Large-Scale Planning

How we approach it

Large-scale planning that survives the entitlement path.

Large-scale planning starts with a single question: does the project the developer wants to build line up with the comprehensive plan that the city has already adopted? The comp plan is a formal statement of a community's goals and policies for future growth, advisory rather than legally binding, but the document the planning staff and the council will reference at every step. The future land use map turns the comp plan's policy into geography. A 500-acre parcel that the FLUM shows as low-density residential is going to fight every step of a higher-density master plan; the same parcel shown as mixed-use moves quickly. Bailey reads both before we touch the conceptual master plan.

When the comp plan and the project conflict, the move is a comp plan amendment. That's a political and procedural undertaking — public notice, neighborhood meetings, planning commission, council — and it lives or dies on whether the proposed land use is consistent with the broader comp plan's stated growth goals, infrastructure investments, and policy direction. We work the amendment with the planning staff before we file, because filing a comp plan amendment that the staff is going to recommend denial on burns a year and reputation that we don't get back.

PUD is the zoning vehicle that makes most master-planned communities possible. A Planned Unit Development allows a mix of land use, building type, and intensity in a single project, and gives the design team room to address broad functional relationships — entrances, traffic, pedestrian movement, stormwater, infrastructure — at the master scale rather than treating each use as an isolated decision. Most jurisdictions reward PUD applications with density bonuses, lot size relaxation, and design flexibility because the trade is real: the city gets a coordinated plan, the developer gets the density to make the math work, and the community gets a place rather than a row of disconnected subdivisions.

Density yield is the financial backbone of the entire planning exercise. On a master-planned scale, density isn't a per-parcel number — it's a yield across the entire master area, with higher densities in some pods balanced by lower densities or open space in others. The total yield has to support the infrastructure cost, the amenity cost, and the developer's return, and the distribution has to make sense for both the market and the entitlement politics. Bailey runs density yield analysis at the master area scale, with multiple scenarios (conservative, mid, aggressive) so the developer can see the sensitivity before committing to a final layout.

Road hierarchy and open space framework get drawn at the master plan stage and carried through every subsequent phase. Arterial connections to the surrounding network, internal collectors that move between pods, residential and pedestrian streets within each pod, trail and open space spines that tie the community together — all of it has to be designed at the conceptual level, because once Phase 1 is in the ground the framework is fixed for the next 20 years. Bailey draws the framework with that permanence in mind.

The output of large-scale planning is a conceptual master plan that the developer can take to a city council, an investor presentation, and a market study at the same time. The plan has to be specific enough to support entitlement and flexible enough to absorb the inevitable changes that show up between Phase 1 and Phase 6. Bailey delivers it as a coordinated package — the plan, the comp plan analysis, the density yield, the entitlement sequencing memo, and the council-ready exhibits — so the developer can move from feasibility to entitlement without backfilling.