by Eric Miller
I noticed Legacy Town Center on the map a few days ago. Setting out on foot, I was unable to get there (see my blog post). Reaching the "town" the way most people do, by car, I found it to have enough of what one might expect in a place to live, far more than most of what has been built in the last decade.
Legacy Town Center came about pretty much because skilled workers didn't what to live without a "there." A company called Electronic Data Systems responded not by moving, but by creating a town center near the office. "These new-economy employees work around the clock and appreciate the convenience of the town center," according to an item on the EPA's web site. Other companies responded. The town center help Hewlett Packard make the decision to locate nearby.
According to the EPA, a study done prior to the completion of the town center showed that half the workers in Legacy would leave the office park at lunch to run errands, driving between two and five miles. A 1994 study by Cambridge Systematics showed that people who work in locations that provide a wide range of services within walking distance of the office are more likely to consider car pooling, van pooling, and mass transit.
Today Legacy Town Center has integrated a mix of housing, retail, office, restaurants, lodging, and entertainment on 150 acres, all within a ten-minute walk of one another. I was impressed by the close integration of retail and housing. In some places the housing and retail grids overlap, something that doesn't occur often even in "new urban" developments. 
I also expected to find primarily chain stores, but instead found a good mix of local and chain businesses. More, the stores weighed heavily on supportive services like cafés, tailors, hair salons and the like. There's even a movie theater that features limited release films. Legacy Town Center does appear to rely, to a great degree, on shoppers who drive in.
One thing that's often missing from these new "bring it in all at once" developments is continuity. I'm not talking about continuity through a plan or landscape, but the continuity through time that you only get from cities that started from a grid and then were filled in by a variety of developers over many decades or even centuries. Legacy Town Center doesn't have much of that either, but one thing it does have adds to it.
It might have only been something developers were forced to work around, but Baccus Cemetary contains the remains of the earliest settlers to Plano, Texas, and today sits amidst this new urban development. It doesn't do much for the organic nature of the buildings, but it does provide some sense that there were people here before this new development landed.
The one thing missing from Legacy Town Center is adequate public transit. My post describing the difficulty of crossing the highway only begins to tell the story. Checking the Google map directions, I saw it would take one hour and 28 minutes to get to downtown Dallas from Legacy Town Center. That's an hour longer than the suggested trip time by car. The urban planning firm DPZ commented on its web site that the nearby North Dallas Tollway--a major highway connecting to the Dallas--could one day feature a light rail line.
But what is the Legacy of this town center? While the community here may be better positioned for the future than neighboring suburbs, it doesn't seem that it has had much impact on surrounding developments built since. Most of them appear to be absent the amenities that make Legacy Town Center attractive. More, they are, with the exception of access by car, completely detached from it. If I lived in Legacy Town Center and tried to walk beyond it, I'd soon find myself standing next to a highway or in the middle of an office park.
Now if North Dallas could use this town center, not as an alien planet, but as a center to replicate and build out from, it could solidify its function as a commercial and civic center and help better position the larger group of North Dallas neighborhoods for the future.
