THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608120171
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KAREN WEINTRAUB, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 221 lines
Dickie Foster has a great idea for a real estate development. Almost everyone agrees on that.
Foster, a Virginia Beach developer with a reputation for quality, wants to build as many as 900 homes for older adults in a community where they can spend their golden years surrounded by greenery with easy access to friends and services.
So why is the Virginia Beach City Council, which warmly embraces his concept, so likely to scuttle Foster's development?
It's a problem of location.
Foster's site is south of the no-growth Green Line, in an area the city has set aside for open spaces and farmland preservation. Foster wants the city to let him increase the density permitted on his land more than tenfold and allow him to extend water, sewer and private roads across the rural divide.
If built, Foster's project, named Coastal Green, could threaten a new, $87 million program meant to encourage farmers in the southern half of the city not to grow houses on their cropland.
And city officials worry it could open the door to the type of endless development that upsets residents in the northern half of Virginia Beach.
Still, the council is struggling with its decision.
To block the project, city leaders would have to buck another string of Virginia Beach goals.
Coastal Green would bring top quality development to a city often criticized for uninspired projects. It includes a premier golf course, something city leaders want to attract tourists away from Myrtle Beach. It would not tax the school system, and could encourage people of all generations to make Virginia Beach their home.
This Catch-22 has stalled the project for almost a year, limiting discussions to private meetings between lobbyists and the lobbied. But Foster is getting tired of waiting and wants to know soon whether the council will give him its blessing.
Foster, 53, lives on a huge, gorgeous lot overlooking Lynnhaven Bay. When he discusses his plans, he has a passion in his voice that makes him hard to contradict.
He says he's more encouraged than turned off by the hurdles facing Coastal Green. He's convinced it would be good for the city and will therefore be approved in the long run.
At the crux of Foster's plan is the idea that today, many baby boomers like him help care for their parents. They want their aging mothers and fathers to be comfortable, well-cared for, and close by, but they also want their own lives.
Foster said he modeled the project on his relationship with his next-door neighbor: the 76-year-old mother of his wife, Judy.
Evelyn Hardison lives in a comfortable one-story house, connected by a path to Foster's side yard. She has company when she needs it; and privacy when she wants that.
Foster bought Hardison a golf cart to tool around in. She uses it to climb hills without getting winded, scoot between her house and her daughter's without wearing out, and get around without being a burden. Her grandchildren love to sit in her lap and pretend to drive.
``This golf cart, it sounds like a very minor thing,'' said Hardison, whose Christmas wish-list last year included new tires, ``but it's meant the world to me.''
Hardison, who worked for an import broker until her first stroke 18 years ago, is nearly blind in one eye now and just recovering from a long illness, but she can still enjoy a sunny day, the backyard rabbits, the bay's pelicans, and her carefully tended caladium, irises and peonies, transplanted from her mother's garden.
``If I had not lived here and had someone to care, I don't believe I'd be here today,'' she said. ``It's real nice to wake up each morning now.''
But Hardison's lifestyle doesn't give her much access to her friends, most of whom don't drive anymore, especially at night. And the nearest stores are too far up busy roads to reach by golf cart.
At Coastal Green, Foster thinks he can solve Hardison's problems and reproduce the best aspects of their lives for others.
The 900-acre property, bounded by Indian River Road to the north and the North Landing River to the south, would be centered on a top-of-the-line public golf course designed by golf legend Arnold Palmer. More agile residents could while away their free time on the links, while others could spend their afternoons cruising along scenic paths in their motorized carts.
Housing options would range from one-story homes to assisted-living apartments.
There would be a few shops clustered in the center and plenty of friends and family close by. Children and grandchildren would love to come for golf games and rides, Foster predicts.
But the young ones wouldn't be able to live at Coastal Green, which would be restricted to residents more than 55 years old.
That's why Foster thinks the council members will eventually approve his plans - because he's already addressed almost all the objections they could raise. Coastal Green residents would pay far more in taxes than they would need in services, Foster says.
Without children on site, the project won't add to the public school system's burden.
Foster has said he won't ask the city to build any roads.
He's already paid to run water and sewer lines to Courthouse Estates, his development just across Indian River Road from Coastal Green. By his paying to bring in the utilities, he won't encourage the council to violate its pledge not to use public money to provide services to the rural half of the city.
Foster won't need city water until after the Lake Gaston pipeline is operating.
If the city approves his plan, Foster promises to move 300 units from Courthouse Estates to Coastal Green, meaning those homes will be cut off from young families and there will be even fewer children for Virginia Beach to educate.
And, Foster says his project would not spark more development nearby, because his sewer and water mains - the lifeblood of growth - are only big enough to finish out Courthouse Estates and meet the demands of Coastal Green.
City officials, who desperately want the development, keep asking Foster why he can't just move it north.
Because he couldn't afford to, Foster answers.
The value of the land, now owned by Rock Church, has been limited by the city's preservation efforts and all the wetlands that provide its natural beauty, Foster says. On more developable property, he says, he wouldn't be able to offer so much open space, such a quality golf course, or so few homes.
