After more than 40 years helping plan and entitle master planned communities across Florida’s Treasure Coast, you might think there aren’t many sides of the process left for us to discover.
As it turns out, there are.
Lucido & Associates Senior Partner Steve Garrett recently had the opportunity to moderate “Capital, Land Strategy, and the Business of Building Florida’s Biggest Communities” at the inaugural Bisnow Florida Master Planned Communities Summit in West Palm Beach.
The panel brought Steve together with John Carter of Minto, Dan Grosswald of Mattamy Homes, Andrew Maxey of PulteGroup, and Jeremy Arnold of Atwell for a conversation about securing land, structuring capital, sales velocity, and what comes next for large-scale communities.
For Steve, it also offered a different perspective on work Lucido & Associates knows very well.
Looking Behind the Curtain
Over the past four decades, our firm has helped design and entitle many of the Treasure Coast’s major master planned communities, including Martin Downs, St. Lucie West, West Jensen, Tradition, Western Grove, Southern Grove, and LTC Ranch, now Wylder.
Our work tends to happen in what Steve affectionately calls the “fun stuff.”
It’s determining the right uses in the right places and understanding the relationships between them. It’s establishing the road network, navigating governmental entitlements, and helping create an identity for a community through planning, architecture, landscape, and signage.
But before any of that can happen, the economics have to work.
The Bisnow conversation gave Steve an opportunity to dig further into the capital and land strategy decisions that precede much of our work—and gain a greater appreciation for just how consequential those early decisions are to everything that follows.
It also raised a bigger question: What does come next?
Forty Years of Evolution
Look at the communities we’ve helped plan over the last four decades and you can see how much the answer has already changed.
Earlier communities like Martin Downs and St. Lucie West were more traditionally focused around residential and commercial uses and vehicular movement. Over time, communities have become increasingly integrated, incorporating New Urbanist principles alongside greater consideration for sustainability, wellness, quality of life, and the experiences people have within a place.
Tradition and Newfield offer examples of that evolution.
The next generation will undoubtedly evolve again as technology advances, market demands shift, environmental considerations become increasingly important, and our understanding of how people want to live continues to change.
The Part That Doesn’t Change
For all those changing inputs, the fundamental opportunity remains remarkably consistent: create places that work for the people who live, work, gather, and spend their time there.
That’s where Lucido & Associates comes in.
Our role is to consider land, infrastructure, market realities, environmental conditions, architecture, landscape, community needs, and a developer’s vision—and help weave those individual pieces into a cohesive PLACE.
The “fun stuff,” as Steve calls it, is really placemaking.
It’s creating the framework for a community to develop an identity, foster connection, and become somewhere people don’t simply live, but genuinely feel part of.
After more than 40 years, that remains one of the most exciting parts of what we do.
And if the evolution of the last four decades is any indication, the next 40 should give us plenty of new ways to do it.
