4.1.2001 00:26
Instant Neighborhood

In Rhode Island's new suburbia, families find community; towns cope with traffic, crowded schools

BY ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writers


Journal photo / Mary Beth Meehan
HOME TURF: Eric Gaudette, 2, ‘‘patrols’’ his corner of Watson Farm in South Kingstown, with his father, Brian Gaudette, who is off camera. The seven-year-old subdivision typifies the ‘‘instant’’ neighborhoods that residents find family-friendly and critics decry as cookie-cutter.

SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- When Dave and Betsy Palazzetti moved into Watson Farm, it was mostly fields and a few construction sites. Now, three years later, it brims with Colonials, freshly paved cul-de-sacs, and minivans full of children.

To the Palazzettis, a young professional couple, the 89-lot subdivision is a neighborhood.

Betsy Palazzetti and the other mothers gather at one another's houses to gab while their children play together. Dave Palazzetti is game when neighbors extend invitations to cookouts -- shouting over their interconnecting backyards. He has also proved handy when Watson Farm dads gather to brew beer.

One day, the Palazzettis' son, Ethan, 17 months, will be old enough to join the pack of children who tear around the central drive on in-line skates. Their parents don't worry about their playing unattended -- Watson Farm has no through streets. The cars drive slowly, and it's easy to spot one that doesn't belong.

"We just kind of wanted space, yet somewhat of a community," says Betsy Palazzetti, 31, who grew up in a part of Warwick that is now so congested she did not want to raise her children there.

"Knowing we were going to start a family, we wanted a place for kids to ride their bikes."

AS THE STATE'S old suburbs have themselves become cities, young couples have looked farther and farther south and west for a new suburbia. And with the help of developers seeking to cash in on the demand, they have been creating neighborhoods such as Watson Farm -- practically overnight.

The trend has brought big houses, bulging schools, and traffic to places once known for meadows, farms, and beaches. Yet to the people moving in, these places offer a version of the countryside and community that earlier generations sought in then-rural Cranston and Warwick.

The signs planted in the woods along southern Rhode Island's Route 138 tell the story: "New Homes: Starting Mid-hundreds" and "Will Build to Suit."

The results are visible from West Greenwich and North Kingstown to Richmond and Hopkinton, where such developments as "Blueberry Hill," "Misty Meadows," and "Camelot Estates" are redefining Rhode Island's suburban landscape.

No southern Rhode Island town has seen a bigger population gain over the last two decades than South Kingstown. According to the 2000 census numbers, released on Thursday, since 1980 the town grew nearly 37 percent -- to 27,921 people.

The town has proved so attractive because it is home not just to countryside, but also to the University of Rhode Island, shopping districts, and picturesque beaches.

WATSON FARM typifies the "instant" neighborhoods that have cropped up to meet the demand for new housing. In the seven years since the first family moved in, all but 5 of the 89 lots have been sold; the last are expected to go in a few months.

Less than a decade ago, these 83 acres off Saugatucket Road were farmland. Now they hold dozens of three-bedroom houses, standing in rows along cul-de-sacs, branching off a horseshoe-shaped central drive.

Behind the houses, yards connect to form a soccer-field-sized common area. Swing sets and bird feeders decorate the landscape, though not many trees.

The subdivision is usually quiet; only in the morning and afternoon do caravans of minivans and sport-utility vehicles depart and return. At night, the only lights seen by someone standing on a front lawn are the stars, the occasional porch lamp, and the glowing doorbell buttons.

It's a new neighborhood, but it exudes a 1950s kind of nostalgia. The residents gush about a place that, they say, has no urban ills and lots of old-fashioned values.

They all look after each other's children, they say. They bake coffeecakes for newcomers. They take meals to the elderly man on Blossom Court when his wife is in the hospital. And they go on outings together -- to the beach, to the mall, to dinner cruises on the Bay.

The demographics of these 300-odd people are remarkably uniform: Most of them are white professional couples in their 30s, with children.

