Vavrus Ranch’s Future will have a Regional Impact in Florida

By Timothy Hullihan

The 2010 Census says that the City of Palm Beach Gardens had, at the time of this last detailed counting, roughly 48,400 citizens spread among 22,000 households with 2.2 people in each home. Palm Beach Gardens got that big over 50-years from what most would consider rapid to above-average growth.

The initial Avenir development proposal for the 4,763 acre Vavrus Ranch proposed 7,600 homes, or a town of almost 17,000 people if the 2.2 people per household presently in Palm Beach Gardens carries over. The recently revised proposal for Avenir scales back the project to 4,760 homes or a small town with a population of 10,500, or the 15^th largest in Palm Beach County if it were added as its 39th municipality today.

Just to put the proposal into regional perspective, I have prepared the following map. In short, the ranch is in the center of 3 large tracks of land protected from development; set aside to preserve water quality, native flora, and wildlife.  For these three areas to remain somewhat connected so water can flow somewhat naturally and wildlife can range appropriately, Vavrus Ranch needs to continue to provide those important connections.

If Palm Beach County is to add a development larger in size than 23 of its existing municipalities within this environmentally sensitive area, it needs to be self-sustaining and built like the small town that it is. It will need schools for the 800 school age children that will live there.  It will need a small library, post office, town hall, police station and fire/rescue facility.  It will need appropriately sized retail establishments, and the economic incentives to encourage proprietors to provide the relatively small number of haircuts, shoe repairs, grocery sales and prepared meals that a small town demands.  Most of all, it needs to be built around the New Urbanist model for dense pedestrian oriented towns and not around the car-centered mind set for suburbia still engrained in the minds of most planners and traffic engineers, and entrenched in the development codes, parking counts and roadway standards of most municipalities.

If the goal is to reduce traffic outside of the town, being self-sustaining and pedestrian is a great way to do that. However, planning regionally sized facilities within a self-sustaining town countermands much of the traffic eliminated through a self-sustaining development model.  A small town cannot support a university, regional hospital, or big-box retailer.  Regionally sized facilities must draw from outside a small town to remain viable, thereby adding trips to feeder roads, especially if they are popular national franchises.

Presently, the Avenir development seems to be saying all the right things, but actually doing something else. Its representatives speak of being a source for eco-tourism and a model for sustainability, but the mix of regionally sized facilities and the absence of smaller scale local services will lead to a large number of trips out of Avenir in search of what it does not have, and large number of trips into Avenir by outsiders utilizing its amenities of regional scale.

Avenir needs to have a very small environmental footprint if it is to be compatible with the sensitive lands within which it is proposed. Some of the brightest minds in the New Urbanist planning world are right here in South Florida.  I hope the City of Palm Beach Gardens is wise enough to require their perspective and creativity become a leading voice in the conversation about what Vavrus Ranch should become.

Timothy Hullihan is an architect and freelance writer living in North Palm Beach