A little more than a decade ago, its reputation was so bad that it was declared off-limits to nearby US Navy personnel. Today the 100-acre parcel on a stretch of Norfolk, Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay shoreline is raising the bar for the rest of city’s bay front.

East Beach is a traditional neighborhood development designed by New-Urbanist master planner Duany Plater-Zyberk. Through a risk-sharing, pubic/private partnership with the City, the multi-phased development preserves and enhances natural features of the site and sets high standards for the quality of its homes. Its innovative design protects and enhances existing mature trees and maintains a community-wide connectivity with the

Chesapeake through a network of pedestrian-friendly streets and public parks, paths and bay front greens.

Early on, Norfolk Mayor Paul D. Fraim stated that the goal was to take the worst of the worst and make it the best of the best.

“That’s almost a mantra to us,” Rock Bell, general manager of East Beach Company, LLC., developer of the project. “We think daily, ‘How can we make this a better place?’”

East Beach broke ground in 2003. With 65 percent of the neighborhood’s single-family homes built, plans are in the works for retail shops and restaurants. Completion is expected in 2011.

Homes are selling on average for 32 percent more than the typically-designed adjacent subdivision development, despite the fact that they enjoy the same beach, marinas, restaurants, and are the same general housing types and sizes.

Blighted past
Ocean view is a 4.5-mile stretch of Norfolk’s shoreline facing Chesapeake Bay as it opens to the Atlantic Ocean. East Beach, formerly known at East Ocean View, occupies the scenic beach on its eastern end.

Once home to a popular amusement park, a lack of zoning regulation following World War II sped a downward trend as the area devolved into a haven for drug pushers and prostitutes. East Ocean View was the worst. Of its 1600 housing units, all but 22 were owned by absentee landlords, who offered by-the-week or by-the-day rates to its transient population, according to Bell.

“As a result, the housing stock slid into disrepair. A lot of it was very poorly built to begin with. The roads were narrow and haphazardly maintained as was the rest of the infrastructure,” he said.

In 1987 the City of Norfolk commissioned the Urban Land Institute (ULI) to do a study of the Ocean View corridor to see what could be done to reverse its decline. Though identifying a few choicer areas that held the potential for redevelopment, it ignored East Ocean View as being too far gone. The theory was to concentrate on those areas that could be more readily improved.

ULI was asked to do another study in 1998 and came to a different conclusion.

“They basically said, ‘The eastern part of Ocean View is so bad, you have to fix it, and you have to fix it soon,’” Bell said.

Develop a plan, work the plan
The City enjoyed a long relationship with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Urban Design Associates (UDA) – world-class talent who the City called in to create a master plan for the new neighborhood. UDA in turn recommended noted New Urbanist design firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. to design the neighborhood.

The new design contained two master-strokes, according to Bart Frye, managing partner of East Beach Company. One was that the entire street grid was shifted, which brought stands of mature, backyard trees onto the streetscape.

“We instantly had 50- to 90-year old oak trees right on the streetscape that we could form linear parks and amenities around. Immediately the place looked like it had been here for a long time,” he said.

The second was to bringing into play the concept of bayfront greens. At the head of every north-south street are open spaces of 50- to 120-feet wide that form parks on the bay. These not only allow people free and open access where they can spend the day or take a walk, creating a connection to the bay front. The greens also created view corridors hundreds of feet into the neighborhood.

“You can be sitting on your porch that can be literally 700 feet back from the bay and have a view of the water,” Frye said. “That has helped the price of the lots appreciate considerably, and it’s something that people really enjoy—a view without a wall of houses blocking the bay front.”

A total of 15 percent (15 acres) of the East Beach neighborhood has been dedicated to parks and programmed open space resulting in over 70 percent of the homes having a view of a park.

Meanwhile, the road infrastructure progressively changes through the neighborhood with four distinct transitions. At the south end, around the marinas, the streets are linear, with full-height curbs, linear sidewalks, with a decidedly urban feel. By the time one reaches  the north end at the bay, they have evolved into a very casual feel, with narrow, meandering streets. The sidewalks have gone away and the curbs are flush with the street, and the on-street parking aisles have transitioned from asphalt to gravel.

“The streets go from very formal to very casual. It’s one of those imperceptible things, but I really think it establishes a sense of where you are in the community,” Bell said.

Distinctive architecture
East Beach is being done completely without production builders.

“For this particular neighborhood, we wanted to use builders who are constructing four-to-12 houses a year, that have great customer service, and who are willing to customize the houses to customers’ needs,” Bell said. Four architectural styles were chosen: (Victorian, Arts and Crafts, Colonial Revival, and Tidewater Shingle). “As long as they build a home that is true to one of those architectural styles, they can build any size or kind of house they want.”

