ARCHITECTURE

10 ft 20 ft
Classic Homes, Windsor, Promontory Pointe, Monument, Colorado, opened in 2011.
First-floor plan (below), Second-floor plan (above). Drawn by Nabila Morales Pérez.
Palmer School District 38, where “students post SAT and
ACT scores well above the national average.” 56 Developed
by Classic Homes, a Colorado Springs based builder,
Promontory opened with fifty lots in 2011, and continues
to offer new build-to-order houses based on 19 floor
plans, with prices ranging from approximately $310,000
to $400,000, as well as re-sales. Plans range from a twobedroom,
two-car garage ranch house (The Amber), to a
six-bedroom, three-car garage duplex (The Sierra), available
in three standard packages: Classic, Renaissance, and
Carefree Living. 57 Based on average home prices of around
$360,000 and an estimated monthly mortgage payment of
around $1,700, their owners probably sit close to the national
median, somewhere between the top 50 and top 40
percent of earners. 58 Equally important for their status as
investors, however, these homeowners are emotional beings:
one testimonial refers to the developers’ agent as a
“home counselor,” who is described as “thorough, conscientious,
detail oriented, amiable, hard working, flexible,
and thoroughly committed to Customer Satisfaction on
every level.” 59 Local banks are listed as preferred lenders.
This is “place-based” development at its most basic, most
functional, and most ubiquitous.
The above cases offer merely a partial sample
of the dominant types of large-scale real estate development
in the United States. They exclude the practices of
small builders, most of which replicate their logics, strategies,
and housing types, at different price points, different
scales, and with local variation. Nor do they include the
range of alternative means for providing housing, from
community land trusts to not-for-profit development to
various governmentally incentivized public-private partnerships.
As an example of the latter, then, consider Via
Verde, a mixed-income affordable housing development,
which has received considerable public attention for the
alternative model that it appears to represent. 60
122 123