Bay Area community brings home an old idea–a neighborhood.
“We were able to get the land base in a city that was so receptive. We designed winding streets, sidewalks separated by curbs, old-fashioned mailboxes, all the things that were designed to make it feel like a charming neighborhood of 50 years ago,” says Merry Sedlak, vice president of marketing for Pulte's Bay Area division.
Pulte's new development has been on the market for a year and a half, and despite the housing slowdown, over 400 new homes have been sold.
“We were designing the community to encourage people to be on the street. If you make the sidewalk wider, you can pass and face the person, you tend to talk and that was one of the things we picked up on,” says John Johnson, vice president of land for Pulte's Bay Area division.
To create a central location, Pulte designed a circle that serves as a town square with houses scattered around it and a community center with a pool in the middle. “We developed a sense of arrival,” Johnson says.
Other big builders have Brentwood in their sights, according to Stirling. Although he declined to name names, he says many builders already own land in the community, and developers are in the process of finishing off lots to sell.
In a year, Brentwood will get the rights to a two-mile stretch of Brentwood Blvd., which is now part of Highway 4. The city plans to redevelop that corridor for single-and multiple-family housing. “There is room for growth,” Maurer says. And Shea Homes just started work on one of its 1,110 unit, active adult communities known as Trilogy.
National and regional builders, such as Ponderosa Homes and DeNova Homes, think Brentwood still looks pretty good, says Joseph Perkins, president and CEO of the Homebuilders Association of Northern California.
“It's not the go-go days of the past several years. But it's still a healthy market,” Perkins says.” In the city of Brentwood, there remains additional developable land. The community is not built-out.”