Since October 1999, they have called the police 22 times. Five calls involved false house alarms; two, barking dogs; two, lost-and-found items. The most serious case was the theft of a $750 generator from a construction site.

"It's very much like the neighborhood I grew up in before it got populated," says Dave Palazzetti, 31, who lived in Chicago's rural outskirts. Now a lieutenant teaching civil engineering at the Coast Guard Academy, in New London, he says: "You don't come into this neighborhood unless you live here or know someone here. There's no reason for any strange cars to be here."

THESE SORTS of ready-made communities cut against the cultural grain of Rhode Island, where bonds traditionally grow from family, religion, and deep roots in a particular place.

And social critics deplore the dependency on cars, the sameness of the people and the buildings, the loss of farmland, and the lack of integration with existing neighborhoods.

The aesthetics of such subdivisions have also drawn criticism. The Watson Farm houses poke up out of the flat subdivision like Monopoly-board pieces. The lack of trees gives the area a barren look -- as well as the nickname "Hurricane Valley," for the winds that sweep through.

When a South Kingstown neighborhood group invited Robert Yaro, a Columbia University planning expert, to critique the town's management of its growth, Yaro pronounced Watson Farm a failed development. "There's not a lot of rural character left up there," he said.

And the price of admission is beyond the reach of many Rhode Islanders. As recently as four years ago, houses at Watson Farm sold for $150,000, making it one of the more affordable subdivisions in South Kingstown. But today, as the subdivision nears completion, newer buyers are demanding larger houses, pushing prices toward $300,000.

"The cul-de-sac instant neighborhood quickly takes on the trappings of healthy neighborhood life," said Robert J. Thompson, a Syracuse University cultural historian, in an e-mail interview. "The two disadvantages to this style of life are their reliance on automobiles -- and therefore fossil fuels -- and their tendency toward exclusivity, often available only to the upper reaches of the middle class."

SITTING IN the kitchen of their yellow Colonial on Petal Lane, with their children clambering through the house, Jean and Rick Willette describe what drew them to Watson Farm.

Jean, 35, a reading teacher in the North Kingstown schools, grew up in Providence's Elmhurst neighborhood. Rick, 32, an English teacher at Cranston High School East, grew up in rural western Cranston.

After marriage, they moved into a Cape in North Kingstown. But after the birth of their second child, in 1998, they wanted more room.

Rick wanted to live out in the sticks, but Jean wanted a more established neighborhood.

"This was a compromise," says Rick, who has taken a two-year leave from work to spend full time with the children.

Jean boasts that she knows all her neighbors' phone numbers, and has their house keys -- so when they're away, she can take in their mail and let out their dogs.

The only thing she misses about Elmhurst, she says, is the ability to walk everywhere -- to work, church, the library, the hairdresser.

WILLIAM G. BOARDMAN, 35, and his family left the Darlington section of Pawtucket in 1992, tired of the tiny lots and scant contact with neighbors. They moved to Tefft Hill, a rolling subdivision of 219 half-acre lots that is South Kingstown's largest.

"We have a need for community, for neighborhood -- the safety of being in essentially a closed-off community unto ourselves," says Boardman, who is a director of the Tefft Hill Homeowners Association.

The association organizes blood drives, Christmas caroling, and tree planting, and it holds a welcome party for each family that moves in.

No such bonding, says Boardman, took place in his Pawtucket neighborhood. "You knew the neighbor next to you, and maybe a few houses down, but that was about it."

Tefft Hill recently approved the expenditure of $200 for signs that say: "We love our children -- Please drive slow." The latest issue of its newsletter contains a debate over above-ground pools and an essay, "A Minivan Is Better Than a Porsche (and I Can Prove It!)."

The newsletter also covers harder news, such as a spate of "unneighborly" pranks -- lawn chairs placed in the water tower, porch lights broken. "We all need to make sure that our kids are not contributing to this kind of thing," admonished the article.

