Spring Hill’s future stirs in Sterling

In the new Sterling Hill subdivision, affluent young residents could eventually attract higher-end stores to the community.

SPRING HILL - “Escape to Perfection!” reads one advertisement for Sterling Hill, the new 1,250-home subdivision straddling Elgin Boulevard. “Enjoy your family in a quiet countryside park-like setting.”

“Awaken your senses at Sterling Hill, a community that has it all!” reads another.

Sterling Hill is likely the last subdivision of its size that will be built within the sprawling, ill-defined borders of Spring Hill, a patchwork of a community founded on the sandhills of western Hernando County nearly 40 years ago.

In those four decades, critics of suburban sprawl around the country have enjoyed a measure of vindication. As predicted, suburbanites became increasingly reliant on the automobile, with its attendant ills: skyrocketing road costs, a dearth of pedestrian life, rising oil prices and steadily worsening air pollution.

Regardless, the brisk sales at Sterling Hill prove suburbia’s durable allure. With 521 new home starts, it was the fourth-fastest growing community in the Tampa Bay area in the third quarter of 2005, according to the Houston firm Metrostudy. Slowly, on land that was scrub two years ago, the signs of a new community emerge. Even as they replant yards and replace light fixtures, newly minted neighbors have begun to make their mark.

New faces, new prioritiesBehind Sterling Hill’s high stucco walls bordering Elgin Boulevard, houses are going up as fast as building permits win approval, said Angela Deaton, sales manager for Grant Homes, one of eight builders that bought parcels in the 514-acre subdivision from Devco Development Corp. in Tampa. Grant planned 241 homes in two phases and opened a model home in January 2005. Even as prices have increased, more than half have sold. During one rush, Deaton signed 15 contracts in one day.

Outside the plush appointments of Grant’s model home, Sterling Hill is a moonscape of tire tracks, half-built homes and rust-colored dirt. Hammering and grinding machines punctuate an otherwise peaceful afternoon. Contractors have emblazoned “Help Wanted” signs on their trucks, desperate for workers to build the houses as fast as they are sold.

Deaton said she spends half her day on the phone with eager buyers in Virginia, California and Massachusetts, updating them on the progress of their permits. The few occupied houses stand out, with neat landscaping, cars in the driveway or jaunty garden flags fluttering next to newly planted shrubs.

These newcomers are younger and wealthier than Spring Hill’s traditional residents, Deaton said. They are a mix of commuters from Tampa, families moving in from out of state and a smattering of well-heeled retirees.

The residents followed the new Suncoast Parkway from Tampa - some driven north by the rising prices closer to the city. And they want more: more schools, more roads, more stores, a stark contrast to some longtime residents who think Hernando County is becoming overdeveloped.

“Build it up,” said Sterling Hill resident Eve Senica. “If you don’t have progress you might as well be living in the horse and buggy age.”

In the mornings, Senica takes her daughter to Challenger K-8 School of Science and Mathematics on the other side of busy Elgin Boulevard. On the way, she eyes the houses cropping up along her street, hoping for new neighbors and friends for her daughter.

Recently separated from her husband, Senica moved to Sterling Hill from Pasco County after she and her former husband sold a three-story house on 10 acres. She had lived in Spring Hill as a teenager until shortly after her marriage, and moved back looking for a mix of the pastoral peace she enjoyed on her Pasco property with shopping and schools nearby.

“When I moved (to Spring Hill), I was 18,” Senica said. “There was not much here. A few gas stations, and that was it. And now there’s so much.” But not enough. For real shopping, she drives an hour to International Plaza in Tampa, she said.

Suburbia, for better or worseSterling Hill bears all the hallmarks of a traditional subdivision: curlicued streets feeding a collector road, single-family homes on individual lots and no commercial development. It has some nods to progress, such as sidewalks and restrictions that assure that neighboring houses will not be the same color or model.

It is textbook sprawl - and enormously popular.

“People still want their neighborhood, they still want their home, they still want their yards,” said local developer Gary Schraut.

“They are buying into a lifestyle,” he added. “It’s the middle-class dream. You have a house, a picket fence, your neighbors. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Louis Marquet sees it differently. A planner in the new urbanist mode, Marquet prefers built “places” like the Villages and Celebration to subdivisions like Sterling Hill. “Places” have a thriving street life, with mom-and-pop stores built into a mix of apartments, townhomes and single-family homes. Homebuyers continue to buy into traditional subdivisions because they have little other choice, he says.

“Everyone criticizes sprawl,” said Marquet, executive vice president of Leyland Alliance, a New York new urbanist design firm. “What they’re really criticizing is the traffic of all these little streets and cul-de-sacs. They’re criticizing how far they have to go to find milk or services.”

Marquet, like other new urbanists, is convinced that well-designed places will outperform traditional subdivisions in the marketplace. Ask any suburbanite where he or she would like to spend a long weekend, Marquet said, and the answer is typically the type of place new urbanism tries to replicate: Savannah, Ga.; Key West; Charleston, S.C.

While traditional developers of subdivisions such as Sterling Hill remain wary that drastic change will hurt sales, some developers have begun incorporating “town centers” in new subdivisions, a small concession to new urbanism, Marquet said.

