PUDs are taking over.
No one can escape.
Slowly and quietly they have entered the city and suburbs, their steady advance making them the dominant force shaping real estate development.
But planned unit developments, PUDs for short, have come as a welcome addition rather than an uninvited intruder. PUDs, urban planners note, have made development a more flexible process and in the bargain given a more open and varied look to the environment.
Especially in residential construction, PUDs have opened opportunities that would never have been possible under the more stringent subdivision rules that governed city and suburban growth prior to World War II.
”The major importance of PUDs is the flexibility to both the community and the developer,” said Rodney Cobb, a law and planning expert with the Chicago-based American Planning Association.
”People in the suburbs grew unhappy with grid development; they grew tired of the block-by-block patterns of the city. The PUD, mainly by concentrating densities in specific areas of a site, allowed developers the economics they needed while allowing the public to preserve open and natural areas,” he said.
Although the concept of planned communities emerged just after the war, the idea didn`t really catch hold until the late 1960s and didn`t blossom until the late `70s. Originally planned unit developments were designed to apply to large-scale, mixed-use projects.
But the concept today has become so pervasive that even smaller, traditional subdivision-style housing projects are carried out under PUD guidelines. In Chicago all new projects, from the $3 billion Chicago Dock property redevelopment on down, must be PUDs.
The earliest planned unit development was not called that at the time. South suburban Park Forest, acknowledged as the country`s first post-World War II planned community, resembles a gigantic PUD by the winding layout of its streets around a central shopping district. But since the whole town was carved out of cornfields, there was no municipal government to lend input to the development.
”The PUD definition would fit Park Forest if it had been developed within that context, but PUD is a relatively new concept with regard to zoning that refers to a specific kind of development ordinance (that didn`t exist when Park Forest was built),” said Park Forest planner Barbara Berlin.
”The PUD is a negotiated process between the developer and the municipality. And that`s one of the controversies that has surrounded the concept: How much does a community exact from a developer in negotiating the PUD,” Berlin said.
”There is a lot more public input into the process because the plans go through a public review rather than just through a zoning administrator. So a developer`s negotiating skill in convincing a public body of the plan`s merits is more important,” she said. ”But the PUD allows for more creative development without the rigid standards of the old subdivision rules, and a well-used PUD can be a much better development than any other type.”
When the housing boom hit that spawned Park Forest as well as Chicago`s other suburbs, most towns were operating under subdivision rules as the city was. But state law gives municipalities broad power over zoning and planning regulation and it wasn`t long before suburban officials, confronting a variety of situations unique to their wide-open expanses, began searching for new ways to govern land development.
”Zoning had been a straitjacket of categorizing districts either residential, commercial or manufacturing,” said David Mosena, deputy commissioner in Chicago`s Department of Planning. ”But what happened when a suburb had 200 acres on a beautiful lake with a stand of trees and its cookie- cutter ordinances completely ignored that beauty? The PUD allowed a variety of layout or site designs that could take advantage of those unique environmental aspects.”
”There was more stimulus at first from the public sector, but some developers began pushing PUDs, too, as a way to take advantage of natural settings,” said Mosena, also a former APA official who coauthored early PUD studies for the association. ”PUDs turned out to be better from both the public and private sides. They provide more interesting design, better layout of roads and better use of odd sites.”
”If there is any down side, it`s when you go from the rigid subdivision format to the negotiated PUD it can take a lot longer to gain approval and cost developers that way,” he said. ”But most good developers say they get a more innovative product with the PUD than in the past.”
One natural amenity that has spurred a number of creative PUDs is the golf course. Mission Hills Country Club Village in north suburban Northbrook is one of the better-known examples and serves to illustrate how a planned unit development can work.
The 144-acre project contains nearly 1,000 condominium and townhouse units on just 10.5 acres. The clustering of the housing units around the layout of the course, which under strict subdivision rules would cause unacceptably high population concentrations, was granted in a PUD that maintained overall low densities and preserved the natural open space of the golf course while giving developers an economical return on their investment. An identical strategy is being proposed in Glendale Heights for the planned $50 million Glendale Lakes residential development. Robin Hill Development Corp. is asking the Du Page County Village to approve a PUD for up to 116 single-family homes and 891 multifamily units on a 165-acre site. In exchange, developers will donate 100 of the acres to the village for development as a golf course.
”The housing industry, which grew up around the square block, never really addressed the issue of suburban development. So most people, especially in the Midwest because it is more conservative, had to grow into the PUD idea,” said Robert Olson, president of Oak Brook-based Balsamo/Olson Group, a planning, engineering and architecture firm that has done work for many suburbs and is a consultant on Glendale Lakes.
Olson said the PUD has had the most impact on multifamily projects, where subdivision rules forbidding the clustering of units as has been proposed for Glendale Lakes would prevent the most interesting uses of suburban topography. ”A PUD satisfies the need by developers to operate on a longer term and a larger scale,” said Chuck Kincaid, manager of planning for Aurora Venture, co-developer of the 4,300-acre Fox Valley Villages project in west suburban Aurora, perhaps the largest planned development in the state.
”It allowed us to develop a master plan for schools and parks and provided the flexibility we had to have,” he said. ”We felt it was important to get everything on the table at first, to get the basic ground rules down about how much of the project would be commercial/residential/industrial. But we didn`t want to get tied to the specific types of housing with how many bedrooms we`d be building.”
Kincaid said that the PUD designation has benefitted residents in that the developer has doubled the mandated 5.5 acres.
