Russell Mosely remembers driving around the massive tracts of farmland that his grandfather, U.S. Sen. Russell Long, owned in what were then the boonies of south Baton Rouge—an area roughly sandwiched between Airline and Old Jefferson highways.
The revered federal legislator, son of the legendary Huey P. Long, had gradually acquired more than 500 acres of property throughout the 1960s, and often shared with his teenage grandson his dreams of one day developing it into something really unique for Baton Rouge.
“He always wanted to do a development on this property,” says Mosely, 34, a real estate attorney. “He knew it had potential to have office, retail and residential because of its location. He just decided to wait.”
Now Mosely is hoping to fulfill the dreams of his grandfather, who died in 2003. This month, he unveils plans for a traditional neighborhood development unlike any other currently under way in the Capital Region. It is called, appropriately, Long Farm, and at 237 acres will be larger and include more elements of a full-scale TND—with its mix of office, retail and residential in a variety of price points—than any of the smaller, mostly infill developments currently in the planning or construction stages around Baton Rouge.
“It’s really different than anything else around here in its size and scope,” says architect Mike Sullivan, whose firm Looney Ricks Kiss is designing the development. “The closest comparison would be to River Ranch in Lafayette.”
It’s an ambitious project for an overbuilt market in a recession-battered economy. But Mosely is taking a long-term approach to developing Long Farm, and has the luxury of time on his side. Because his family owns the property, he has structured a deal that enables him to acquire and develop the land piecemeal, unconstrained by carrying costs.
Still, Mosely has his work cut out for him. Experts familiar with the challenges of TND development say building on family-owned land gives the project a leg up, but it doesn’t guarantee success. The key, they say, will be to quickly construct enough elements of the TND to immediately create a distinct sense of community in a project that by its very nature will take 10 to 20 years to develop.
“It takes more than just owning the land,” says TND guru Robert Daigle, the managing partner of River Ranch Development Company, who developed that project in the late 1990s. “It still takes putting together the dollars to create that partial sense of place right off the bat in the first phase. That will be the challenge this development faces.”
History lesson
Mosely is young, energetic and driven; he has already invested four years of his life getting to the launch pad. Perhaps most important, he is committed to this project for what will essentially be the better part of his career. He’s looking 20 years into the future and wants to create a legacy for his family and for Baton Rouge.
“I want this to be something really special for Baton Rouge,” he says. “My grandfather loved this way too much for it not to be special.”
It’s easy to understand why Long loved the property.
It’s peaceful and picturesque, with lush pastures and scattered stands of live oaks, and feels a world away from the city that’s just a few miles down the highway. Long used the property and the farmhouse that sits on it as his local residence. It served as his getaway from Capitol Hill, where he chaired the powerful Senate Finance Committee in the 1960s and 1970s.
The farmhouse still sits on the property, a comfortable but modest 1950s-era ranch surrounded by oaks and camellias and flanked by a patio and swimming pool. Long’s former driver, Henry Heltz, a retired 83-year-old state trooper who worked under four sitting Louisiana governors, now lives in the house and might remain there after Long Farm is developed [see related story, page 28].
Mosely intends to keep the house, along with six-and-a-half acres surrounding it, as private property. It will give his family, with its prominent place in Louisiana’s colorful political past, an ongoing connection to the development, while representing a unique historical identity.
“We do projects around the country where we have to make up stories to create a sense of place,” Sullivan says. “What we love about this project is we didn’t have to make up a story. Russell already had that in the mix.”
The story goes back to 1961, when Long began acquiring property in the area, eight tracts in all that took 10 transactions over more than 10 years to complete. When all was said and done, he owned 550 acres roughly bordered by Airline and Old Jefferson highways, Antioch Road and the old Briarwood Golf Club.
His original vision for the property was to develop a golfing community with nearby retail, something along the lines of Santa Maria or Country Club of Louisiana. At one point in the 1980s, he went so far as to invite an associate of Arnold Palmer’s to view the land and draw some sketches. But he ultimately held off.
