Can U.S. planned communities become diverse? The case of industry-leading master-planned communities in five metro areas

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe history of master-planned community (MPC) development is inseparable from the history of race- and class-based discrimination and segregation in the United States. This paper investigates the place of exclusion and inclusion in planned community development practice. We undertook qualitative and quantitative analyses of the MPC development practice from the 1990s to the present. Through archival analysis and interviews, we demonstrate that, beginning in the early 2000s, MPC developers started to embrace diversity for financial success. We further confirm this trend by quantitatively analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data. We find that MPCs built since 2000 are racially and ethnically more diverse than their predecessors, with greater emphasis on middle-income households. Based on these findings, we carefully posit that American MPCs are moving toward greater diversity, a clear departure from their history of exclusion. We conclude with policy implications for various levels of the government to take advantage of this trend.KEYWORDS: Master-planned communitiesmixed methods researchdiversity AcknowledgmentsWe thank the four anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions that allowed us to improve the paper significantly. We would also like to thank Jason Reece and the other participants of the pre-organized paper session on equitable developments at the 2022 ACSP conference for their helpful feedback on the earlier version of the paper. We thank the ULI staff and other anonymous interviewees who have generously offered their time, expertise, and knowledge. Data collection and interviewee recruitment for this paper benefitted from a previous research project conducted by Minjee Kim for the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing. This research was conducted when Hyojung Lee was an assistant professor at Virginia Tech and was partially supported by the Niles Faculty Research Grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplementary materialSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2023.2260026.Notes1. However, Glotzer (Citation2020, p. 185) also documented that Rouse established his career by enforcing and profiting from discriminatory lending practices. The discrepancies in his earlier and later practices embody the shifts in community development practice of the 1950s.2. Several laws preceded the New Communities Act of 1970. However, the earlier legislations provided limited financial support and thus did not prove effective in kickstarting new communities (Burby & Weiss, Citation1976, pp. 59–60).3. RCLCO is a real estate consulting firm widely recognized as one of the most authoritative by industry professionals.4. Given the geographic proximity and close social and economic ties, we combined the Los Angeles metropolitan statistical area (MSA) with Riverside MSA, and Miami MSA with Port St. Lucie MSA. The official titles of the selected metropolitan statistical areas are “Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX,” “Las Vegas-Paradise, NV,” “Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA,” “Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL,” “Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ,” “Port St. Lucie, FL,” and “Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA.”5. We used lists of best-selling MPCs published by RCLCO, expanded to include the Top 50 best-selling lists, and John Burns Research and Consulting. We also used a comprehensive list of MPCs collected by ULI in 1992.6. The interviewee pool comprised five women, 18 men, and two groups, all presumably White. These interviews were conducted between February 2022 and April 2023.7. Following previous studies (Frey, Citation2012; Lacy, Citation2016; Logan, Citation2001), we defined suburban neighborhoods as census tracts that are within an MSAs but outside each MSA’s largest principal city or up to three principal cities, if they have 100,000 or more residents; Moreover, this definition of suburbs implies that smaller MPCs are included. This means that our findings may be downwardly biased if the smaller MPCs have characteristics similar to those in our sample.8. While we only present the results from the first 10 years of development, the findings at later development stages were qualitatively consistent. The results at 10–19 years and 20–29 years since build-out are shown in Appendix Tables A-2 and A-3, respectively.9. The results for all five metropolitan areas are shown in Appendix Table C-1.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMinjee KimMinjee Kim is an assistant professor at Florida State University’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She earned her PhD and master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has multiple years of experience working in local governments including the cities of Boston and Cambridge. She studies the relationship between real estate development and urban planning and writes about land value capture, large-scale real estate developments, exactions, negotiated developments, and equitable growth. She strives to identify how planners and policymakers can harness the forces of real estate development to further progressive planning values and encourage equitable development outcomes.Hyojung LeeHyojung Lee is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Seoul National University. His research has focused on the impacts of demographic change on housing markets, the consequences of neighborhood change for urban policy, and the jointness of mobility, residential location, and housing tenure choice. Prior to joining the school, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University and an assistant professor of housing and property management at Virginia Tech. He received a PhD in urban planning and development and a master of planning from the University of Southern California and a BS and a MS in civil and environmental engineering from Seoul National University.