West world - Weston City Report - Weston, Florida - Arvida Co

South Florida CEO, Jan, 2003 by Rochelle Broder-Singer

It began as a 100,000-acre tract purchased by a real estate company, quietly held for decades as development moved west. It has ended up its own city, incorporated and run by the residents who have come to cherish their protected world on the rim of the everglades.

If nothing else, Weston presents a prosaic scene that hearkens back to what the American suburban lifestyle is supposed to be all about. On weekend mornings, thousands of kids play formal soccer and baseball games on the 16 fields at Regional Park at Weston, and fill its seven roller-hockey rinks and its basketball courts. The vast open space also swarms with adults, busy coaching, cheering and socializing. It's pretty much what developer Arvida envisioned for its gigantic master-planned community, back when Weston was just a series of misty watercolor paintings.

Is Weston a success? It's hard to argue with the numbers in this 16-square-mile city of more than 57,000 residents. The average home in Weston sells for $271,000, some 20 percent higher than the South Florida average. It has Broward County's lowest crime rate, and one of its highest concentrations of "A"-rated schools.

All this might be expected of a city with a reputation as a family haven. Less expected is the international mix. Some 28 percent of Weston's population is foreign-born. It turns out that the amenities, security and family values of the city make it as appealing to Venezuelans and Colombians as it is to South Florida residents and transplanted executives from across the US.

Population demographics aren't the only things changing in Weston these days. Arvida, which has been building its master-planned community (which covers the bulk of the city) since 1985, is almost finished, and beginning to pull up stakes. Even as Weston incorporated as a city in 1996, and brought in areas not built by Arvida, the developer kept building out its 30-year-old vision. The signs were everywhere: "Weston -- an Arvida Community."

Now, Arvida is working on its last Weston project -- 128 townhomes in Courtyard II. The townhomes, already sold out, will be fully occupied by April. "That will be the last of the 15,685 homes that we have built out there," says George Casey, Arvida's president of South Florida operations. Weston Town Center, the last commercial project the developer still owns, is under contract to a new buyer. "It's strange because Arvida has owned the property that we now call Weston since 1958," Casey says. "When the company put the first shovel into the dirt, in the early 1980s, it seemed that the land was endless."

Certainly Arvida founder Arthur Vining Davis (Arvida is an acronym for his name) must have felt that way when he purchased 100,000 acres in west Broward in 1958. At that time, the area that is now Weston was cattle country. Its marshes and swamps had been dried out more than a decade earlier, when the South Florida Water Management District (formed in 1949) built levies around 914 square miles of protected Everglades and drained everything else.

Arvida was patient with its holdings. A master plan for Weston wasn't even created until the 1970s. "In the mid-seventies, when Arvida developed their plan, the movement west out of Fort Lauderdale had begun," says Ron Bergeron, CEO of Bergeron Land Development and Bergeron Properties, which did much of the road, sewage and site development for Arvida over the course of two decades. Bergeron -- who purchased a 100-acre ranch in the area from Arthur Vining Davis -- remembers the times well. "That progress was coming west, and eventually you would end up at Weston," he says.

The original plan for what was then known as Indian Trace called for 60,000 mostly condominium units on 10,000 acres, aimed at the snowbird and retiree markets. Broward County didn't want that kind of density, so Arvida revised its plans. The master plan approved in 1977 anticipated 20,000 residential units, mainly single-family homes. Arvida then waited until 1985 to break ground, after interstates 75 and 595 opened up access to the area. "When it opened in the mid-1980s, the area was considered the edge of the earth' Casey says. "It was really hard to get people to live here. Frankly, everybody would have thought you were nuts."

That didn't last long. A young Dan Marino bought one of Weston's first homes, and Arvida quickly signed him as Weston's spokesperson. "Dan and his support of the community cannot be underestimated," says Casey. Tragedy, too, sped up things up, as Hurricane Andrew sent a sizeable population of Miami-Dade residents, insurance money in hand, to Weston.

The project sold out in 16 years, half the time Arvida originally projected. At its peak, the company was closing on about 1,400 new homes a year, says attorney Roy Oppenheim, who worked for Arvida as a young attorney at White & Case. Oppenheim, today a principal of Weston-based Oppenheim Pilelsky and Weston Title, says that, combined with resales, there were 2,200 closings a year at the peak.

Selling a Lifestyle