Several weeks ago, one of the "We love our children" signs was stolen, and later found in the woods. The residents, some of whom don't lock their doors for quick trips to the store, dismissed the episode as teenage mischief.

THE MOVING VANS that pull into Watson Farm are disgorging not just Rhode Islanders. The subdivision also attracts military families and other job transferees.

In 1999, when Wayne Woodall's employer, Raytheon, closed its Seattle-area factory and moved him to Rhode Island, his wife, Katie Woodall, worried about not knowing anyone here. Her relatives had warned her about New Englanders' coldness, and as a mother working in the home, she feared isolation.

What if she went into labor with her second child and there was no one to look after her toddler?

So when the Woodalls were house-hunting at Watson Farm and someone approached them to chat, Katie Woodall felt that she had found the right place.

By contrast, she says, the residents of older neighborhoods seemed less welcoming -- "the fabric of those neighborhoods had already been laid, and they didn't really need to make friends."

Here, she belongs to a mothers' group, takes her kids swimming in a neighbor's pool, and is always chatting with the people whose yards back up to hers.

"I've made more connections with people here than I did in my old neighborhood, in Seattle," she says.

WHEN THE Palisades Ltd. developers proposed Watson Farm, in the late 1980s, South Kingstown residents weren't pleased.

Kenneth R. Hinga, a URI professor, was one of several neighbors who wrote Town Hall to object.

"The gut reaction," he says, "was: 'My goodness, they're going to take open fields and all of a sudden we're going to have a suburb built. It's changing the character of the town from a rural independent community to a bedroom-community suburb.' "

Nonetheless, in 1992, after resolving some drainage problems, the town approved the subdivision. The Planning Board liked that Watson Farm would be a "cluster development": the houses would be built on relatively small lots, leaving room for communal open space.

But before long the town's officials had regrets.

By 1996 such developments were being proposed so often that the Town Council placed a 160-a-year limit on house-building permits. And now the town is considering measures to ensure that subdivisions fit more gracefully into their surroundings.

"If you picture New England development patterns, you don't picture Watson Farm," says Anthony Lachowicz, the town planner. "You picture winding roads, trees arching over the roadway, the fall foliage -- a more wooded environment.

"If I had to do it all over again," he says, "I would have pushed the houses back further from the road."

Such criticism has not, however, dampened buyers' interest in Watson Farm.

Edward McGuire, the Watson Farm house builder, says he long ago dispensed with his sales pitch about good schools and short drives to beaches, shopping, and URI. Even when he doesn't advertise in the newspaper, some two dozen potential buyers drive into the subdivision every weekend.

"Because of the way South Kingstown is, I don't have to sell them on anything," says McGuire, leaning against his white pickup and surveying the few remaining empty lots.

"It's a feeding frenzy."

JAY GITLIN, a history professor at Yale, says that the idea of starting a community from scratch is distinctly American, dating back to Plymouth Plantation. "We are constantly inventing and reinventing community."

And part of the draw of the new suburbs, he says, is the desire to be among people just like yourself.

The subdivisions, especially those with a dues-collecting owners' association, also offer residents a control over their environment that is otherwise lacking.

Watson Farm specifies the house colors (earth tones), the pitch of the roofs, and the shingle material. It specifies the number of pets a family may have (two) and the kinds of vehicles it may park in its driveway (pickup trucks, yes; trailer-truck rigs, no). To build a shed, you must apply for permission.

"A lot of people complain about cookie-cutter developments, but at the same time I think they really like it," says Adrienne Schmitz, the director of residential community development at the Urban Land Institute, in Washington, D.C., and the author of Trends and Innovations in Master-Planned Communities.

"They want the security of knowing that nothing they don't like is going to be in their neighborhood."

RHODE ISLAND SUBURBIA traces its history to the early 20th century, when neighborhoods such as Providence's Washington Park sprouted at the ends of the trolley lines.

The movement away from the city sped up after World War II, when the federal government built the interstate highways and gave returning G.I.'s cheap mortgages.

