The Crown Perspective
If any company is particularly well qualified to meet the unique challenges of community master planning, it is Crown Community Development. Those qualifications begin with the organization's status as one of the Henry Crown Companies.
Founded in 1919 as a family-owned building material business, The Henry Crown Companies grew to become one of the nation's largest privately held business organizations and a major force in land development throughout the U.S. The organization's diverse interests range from large-scale office buildings such as Rockefeller Center in New York City, to Aspen Ski Company and the Ojai Resort in Ojai California. Additionally, the Crown family holds significant stock positions and board memberships in General Dynamics, JP Morgan Chase, Sara Lee, and Hilton Hotels, as well as investment holdings in the New York Yankees and Chicago Bulls.
These substantial financial resources, coupled with the flexibility of private ownership, provide the ideal backing for Crown Community Development. The company was founded in 1973 to invest in, and later to manage, a 3,500-acre expanse of property in Aurora, Illinois on the western edge of suburban Chicago. Today, the acreage is home to five large-scale residential communities, each ranging from 500 to 700 acres, and boasting a variety of outstanding recreational attractions, including golf courses, sport programs, athletic fields, bike trails, community clubhouses and swimming pools. Several hundred acres are also dedicated to large and small-scale retail developments, many within easy walking distance of residential neighborhoods.
The success of the Aurora property provided a cornerstone for Aurora's emergence as one of the nation's premier areas to live and work. It also provided Crown Community Development with a singular perspective on the mission and mechanics of master planning, which has led to significant participation in major developments from Florida's Gulf Coast to Chicago's North Shore. More importantly, it has allowed the company to evolve and perfect one of the most thorough and effective approaches to community master planning in the country today.
Master Planning: A Question of Balance
Real estate development is a complex field that is guided by a wide array of distinct, and often conflicting, interests. Builders seek favorable land for healthy building environments. Landowners want fair market value for their property based on its development potential. Regulatory agencies and environmental groups look to preserve open space and protect the integrity of the landscape. Municipal officials wrestle with issues of schools, traffic, public services and local property taxes. Finally, members of the existing community seek answers to questions about the character of new development and its impact on their quality of life.
Balancing these diverse interests is the key to the success of any development. It requires a singular vision that shifts the focus from individually held short-term gains to a broader community plan whose long-term value is clear to all concerned. Such a vision, in turn, calls for a development organization whose talent, creativity and resources can be entirely committed to the success of the community as a whole. That is a good definition of how Crown Community Development functions, and a good place to begin defining the role the company plays in the development process.
Crown's mission is to envision and create memorable communities of high quality that meld naturally into their surroundings and generate real long-term value for landowners, municipalities, builders, residents and neighbors. Fulfillment of that mission requires substantial financial resources, exhaustive research capabilities, extraordinary patience and perseverance. It also calls for expertise and sensitivity in a wide range of disciplines, from municipal planning and community design, to architectural and building processes, to land management and environmental systems. Above all, it demands vision - the ability to simultaneously see, address, and balance the immediate concerns of today with the long-term community needs of tomorrow.