“Part of it was that he was just too busy doing other things,” Mosely says. “But I think part of it was that he really enjoyed the property and loved it the way it was.”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Long sold some of the land, and he donated another 70 acres on Old Jefferson Highway to Most Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church for the construction of a larger sanctuary. When he died in 2003, he left a total of 480 acres to his family. Mosely has always had an interest in the property and began seriously thinking of developing it about five years ago, just as the acronym TND was working its way into common parlance.
“When I first started exploring the concept, I tried to find property to develop and couldn’t find anything that would give me the ability to do this many acres,” Mosely says. “And I really was impressed with the TND approach and walkable communities.”
Mosely arranged to purchase the property from an LLC the family had created, and he spent the next four years researching and planning. During this period, he hired LRK, which has designed several TNDs around the country and consulted on dozens more.
Last fall, he received approval from the Metro Council to zone 237 acres for Planned Use Development. He chose PUD zoning over TND because the former gives him more flexibility to develop the property in response to changing market conditions than a schematic design would.
“With PUD zoning we can do a mix depending on what the market is,” Mosely says. “TND deadlines are very stringent and there isn’t as much flexibility. With a PUD we have more options.”
While the zoning might be PUD, as plans exist now the development concept for Long Farm is pure TND, with strict design guidelines that borrow heavily from French colonial/Acadian and classical vernacular architecture. Plans call for seven neighborhoods, each with a distinct feel; three wetlands areas with boardwalks and walking trails; and four pocket parks, along with a central town green.
Sprinkled throughout in various price points will be 460 single-family homes, 48 townhomes or courtyard homes, 250 condominiums and 285 rental units. Additionally, plans call for 690,000 feet of commercial space and 275 active-adult or assisted-living units. As envisioned, the active adult complex will feature such amenities for residents as a private dining room, art center, fitness facility, ATM machine, indoor pool, salon and a gathering area. Services, including housekeeping, also will be available, and older seniors who need assisted living will be able to purchase a package with a higher level of specialized care.
Such active-adult communities have been successful in other parts of the country, and with an aging population, demand for them is expected to increase. Mosely is looking at developing that part of the project first because he could partner with an established firm that has experience in the field and access to financing. It would be a way to jumpstart the development.
“Whoever can get financing for this active adult/assisted living community would, hypothetically, buy that site and develop it,” he says. “Then we would put guidelines in place with what they could construct.”
But Mosely also is planning to move forward in the first phase with a small area of single-family homes in the $200,000-$350,000 range. Already he has some interest from developers wanting to buy in. If he can secure enough commitments from them, he might concentrate his early efforts on developing those homes first and focus on the active-adult community later.
Not that he will be able to wait very long. Mosely acknowledges that it is critical to the success of a TND to develop elements of an entire community simultaneously. To that end, his first phase will include not only some type of residential but also a park, a pond and a fitness center. He is currently in negotiations with YMCA of the Capital Area and hopes to build a facility on the site.
“We need to build the market and start to get things moving,” he says. “That’s how we can build some synergy.”
Plus signs
Experts say the proposed Long Farm development has several things going for it. For one, it’s located in the fastest-growing part of East Baton Rouge Parish, next to busy Ascension Parish, which also is growing. Signs look good for future growth, too, with Woman’s Hospital resuming construction on its campus about two miles north on Airline Highway as well as plans for an Interstate 10 exit at Pecue Lane.
“That is part of the growth side of Baton Rouge,” LSU economics professor James Richardson says. “So if that growth continues, as anticipated, it’s feasible from a 15-year or long-term perspective.”
Mosely also will be offering homes in a highly sought after TND setting at very reasonable prices. Many so-called New Urbanists, who desire a lifestyle that allows for walkable communities with real neighborhoods, can’t afford to buy in pricey downtown or in the few other TNDs currently under construction. Mosely’s homes, by contrast, will start at around $200,000, at least in the beginning.
“You can’t just have expensive homes,” Richardson says. “You have to have some to accommodate middle incomes as well. Anything in the range of $200,000-$350,000 would be affordable, and that means people with incomes of $75,000-$100,000 could buy in.”
Because Mosely can be flexible with the development, he requested designs that could withstand changing market conditions. In composing this site plan, architect Sullivan used a model that he characterizes as more “multi-use” than mixed use. Buildings in it are designed to be adaptable, so even though their general appearance will not change, the purpose they serve might, depending on demand.