Rhode Islanders who had grown up in triple-decker houses moved to single-family-house developments in eastern Cranston and Warwick, as well as Johnston and North Providence.

And then, eventually, they moved farther south and west, bringing new roads and houses to such places as South Kingstown.

The story is encapsulated in the life of John D. Leal Jr., at 71 one of Watson Farm's oldest residents.

Leal grew up in South Providence, over Leal's Variety, his family's store. During the next five decades, he moved south six times: from Providence to various Warwick neighborhoods to North Kingstown to, finally, Watson Farm. There, the retired banker and his wife, Irene, built a one-story house; she has trouble with stairs, but he's an avid walker.

Watson Farm's appeal was its nearness to the ocean, and also its children.

"I didn't want a place with just elderly people," says John Leal, sitting in a pink plush chair in his living room.

Some of the neighborhood kids call him Grandpa.

WATSON FARM is not immune to the problems of other neighborhoods.

Cars racing along Saugatucket Road prompted the parents to petition the town to move the school-bus shelter inside the subdivision.

(Soon the shelter itself generated grumbles -- some say it looks like an outhouse, and Watson Farm's builder, McGuire, says its roof pitch clashes with that of his houses.)

Even the vaunted South Kingstown schools -- from which four out of five students go on to college -- now face problems more typically associated with city schools.

Since 1990, the town's growth has inflated the school's population by more than a third. The 4,000-plus students are straining the schools' resources and have made it necessary to build additions and a whole new school.

Then, in 1999, a state Department of Education report asserted that the high school suffered from outdated teaching methods, staff bickering, and a high turnover in administrators. "That was a bit of a wake-up call," says Supt. Jack Harrington.

Meanwhile, the South Road Elementary School recently suspended a sixth grader who had drawn up a "hit list" of 24 schoolmates. At a subsequent school forum, angry parents said that the students routinely encounter profanity, bullying, and violence.

Even within Watson Farm, cracks are appearing in the ethos of neighborhood openness. One family has erected a high fence around its backyard, and others are thinking about doing the same.

Marie Woodward, a South County Hospital nurse in her 50s, says that she would have preferred to build her house in a more private setting. But South Kingstown's limit on building permits made the Watson Farm lots among the few available.

When her neighbors' high fence went up, Woodward said she could empathize. "How comfortable am I going to be if I've only got 18 feet between my house and the house next door?"

NEVERTHELESS, for many of South Kingstown's new residents, such problems are minor irritants compared with life in the older suburbs.

For Pearl and Dieter Hirsbrunner, the move to Watson Farm meant leaving a West Warwick condominium complex -- 136 units of people living, as they put it, "on top of each other."

The condominiums were off busy Route 2: too close to traffic for their children to play outdoors, says Dieter, an engineer with an East Greenwich semiconductor company.

Meanwhile, the garage doors' paint was peeling, and other owners started renting out their condos to people whom the Hirsbrunners considered rowdy. But most of all, the family's two-bedroom condo was no longer big enough for four.

They first looked in Cranston and Johnston, but the houses that they could afford were too small. When they discovered Watson Farm, Dieter decided he was willing to trade a 2-mile drive to work for an 18-mile commute.

He says he likes having his own backyard. The subdivision reminds him of the close-knit Attleboro neighborhood he grew up in.

Pearl Hirsbrunner, who grew up in western Coventry, works in South Kingstown, linking volunteers with jobs in the public schools. She says that if she's running late at work, she knows a neighbor will bring her children home from the bus stop. She doesn't even have to ask.

At their house the other night, Andrew Hirsbrunner, 10, slips out from behind his mother's easy chair. He announces that he likes prospecting Watson Farm for butterflies, Japanese beetles, and caterpillars.

His sister, Alyssa, 8, says that in West Warwick she had only two neighborhood friends.

When she's asked how many she now has, her brother answers for her:

"Three billion."

With reports from staff photographer Mary Beth Meehan.


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