25% of Orange County is composed of various master planned communities, much of which was done by the Irvine Company, and since 1990, 85% of all developments in Orange County and a slightly smaller amount of communities in Arizona were part of a master planned community. 75% of all resales today in the Phoenix area are homes in master planned communities, and 80% of all new home construction permits issued by Arizona building departments are master planned communities. These communities provide functionality to the precious land left in the area, as well as the ability to create a housing-business-transportation-open space balance.

The era of the modern planned city began in 1962-64 with the creation of Reston, Virginia which was begun just a year before Coral Springs in western Broward County, Florida, and Columbia, Maryland. In more recent years, New Urbanism has set the stage for new cities, with places like the idyllic Seaside, Florida, and Disney's new town of Celebration, Florida.

In the United States, suburban growth in the Sunbelt states has coincided with the popularity of Master Planned Communities within established suburbs. Texas was at the forefront of this trend. Las Colinas, established in 1973, was one of the first such examples and is still growing. Las Colinas is a 12,000 acres (4,900 ha) master planned community within the Dallas-area city of Irving. In 2006, residents approved changes to deed restrictions to allow greater density of urban mixed-use and residential construction. Also in the 1970s, just north of the existing town of Spring, Texas (north of Houston), oil and gas industry executive George P. Mitchell developed The Woodlands, a major residential and commercial master planned community which is now considered one of the premier residential and business destinations in the Houston area. The Woodlands is still experiencing huge growth to this day. In the 1990s, Cinco Ranch was first developed just south of the existing town of Katy, one of the western suburbs of Houston, and has contributed to the explosive recent growth of Houston's suburban west side.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, master planned commercial developments such as Bishop Ranch in San Ramon and Hacienda Business Park in Pleasanton have attracted major corporate tenants to relocate from downtown Oakland and San Francisco; these companies include Safeway, Chevron Corporation and AT&T (as the former Pacific Bell).

In recent years, new towns such as Mountain House, San Joaquin County, California, have added a new wrinkle to the movement: to prevent conurbation with nearby cities, they have imposed strict growth boundaries, as well as automatic "circuit breakers" that place moratoriums on residential development if the number of jobs per resident in the town falls below a certain value. Centennial new town part in Tejon Ranch halfway between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, will incorporate such restrictions in order to minimize the commuter load on severely congested I-5. Coyote Springs, Nevada, Destiny, Florida and Douglas Ranch in Buckeye, Arizona are amongst the largest communities being planned for the 21st century.