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Pricey developments will dot countryside
By BILL COATS, Times Staff Writer LUTZ -- Civic activists here have long fought to preserve a rural sense of space. So they convinced Hillsborough County to require spacious lots on future developments in Lutz's countryside. Now, two such developments are under way, and the spacious lots are destined for spacious houses, with especially spacious price tags. Houses in Wellington Manors, where ground is to be broken this week, will start at $300,000. Houses in the Sanctuary on Livingston, which is being developed just southeast of there, will start at $375,000. In both developments, top prices will hover somewhere above $1-million. "If the right customer comes along, we could build a $3- to $4-million house there," said Frank Maggio, founder of First Dartmouth Homes, one of two builders in the Sanctuary. "You might have a brick colonial, and another lot will have an English Tudor," said Craig Fiebe, a top executive with both of the Sanctuary's builders. This wasn't exactly what the activists had in mind. "We hoped there would be more of a mix," said Denise "Dee" Layne, president of the Lutz Civic Association and the leading advocate of rural development standards in Lutz. "We were hoping and envisioning people buying two- to three-acre lots and creating little farms on them." But there are many concepts of rural. "One thing I've learned is that people want space, but beyond an acre they don't want to mow that space," said Jack Fugett, Illinois-based developer of the Sanctuary. He argued his development will be rural simply because it's removed from urban Tampa. "I think it's far enough away that you're not going to have the traffic congestion of Tampa, but close enough that you're not going to have a bad commute." Bob Gagne, the real estate broker developing Wellington Manors, met with Layne and her board early last year and pledged to give his development several rural touches. He agreed that the homes fronting Newberger will face it, instead of being turned away behind walls. And he swore off sidewalks and streetlights, which the group considered too suburban. But Gagne worries that those decisions could turn off homebuyers. "What if your wife wants to walk the dog at night?" he asks. Two years ago, Hillsborough adopted a community plan for Lutz and Keystone, a binding expression of the county's intent to preserve rural land-use styles. The plan called for regulations that would limit how large a house could be if the lot was smaller than 2 acres. "You can have an acre lot," said Lorraine Duffy, planning manager for the county's Planning Commission, which wrote the community plans. "But if you build a 4,000-square-foot house and a 2,000-square-foot garage, suddenly it doesn't feel much different from a quarter-acre lot." Earlier this year, a first round of regulations was adopted implementing other ideas in the community plan. But a limit on house sizes proved complicated and was postponed, Layne said. Homes in the Sanctuary are projected to range from 3,500 square feet to 5,500. Duffy said Layne's notion of mini-farms might work for isolated parcels but could be impractical for large-scale homebuilders. "If he invests $80,000 in the lot, but he needs to make a certain percentage return on the house, he's got to build an expensive enough house to do that," she said. Layne said Lutz won't fill up with mansions because it's already partly filled with a wide variety of housing. In fact, the Sanctuary's entrance drive, with more than $500,000 in landscaping, is next door to Mobilaire Drive, an old street with mobile homes. But the Sanctuary and Wellington Manors will make a splash with some 250 pricey houses. Only Avila, on Lutz's southern edge, averages higher home prices. The older half of Lutz, east of N Dale Mabry Highway, hasn't seen developments this large in a decade. And the Sanctuary is likely to grow beyond the 122 houses currently planned. Fugett said an additional 80 acres is under contract for future phases. "We're proceeding like things are going to go fairly well," he said. -- Bill Coats can be reached at (813) 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com.
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