Capital Ideas: Gene Townsend

When it comes to business, it helps to know your product inside and out. For local builder and developer, Gene Townsend, the product is a great urban lifestyle.

And from his highly successful and much-touted Printer’s Row development south of Downtown to his role in helping start the Genesee Gardens Co-housing project on Lansing’s Westside, it’s clear he knows his product well.

On a recent early morning, Capital Gains Managing Editor, Brad Garmon, chatted with the urban philosopher-builder in his home element: pulling the occasional weed in the community garden and greeting his fellow urban co-housers as they headed off to jobs as social workers, astronomy professors and librarians.

Gene Townsend: About four years ago it dawned on me that the next logical step in building homes that were more environmentally responsible—once I had extracted all the practical advantage out of the normal building systems [with programs like Energy Star]—was to build where people didn’t have to drive.

Concurrent with that was a realization that the scattered-site, custom-home business was getting over-built. It was increasingly difficult to make money. The business plan and the systems in place for custom building homes were getting so accessible to everybody that there was no competitive advantage in having a lot of knowledge and being particularly good at it.

So I needed another way to build houses. And in the trade magazines there was more and more information about what they call master planned communities.

In 2004, 70 percent of the new homes in the country were already in master planned communities. Mid-Michigan really didn’t have any, or had very few examples of them. We thought, this is so big in the rest of the country and we hadn’t started doing it here.

CG: What are the keys to making urban developments work?

Gene Townsend: Walkability is number one. I always thought that was a throwaway line, but it’s not. Having met the people that bought at Printer’s Row, I know they moved where they did so they could walk. And it’s not just for exercise or to avoid their cars. It’s for stimulation.

And the visual stimuli are denser in the city. A building that was built before World War II is going to have detailing on it that was intended to be seen from the sidewalk; whereas, if you’re walking in Okemos, the detailing on the buildings is meant to be seen from the street at 30 or 35 miles an hour. Walkability is [having] both destinations of genuine value within five blocks . . . and the detailing of the architecture and site plan, so that it’s of interest to pedestrians.

Context: the most successful urban projects are the ones that blend with their environment. That means both physically—people can move from the surrounding areas into the site and through the site—as well as visually, where the buildings reference what’s already there.

Complexity is the idea that people who choose to live in an urban environment are predisposed to complexity in their lives. They interact with wide social circles. The type of people they know have varying interests. They like surprises, and you build that into the land plan. The idea is that you don’t know everything that’s in the environment as you move through it, [and that] makes it interesting to people who would live in cities.

Then there’s the idea of heart. To get people to move into a new living situation, there has to be a way for them to have a story that they can tell. They basically need to justify their decision to other people. The goal is to provide affection and identity. If people can express identity and affection, they can justify living in a new, untried place.

The easiest way to give people the story is with some icon that is the heart or the essence of the development. It can be anything that puts people on the ground through as many times during day as possible—that’s why mixed use is so valuable.
History often plays a role, or a natural feature. If you had a creek running through, you could get the story of that. If you have a historical icon, it’s the history story that you build your heart around.

CG: In such tough economic times, why is this area worth investing in for you?

Gene Townsend: There are two demographic tidal waves coming at the housing business. One is baby boomers that have raised their kids, and they’re sick of mowing the lawn, and they’re looking for more stimulation in their lives that isn’t centered on kids and schools.

The second big tidal wave is people in their 20s who are perhaps rebelling against the suburban experience of their childhood. My kids have informed me they’re not going to mow a lawn. Both of those demographic groups are going to demand housing that doesn’t exist very much anymore.

I think Michigan is in a temporary lull. We’ve got to get over our dependence on the auto industry. The auto industry provided us with some real strengths. But the main strengths for Michigan in the long term are the water, and I think also our civic institutions.

Right now, the world is just so flat, but I think we’re going to see some ridges come back. There will be more local economies. And the fact that we have rainfall and fertile soil is going to be a tremendous asset. Also, the civic institutions that exist in the upper Midwest and Northeast: even though we live in this big, flat economy now, those [churches, committees and nonprofits] are still with us, and we use them, and I think it’s going to be a defining factor in the future.

Michigan has a lot going for it. There’s going to be a strong demand for new kinds of housing. We have to reinvent the places where people live. We have to create a whole new set of investments.

CG: Outside of downtown, where are the most exciting things happening in Lansing today?

Gene Townsend: The four corners in Lansing: Old Town, East Michigan, REO Town, and West Saginaw. These are former neighborhood commercial districts that saw massive disinvestment in the 60s and 70s, but there is still enough there—and certainly in the neighborhoods around them—to bring them back.

What are the criteria for deciding whether something is worth investing in, either privately or publicly? I think that there has to be evidence that property values are already rising. I think there has to be diversity in neighborhoods, a spread in property values. You want to see a good spread in the ages of the people. You want to see some ethnic diversity. And neighborhood schools.

These are the indicators of the strength of a neighborhood, a place where you want to buy a piece of land or invest.

Gene Townsend is a partner in Odeena Development Group, board member of the Mid-Michigan Environmental Action Council and is active in the homebuilders association. Since 1974, he has built more than 100 homes and now, with Lansing's Printer's Row, has one of the region’s most celebrated green, master-planned developments under his belt.

Brad Garmon is managing editor of Capital Gains. 

Dave Trumpie is the managing photographer for Capital Gains. He is a freelance photographer and owner of Trumpie Photography.