“We can design multi-family that has a commercial feel on the ground floor, but it will have residential above,” Sullivan says. “We’ve tested the block usage to plug out three different uses for each one so that, depending on which financing market flips first, we can respond accordingly.”
Finally, since the property is family owned, even though Mosely is paying what he says is fair-market value for it, he doesn’t have to purchase it all at once and be saddled with the debt. That’s important.
“A lot of the TNDs we’ve been involved with have a tendency to go south or cave because they don’t have the wherewithal, because they still have the carrying costs,” says Jim Manskey, a principal with TBG Partners in Dallas, which specializes in TND design. “Not having those carrying costs will help.”
Minus signs
Those are the pros. There are cons, too. Because many sectors of the housing market are overbuilt, financing is hard to come by and the economy is still struggling. In short, this isn’t an ideal time to be doing a development like Long Farm.
“There aren’t many dollars out there, and the banks are wary,” says River Ranch’s Daigle, adding that even homes in the $250,000-$300,000 range are sitting on the market for a long time. He points to Sugar Mill Pond, a TND he developed in Youngsville, near Lafayette, where he has recently reduced the price of single-family homes to less than $200,000.
“If you look at the East Baton Rouge Parish MLS, your absorption rate goes way down once you get above $250,000,” he says. “So even [building] homes in the $250,000-$350,000 range is something I’m not comfortable with.”
Then there’s the fact that even if market conditions improve by the time Mosely is ready to start building homes at Long Farm, the rate of absorption for TNDs is typically much slower than in more traditional subdivisions.
“The TND’s premise is that you have a hierarchy of values within each neighborhood, so you provide a more diverse offering to the market,” Manskey says. “But that slows your pace—and it’s not going to be a mainstream pace, especially in what is a recessionary market.”
Manskey also cautions that concentrating early on the active-adult community could be risky. Retirement communities are inherently designed to be somewhat segregated from other neighborhoods, a dynamic that flies in the face of what TNDs are all about.
“When you look at an active-adult community, the market guys will tell you that it has to be sequestered, provide all its own amenities and be self-contained,” he says. “That’s a bit of an oxymoron for a TND, which is a truly integrated neighborhood and which would weave the active adult buyer into the fabric of the neighborhood.”
Sullivan and Mosely say Long Farm will integrate its active-adult community into the greater development. They’re convinced that adults in the 55-and-older market really want an integrated community, as evidenced by the success of several retirement communities around the country built on college campuses, such as Capstone Village at the University of Alabama. They also note their plans entail the development of other elements around the active-adult neighborhood.
“Our plans allow us to do active-adult community along with a little bit of office and retail across the street and also some single-family cottages and the YMCA,” Sullivan says. “So right there, without having to go the length of the boulevard, you’ve got all those parts and pieces at that intersection.”
Observers say building enough of those little pieces and parts all at once before there’s any real revenue stream will be the biggest challenge in developing Long Farm, as it is with developing any TND.
“What makes them tick and what sets them up for long-term success is creating that sense of place in the early phases,” Daigle says. “I’ve seen too many people throw down some streets and allow the builders to throw down houses, and for the first five years they don’t have any characteristics of a true TND.
It also will be important to integrate the planning and design and to concentrate on whole blocks and neighborhoods at a time, according to Manskey.
“One of the true aspects of TND is that you don’t have a starter home neighborhood over here and a fancier neighborhood there,” he says. “You have the larger lots on the corner and the smaller and mid-price homes in the middle of the block. So you really have to concentrate on the whole thing at once.”
Sullivan and Mosely acknowledge that reality of TND development and say their plans are designed for them to develop in that manner. The difficulty will come with financing. But Mosely is optimistic that by bringing in various partners to help him build out different segments of the project, he will have access to capital markets that might not otherwise be open to him. He also is bullish on the economy and its chances for a recovery.
Even if it’s slow going at first, however, Mosely is committed to the project for the long term. It’s what his grandfather envisioned.
“He wanted it to be something special,” Mosely says. “He loved it way too much for it not to be something wonderful.”
