Civano moving toward success

To the Editor: In an article in the December issue, I was quoted as stating that, two years ago, the new urbanist community of Civano was not making money and that the ambitious design and performance goals imposed by the City of Tucson added extra cost to the land development. Both statements are undeniably true. They would likely be true for any development that pursues new standards of energy efficiency, land use, architectural excellence, and building design. Left by itself, however, the quote would obscure a larger truth. CDC Partners and its sister company CDC Realty, managers of Civano in 2000-2002, were leading the project to a second year of success, both conceptually and financially, when the owners, Fannie Mae, chose to take over management of the project themselves. CDC Partners and the many others in the private and public sector who worked on Civano accomplished much. • Civano met its stringent energy and water use reduction standards. These are the toughest in the nation for production housing. • Civano was among the very first large-scale new urbanist projects to go to planning and to actually be built. • Civano remains one of the very few projects to bring new urban concepts to the middle-market production-housing arena in the Southwest. • CDC Partners addressed the issue of financial sustainability. Overhead costs were reduced by about 30 percent, while the “look and feel” of Civano remained consistent. Site construction costs were contained and we even generated savings that were slated to be used to fulfill some of the non-funded on-site amenities promised by previous management. • A rigorous two-year marketing plan with a five-year projection was completed. The marketing program was overhauled and reinvigorated. The concepts of Civano were rewritten in “user- friendly” language, with dramatic and sustained improvement in sales. Civano “took on” the sprawl developments surrounding it and held its own in sales. As a result of CDC Partners’ efforts, during the last 18 months of management the project became stable financially and began to operate in the black for the first time in its history. It was not an accident that Fannie Mae renewed CDC Partners’ management contract continuously for over three years. Perhaps more importantly, CDC Partners set the groundwork for the planning of the future Civano neighborhoods in such a way that the planning and environmental goals of the project could be achieved, while giving more flexibility to its implementation and a more predictable basis for financial success. Considerable progress was made with the entitlement process. In February of this year, we were prepared, with the reviewers of the City of Tucson, in a collective effort, to effectively expand the planning concepts of the first neighborhood of Civano to its future neighborhoods. As was noted in last month’s New Urban News, this effort appears to have been muted in its concept and intent. Civano could not have happened without the support of Fannie Mae. As often happens in pioneer projects, CDC Partners and Fannie Mae came to an unbridgeable divide over very different visions of where to take Civano’s future. At this point, Fannie Mae’s vision is unclear, but growing indications are that it will not be a continuation of even a simplified or evolved version of a new urbanist or environmental agenda, but rather a “greener” version of standard land use development. Lee R. Rayburn Director of planning and design for Civano from 1997 to 1999, and managing member and principal of CDC Partners from 2000 to June, 2002