“In our time, place-making will have a higher value than making a buck on cul-de-sacs,” he said.

Affluence comes standardThe Deltona Corp. billed the original Spring Hill as a self-contained community including churches, stores and parks, sold as an affordable alternative to blighted cities.

But suburbia is not as affordable as it once was. Sterling Hill’s homes range in price from the $200s to the high $400s, built for families that need “optional first-floor bonus rooms,” service entrances and master retreats. Marble countertops come standard.

The model names aim for a certain cachet: deep-rooted affluence and class by Grant Homes’ Cambridge and Devonshire models; the breezy wealth of port towns like Windward Homes’ Sanibel, Newport and Savannah; the lush woodlands invoked by Avatar Homes’ the Sandpine, the Hickory, the Laurel and the Spruce, a four-bedroom, three-bathroom, two-story house with a three-car garage.

Armando Coral and his wife, Merideth Rossetti-Coral, moved from Massachusetts with their 17-month old daughter to be closer to Rossetti-Coral’s mother. They sold their home in Auburn, Mass., and flew to Tampa. From the airport, they began driving north looking for houses in their price range.

“I like that this is all residential. It feels safe,” Rossetti-Coral said recently, busying herself repainting her dining room.

They couldn’t see their neighbors from their last house, and they wanted to duplicate that sense of privacy, said Coral, 43, a real estate agent. Similarly priced homes in Pasco were built on smaller lots and bunched too tightly together.

But they quickly discovered that, like Senica, they would have to drive an hour for the shops they wanted, and that local jobs paid far less than in Massachusetts, where Rossetti-Coral, 34, had been a teacher. They described their former house as rural, but still only 15 minutes from two large malls, and a half-hour from Boston.

The couple moved in Halloween weekend. By Thanksgiving, Rossetti-Coral had already outfitted the kitchen with antiqued nickel fixtures and replaced the ceiling fan in the living room.

The building of the Suncoast Parkway paved the way for younger, more affluent residents like the Corals.

In his 1956 bestseller The Organization Man , William Whyte predicted that suburbia would become “the most important single market in the country.” Suburbanites would set the trend for “dungarees, vodka martinis, outdoor barbecues, functional furniture,” Whyte predicted.

A stroll through Target confirms his predictions: Mossimo stonewashed jeans for $27.99, a stainless steel and red leather cocktail set for $13.99, a Coleman Road Trip Sport Grill, $149.99.

The new population represents a market with the potential to change the face of Spring Hill and the county, attracting new and different businesses, said Schraut, the local developer. Forerunners of that trend include the recent expansion of Target on U.S. 19 and the addition of a Lowe’s in Brooksville. Schraut predicts that higher-end commercial development will soon begin moving to the county.

Constructing a heritageSterling Hill shares its name with a custom bookbinder in Waterbury, Vt., an active adult community in Exeter, N.H., and a New Jersey mine known as the “Fluorescent Capital of the World” for the many bright minerals found there. Closer to home, “Sterling” is John Toborg’s mother’s maiden name, which he swears had nothing to do with the name of the Spring Hill subdivision.

Toborg is the landscape architect for Devco Development, the Tampa firm responsible for Sterling Hill. He gave Sterling Hill the limited sense of place it has: its name, its trees, its logo.

“Sterling was clean, clear, and I already had a color palette floating around in my head as far as the logo and the letterhead and the signage, which was charcoal gray and stone, and the color sterling silver goes along with that,” Toborg said. The hilly landscape gave him the rest of the name.

The Indiana native surrounds himself with atlases, maps and encyclopedias, trolling for street names and monickers for Sterling Hill’s gated villages: Haverhill, Brackenwood, Brightstone Place, Edgemere, Amersham Isles, Arbor Glades, Covey Run, Glen Burne.

For the landscape, Toborg picked native plants that will thrive in the sandy soil, like Bahai sod and sand pines. He planted Shumard and live oaks, Drake elms, sweet gums and Leyland cypress.

He predicts that some of his trees will be uprooted by the new owners, who will try to make the place their own by planting trees and sod native to Northern states.

Apart from Toborg’s efforts, heritage at Sterling Hill must be built from scratch. Instead of all the things that lend a place its genius - folk tales, celebrations, monuments, art, landmarks - one of the builders describes Sterling Hill as a “large-scale planned community designed for a multitude of buyer profiles.”

For the time being, until the Corals get some more neighbors, they focus on the interior of the house. Rossetti-Coral outfitted a modish hot-pink, black and white bathroom for her daughter and decorated the playroom. Like Senica, they watch through the windows for new neighbors.

They already know Joe and Georgia Fatigato, a semiretired couple from Illinois who moved in up the street and quickly replanted their front yard with small palm trees. From there, Joe Fatigato, 63, points out “For Sale” signs in front of completed homes.

“They call it spec buying,” Fatigato said. Investors, betting on swiftly rising prices, have a house built just to turn around and sell it.

Despite the construction around them, the Fatigatos hosted their family for Thanksgiving, and the Corals likewise spent the holiday in their new home. By Christmas, two families had moved in.

“We were thinking to have a small party after New Year’s Eve, to invite the neighbors,” Armando Coral said. “The neighbors can meet each other and talk. Somebody has to start it.”