Another planned community, sort of

Last night I was out at Cannonsgate which is a large planned community on North Carolina's Crystal Coast between Morehead City and Cape Carteret.

The sun was setting as I was driving out of the development, and I stopped to snap this picture just after the sun disappeared.

It happened to be the lake behind a client's lot, and I thought she would enjoy seeing the shot.

While Cannonsgate is no Reston, it still is pretty impressive as a sound side community on Bogue Sound near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  It is just off of the Intracoastal Waterway.  There are no homes yet in Cannonsgate so it is fun driving around and imagining what is will look like five years from now.

The first homes are planned to start just after the first of the year.  We are all eagerly awaiting the first finished homes.

Reston, of course is a planned community on a large scale.  We lived in Columbia, Maryland which was done by Rouse. I always heard that the mistakes in Columbia led to some of things that I like the most about Reston.

The "Town Center" of Columbia seemed to be the food court in the Mall in spite of efforts to make it over at the lake.  I love Reston's Town Center though I worry about parking and access since the density of settlement in Reston is impressive.

While living in Columbia, I can remember driving by a five acre block of woods only to find it gone when I came home in the evening.  We enjoyed Columbia, but we did not find it a particularly great place to raise kids.  The idea that all the kids would walk to neighborhood schools was great except that only a couple of families on our street including us sent their kids to public schools.

I also found it sort of weird that you often had to leave Columbia to get many of the services that you needed.  There were no auto dealerships.  They had all been consigned to Laurel.  Of course if you live in Reston you will end up going to Tyson's or Dulles for your car needs also.

I just heard that the neighborhood Giant over on North Shore will be closing.  That's the unfortunate thing about planned communities, you cannot plan for corporate policy changes.  A neighborhood grocery store is one of the things that makes a community.

As usual the excuse is that the company does not want any stores smaller than a certain size.   I have been in that store a number of times, it is always busy, and I cannot believe that it would be unprofitable.

While the same thing happens in unplanned communities, we just lost a local hardware store in Roanoke, Va., I think it is harder to recover in a planned community.  I know the same little mall on North Shore where the Giant is closing has a shuttered Burger King that hasn't found a second life.

While the plans in Reston have turned out one of the best planned communities around, nothing is ever perfect.  I will be interested in seeing which get filled first the empty hardware store in Roanoke or the empty grocery store in Reston.