Redefining Property Values
By Design, Status Seekers and Tree-Huggers Don't Have to Commune
By Stephanie McCrummen Washington Post Sunday, April 16, 2006

At Ladera Ranch, now a thriving community of more than 16,000 people, various 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 across the suburban frontier, the story of Ladera Ranch offers an extreme example of how developers are using the kind of sophisticated market research more commonly used to sell Hummers or Cornflakes to build the very places people live, and in a sense, to try to socially engineer community.
(realestate/suburbs/sprawl)