Although several city leaders said they'd like to retire to a place like Coastal Green, most City Council members said they don't think they'll be willing to approve Foster's plans.
Only two of the council's 11 members said over the past two weeks that they'd definitely vote for the project.
``The irony of this application is that it's everything that the council has talked about as being good in planning for the future of Virginia Beach,'' council member Linwood O. Branch III said Thursday: ``The village concept, adult community, no burden on the schools, positive for the tax base, development that is clustered in one area so that we have open recreational space. The golf course meets another one of the council's needs.''
``However, the location is a problem,'' he said.
The council and Beach citizens need to decide what they really want, and what they're willing to give up to get what they want, Branch said. The council will discuss the project at its annual retreat Aug. 20-21.
``Let's really talk about how do we accomplish our goals,'' he said. ``How do we build a trust where we can look at an application as perhaps a good thing and not set precedent for full-scale development - because nobody wants that.''
The area south of Indian River Road is supposed to be left rural, with only 2,500 homes on approximately 61,000 acres. Under current zoning, Foster would be allowed to build about 70 homes - not even a tenth of what he wants.
Farmers get the room they need to maintain their lifestyle and their industry without having to give up the value of their land or having suburbanites move in next door, complaining about tractors, pesticides and pigs.
The suburbanites, too, say they want that land to stay open. In 17 public meetings held around the city this summer, citizens talked again and again about how much they hate the endless sprawl around them and how much they like the easy access to nature that the southern half of the city now provides.
In conversation after conversation, Beach residents have complained about the failure of their leaders to stop the ugly parade of strip malls and subdivisions across their city. They fault the council for not having enough resolve to turn down projects; for caving in to their friends, the developers; for yielding to politics.
Today's council is far from development-minded.
Council members can lose their jobs in Virginia Beach for getting pro-growth reputations. They voted unanimously to raise taxes to pay for the farmland preservation program, so they don't want to undermine it before it's even had a chance to begin.
Council member Harold Heischober said he likes Foster's plan but can't see himself supporting development south of Indian River Road right now.
``It's a tough one,'' Heischober said. ``We want the golf course, the plan is good, but it's conflicting with something that the council voted for 11 to nothing. That's where we are.''
Planning Commissioner Jan Eliassen said he also thinks the city needs to give farmland preservation a chance to work.
``The Agricultural Reserve Program represents a long-term . . . move to protect our tax base, protect our ability to provide quality education, to protect our open space, and we have to give the (program) enough time to prove itself,'' he said.
Why would farmers give up the right to sell their land for development - as participation in the Agriculture Reserve Program requires - if their land was valuable to big-time developers like Foster, Pungo-area developer Herb Culpepper wondered.
``If your property is worth potentially $20,000 (an acre), why would you take $1,500 for it? You'd have to be a blooming idiot,'' he said.
Culpepper has fought the city for years to allow more houses in the southern half of Virginia Beach, but he doesn't like what he's heard about Foster's plan.
Development in the rural area should be limited to big houses on huge lots, not clusters of homes surrounded by green, Culpepper said. The southern area needs to stay the ``one part of the city where you won't have to worry about having a neighbor at your side,'' he said.
A retirement community is a great idea, Culpepper said, but does it really make sense to put it next to a swamp?
``That would be wonderful for granny,'' Culpepper said, ``if she's got a lot of mosquito repellent.''
Culpepper and others predicted that residents of the southern area wouldn't settle in a place like Coastal Green. Most people live in the south for the space, to keep other people at bay, Culpepper said.
Farmers don't go into retirement communities when they get old, they usually can't afford them, Beach Agriculture Director Louis E. Cullipher said. They move in with younger relatives instead.
But there's no question Virginia Beach needs more retirement communities.
The 1990 Census found 46,750 Beach residents age 55 and up.
There are a few top-of-the-line places in Virginia Beach for affluent seniors, but there's nothing like the retirement communities that blanket south Florida, with reasonable prices and plenty for residents to do.
Planning Commissioner Barbara J. Ferguson said she may have to leave Virginia Beach soon, because she doesn't see this city as a good place to grow old.
``I don't see anything to keep me here when I get to that point in my life,'' she said. ``There's a real lack of opportunity for older folks.''
That's why she strongly supports Foster's project. No matter where it is. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot
Dickie Foster, center, with his wife, Judy, says he modeled his
over-55 community on the relationship he has with his 76-year-old
mother-in-law, Evelyn Hardison, at right.
Maps
The Virginian-Pilot
Graphic
PROJECT'S PROS AND CONS
If the council lets Dickie Foster build his project: It will
endanger an $87 million farmland preservation program; and threaten
to spread sprawl to the southern half of the city.
If the council blocks the plans: It will be turning down the type
of high-quality project it has been trying to attract; the
name-brand golf course it desperately wants for tourists and
citizens; and the sort of retirement community older residents are
clamoring for. by CNB