Welcome to Part 2 of our neighborhood development blog. Last week, we addressed a couple of concerns about traffic and density being added to an established community. If you haven’t read it, you can check it out here.

Today, I’d like to discuss a few more concerns that residents often have when the farm next door gets sold to a developer like us.

Let’s face it. Nobody ever seems to want any new homes in the field next door. That’s totally understandable.

But as things always go, eventually those inner-city properties will be developed. You as a neighbor have a right to be concerned and involved. So lets discuss a few more items that you might be considering, or might want to consider.

Concerned about a new 55+ Active Adult Communities coming into your neighborhood?

Parking

We recently attended a zoning meeting where a concerned resident asked about the parking. The concern was, that in a project like ours, would there be enough parking for the home-owners and their guests.

Luckily, we’ve been doing this for many years now, and we’ve addressed the question of parking quite well. In our 55+ communities, even guests have enough room to park without overflowing into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Part of this is planning on our end, but part of it is also the demographic that we serve. While many of our homeowners receive occasion guests, the majority of our homeowners have fewer cars on average. With each having a double car garage, plus two spaces in their driveway, and additional parking by the clubhouse and street-side parking within the community, there always seems to be enough parking for everyone.

Other neighborhoods I’ve seen in the past, haven’t been so well contained. I know of one new neighborhood, not ours, that built townhomes that were often rented out to college students. While they too should’ve had enough parking, their demographics encouraged too many people to break the city ordinances and over-occupy many of the homes in that subdivision. This caused overflowing cars to park on the surrounding neighborhoods.

So yes, parking is a valid concern. Luckily, our senior communities are well designed to accommodate all necessary parking for residents and visitors.

Visual aesthetics

Property rights are a funny thing. Our founding fathers were adamant about preserving property rights. This is one of the major parts of the Constitution. Among those rights are the ability of a property owner to use their property as they see fit.

Naturally, there has to be some restrictions on this.

Zoning and planning are among the restrictions placed on property use. This is a good thing. There has to be limits or else city infrastructure will be strained or underdeveloped.

There’s also a trend lately, to impose design standards for what someone puts on their property. This one is a little more iffy. I’m personally not opposed to some design standards, but there should be limits to what a government can demand. I wonder at what point does a city violate a property owner’s rights when they start dictating every facet of building’s visual appearance.

In any case, we’ve all seen those developments that look horrendous. Some of them are even brand-new subdivisions. Granted, most of those are catered to first-time home buyers, so they’re trying to keep the costs as low as possible.

While there are often many ugly homes out there, we tend to associate ugly with higher density. This is a little unfair.

For instance, we build higher density communities. Granted, our communities aren’t a lot more dense than a standard single-family-home subdivision, still, many people might be concerned that we too would just slap some piece of garbage on a newly developed piece of land. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

We’re selling to retirees, not first-time home-buyers. Our buyers have higher expectations. They don’t want to live in an ugly community. So we put a lot of effort into designing beautiful homes, inside and out.

Our landscaping is rarely outclassed by any other community, and since it’s managed by an HOA, it stays nice too.

I’ve often looked at our communities and thought of them as parks, with ramblers homes. All the land between the homes is common ground, and so the greenspace isn’t fettered with lots of mismatched fences and lawn garbage.

In short, our communities look amazing! The landscaping is great, and so are the exterior treatments of the homes.

Of all the builders

There’s a lot of builders out there. With some of them, you know what you’re getting. With others, you have no idea.

We are one of those builders with a proven track record spanning about two decades now. With us, you can be sure that we won’t hurt your neighborhood. Most likely, we’ll take that farm, or vacant land, and turn it into a low traffic community that is beautiful and gives grandma and grandpa a place to retire to.

These are people like you, people like your parents. We strive to build without stairs, and to provide warm receptive places for them to enjoy an active lifestyle throughout their retirement.

If a property near you is set for development, you couldn’t go wrong with Leisure Villas Community. It would be hard to say the same for a lot of other types of developments of similar or even of less density.