UDA was charged with creating the East Beach Pattern Book, a detailed document which is used by a full-time Town Architect, and a design review committee to assure the guidelines and exterior finishing standards are maintained, in both design and construction of the homes.  The Pattern Book not only contains all of the details of each architectural style, but it also explains how they interrelate to each other.

“What it does is allow the architect or the designer to use all the imagination that they possess to create a place that conforms with their client’s wishes, that is also historically accurate,” Frye said. “It adds up to a streetscape that you would not get when somebody takes a collection of architectural details  and throws them together without understand how they all affect each other.”

City support
The effort to reverse the downward spiral has had a champion on the Norfolk City Council in Randy Wright, who led the charge for the City to invest $50 million to acquire property and revitalize the area. To maintain greater control over the project, the City opted not to go after federal funds, but to obtain financing from a local bank to fund the rehab project.

“From the beginning, Councilman Wright has insisted that everything be done first class,” Bell said. He points to a three-year battle early on to change a Virginia DOT plan for a bridge replacement that connects to a main roadway through East Beach. The State favored a standard, concrete span.

Instead, Wright pushed for one that featured steel-arch supports, with topside brick pavers, treeway wells, and Colonial lantern heads.

“That set the tone that clearly stated ‘This was not going to be business as usual in developing this place,’” Frye said. Such support became contagious. Not a single “no” vote from the City has impeded development of the East Beach project.

The return on the City’s investment is significant in a number of areas.

Before the development, East Ocean View cost the City of Norfolk an estimated $2 million to $2.5 million a year to provide police, fire, and social services. At full build out, it is expected to generate between $6 million and $6.5 million a year in positive tax revenue.

“That’s an $8.5 to $9 million swing in property taxes, which justified the City’s $50 million investment on that basis alone. You take that deal to Wall Street and they’d jump on it,” Bell said.

Further, the development has had a very positive impact on the rest of Ocean View, where property values had risen two to three times over the past six years.

“As far as the surrounding real estate market, when we opened in 2004, all the really good deals on property within three miles of here were gone.

Everybody who knew what we were doing had gone in and bought those parcels,” Bell said.

Shared risk
Some bad experiences in the past made the City cautious about how it sold the property. In some cases, the developer defaulted or otherwise failed to deliver. Meanwhile, a developer would be cautious about committing to a multi-million dollar redevelopment of a property with a well-established bad reputation. The City of Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority and East Beach Company, LLC arrived at a compromise that spreads the risk.

The 100-acre project was divided into seven phases, with a separate development agreement for each, which requires both parties to agree before moving forward.

“It’s a great system of checks-and-balances that prevents either party from sticking their neck out too far,” Frye said. There was considerable concern initially that there would be difficulty attracting buyers to a densely-designed New Urbanist neighborhood in an area that was formerly a slum.

Thus far, those concerns have proved baseless.

“Homes are averaging $852,000. Bayfront property notwithstanding, we have plenty of properties that are selling for well over $1 million that are hundreds of feet from the bay,” Bell said.

Another key provision is the sales price of the land. The City did not want to sell the land for too little, which would draw the ire of the taxpayers whose dollars backed the GO bonds that purchased the property. The developer was similarly concerned about over-paying for the land.

Rather than setting a price, the City set a minimum figure that it had to get back to break even, which would be paid at full build out.

“At each closing, we deliver 20-percent of the gross proceeds of the lot back to the City,” adds Frye. “If we sell land for more than it was originally estimated, then the Housing Authority gains from that, which makes them very much our partner in our financial success.  We estimate they will be paid over 40 percent more for the land than the minimum price under this arrangement.”

The bottom line
People like it in East Beach.

“You can do all the lifestyle advertising you want, but there is no better sales tool than to have a perspective buyer go through, stop and talk to somebody on the street and ask, ‘What do you think of it here?’” Bell said. “People tell them they absolutely love it.”

It’s a very social neighborhood where cocktail parties and impromptu barbeques pop up frequently. It’s an effect, according to Bell, that is directly related to the design and layout of the place, the placement of the houses around the parks, the size of the blocks that increase pedestrian connectivity—“all these little things that we’ve put done have gone together to make a place that has a real sense of community.”

“After being in the development industry for all these years, I’ve never seen a place where people are so uniformly happy to be where they are,” said Frye. “To me, it’s the ultimate litmus test of whether we have been successful or not.” SLDT