River Ranch in Lafayette is influential model

River Ranch in Lafayette, Louisiana, is becoming an influential model of new urban community-building. More than 100 developers have visited the project, under development by Robert Daigle and designed by architect Steve Oubre, according to the Baton Rouge Business Report. River Ranch is home to 145 families. Fifty more houses are currently under construction, and 145 apartments are scheduled to become available early in 2003. The town center offers a grocery store, restaurant, real estate firm, and home accessories shop. When complete, the development will have 1,200 units. The Business Journal outlined the formidable permitting and political resistance first encountered by Daigle — hurdles that have all but disappeared as officials have learned to appreciate the project. The reporter, Mukul Verma, had expected, in visiting the community, to find it was another "marketing trick" — a promised new urban project actually laid out like conventional suburbia. "But there it is," Verma wrote, "coming out of the ground like no other place in Louisiana, built by what seems sheer will against the longest of odds by a man who wonders why no other developer is willing to do what he’s doing, especially because River Ranch is making Robert Daigle a wealthy man."