Housing developers have values in mind — yours

The survey went to thousands of people who'd called a number on highway billboards announcing that Ladera Ranch, a new planned community in Orange County, Calif., was coming soon.

It asked predictable marketing questions, such as whether people wanted ballfields or trails. Then came a section titled "values."

"Please check the box that comes closest to how you feel most of the time," it began. It asked people to rate how strongly they agreed with various statements.

"We need to treat the planet as a living system," read one. "Abortions should not be legal unless there's a threat to life," read another. And, "I have been born again in Jesus Christ."

There were questions about corporate greed, divorce, foreign travel.

Over the next few years, the results showed up across thousands of acres.

For the more conservative-minded "Traditionalists," Covenant Hills, where homes have classic architecture and big family rooms, was built.

For the green and soul-searching "Cultural Creatives," developers built Terramor, where Craftsman-style houses are fitted with photovoltaic cells and bamboo flooring.

At Ladera Ranch, now a thriving community of more than 16,000 people, villages are tailored not simply to practical needs, but to what marketers call different "values subcultures."

"We were trying to characterize the lens through which people see the world," said Brooke Warrick, who heads Ladera's marketing firm, American Lives. "A community is a collection of symbols and images. And we wanted our symbols and images to be better than the other guy's."

As the largest building boom since the 1950s continues, Ladera Ranch offers an extreme example of how developers are adopting the kind of sophisticated market research, more commonly used to sell Hummers or corn flakes, to build the very places people live, and in a sense, to try to socially engineer community.

Whether it is working is another question.

Dan LaBelle, who moved into Terramor, doesn't consider himself culturally creative. He said a neighbor turned his so-called culture room into a TV room with a 50-inch flat panel, and others in the environmentally oriented village have installed big swimming pools and $100,000 landscaping.

"The environmental stuff was a secondary concern, really," LaBelle said. "The truth is, I got a neighbor with a Hummer. I doubt he's very soul-searching."

Builders and marketers don't care as much that buyers are Bible Belters or tree huggers as much as they care about selling houses. But large-scale developers are realizing it's not enough to build a plain subdivision. They must manufacture community itself, an amenity people now crave, right along with tray ceilings.

Subdivision themes

Recently built subdivisions tend to project themes. In Prince William County, Va., Dominion Valley is country-clubbish with white columns and a golf course.

In Loudoun County, Va., Brambleton has a more earthy, yet high-tech, feel with its rocky waterfalls, high-speed Internet connections and the slogan "Connect with Life."

On the West Coast, the builders of Ladera Ranch, where house prices range from $800,000 to more than $1 million, have pushed the idea to a new level.

"You write values questions people can agree or disagree to, and then you use some fancy statistical routines to be able to characterize who's in what group and how big the groups are," Warrick said.

LaBelle, who bought his house because he liked it, said he enjoys the sense of community that has taken hold in Terramor. The Central Paseo, for example, encourages people to get outside and socialize.

To some extent, self-segregation has always gone on among people lucky enough to choose where they live.

The difference is that out in the deserts beyond Las Vegas or the fields of Loudoun County, Va., developers are building towns from scratch.

"These things have always happened organically," said Robert Lang, a Virginia Tech demographer who studies exurbs. "What we don't have experience with is a contrivance of this, where it's engineered.

"You target people, you catch a niche of preference in lifestyle, and it creates a community and intensifies the inward focus of the niche, like an island," Lang said.

Until recently, developers have sought the basic demographics of potential buyers, such as income and age, or simply built what sold yesterday. Particularly where demand exceeds supply, that is all they need to do.

But in the quest to entice people a few exits down the highway, developers increasingly avail themselves of research called psychographics to inform their decisions on whether to build colonials or Craftsmen, dog parks or tot lots, to gate or not to gate, and in general, to decide how they want a community to "feel."

The concept, which assumes people buy things because of their personality and values more than age or income, goes back to a 1959 academic paper describing the psychological differences between people who buy Fords and those who buy Chevys.

It became popular among Madison Avenue types in the 1980s, particularly as computer technology enabled pioneering firms such as Claritas to merge vast amounts of census data with vast amounts of consumer data, creating dozens of personality-oriented market segments — the "young digerati" or "money and brains" — to describe the U.S. population.

Building on a theme

"People of a certain typology look for a certain kind of house or respond to a certain type of theme," said Len Bogorad, managing director at Bethesda, Md.-based Robert Charles Lesser, a marketing firm that specializes in real estate. "It's a type of marketing that, for better or worse, is part of our economy, and developers are catching on."

Before a shovel ever hit the dirt at Ladera, Warrick sent more than 20,000 surveys to people who had called in response to the billboards or who had been shopping for a new house in Orange County.

He asked them to rate how important certain things were to them — "making it big" or "finding your purpose in life." He asked people whether "extremists and radicals should be banned from running for public office" or whether they "like to experience exotic people and places."

The responses were sorted, and four psychographic profiles emerged.

As it turns out, there were lots of status-conscious "Winners" in Orange County, people who tended to go for the glitziest homes in Covenant Hills.

And there were a fair number of "Winners with Heart," a hybrid group of status-conscious people with a spiritual side.

There were the religiously oriented "Traditionalists," who, it was assumed, would prefer the more classic architecture there, and more family-oriented activities, such as the annual Easter egg hunt.

On the other hand, the "Cultural Creatives" tended to be more liberal-minded, environmentally oriented and "less into conspicuous consumption," Warrick said. Terramor was built for them.

"Their houses might have a courtyard that conceals the front door, and it's kind of cozy and nestlike," Warrick said. "The materials might be just as expensive as what the Winner would want, but more understated."

Understated quality

Warrick has sold products from cars to TVs and worked on a seminal ad campaign for Merrill Lynch, the one with the lone bull in a china shop.

"We told the ad agency, you don't want a herd of bulls," he said. "That's not the image for achievement-oriented people. You want an individual bull."

But Warrick said he is especially excited about his work at Ladera and the social chemistry that seems to have evolved.

"Neighboring is one of the biggest concepts in America," Warrick said. "People want connections. And as good community developers, we should recognize what it means to create community.

"In one sense we're doing social engineering. In another sense we're trying to break down walls between people."