Fair Oaks Urban Center

[LandArchPoke]

Something that I've known about for a bit but has been flying under the radar until now is the Fair Oaks Urban Center (Robson Ranch).

This is the site where Tesla had looked at and also came in 2nd in a national search for a new Ford plant to build the electric Lightning trucks. There's been several major projects scope out of site and so the owner has been working on a very large master plan that would create one of the largest if not the largest new urbanist community in the nation.

Part of it will also be a major 'industrial' park, but think more along the lines of semiconductor site or EV car plant site or aerospace/drone manufacturing - it will be a site for high tech operations versus something like the battery plant in Mid-America or things with more polluting potential.

It's been recommended by the State ARPA group to move forward with awarding $50 million in funds to establish the needed wastewater expansion to the site. TIF funds would help expand road service and other needed infrastructure. As part of it, the industrial portion will be transferred to the City of Tulsa and the land owner will retain the rest of the site that will be available to build thousands of houses and commercial. Think more Stapleton in Denver in terms of scale, but bigger - not small like Wheeler District in OKC (this is like 20x the size of that). This plan is massive and will be mostly within City of Tulsa limits but some extends in BA as well. The master plan is being rolled into the city's plans as well so likely as portions of residential land is sold off it will be required to be built out according to the master plan which is based on new urbanism principals. It's being done by a good firm who has experience in this area.

This really has the potential to be a massive game changer especially it's location near the Port of Inola and Mid-America and that it will have the ability to house thousands which has been a missing ingredient and a big barrier to our regional landing some of these big projects is we don't have an area that can be scaled up to house 3,000-5,000 people or more.

New article if anyone is interested: https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/arpa-funds-sought-for-infrastructure-to-service-industrial-park-fair-oaks-ranch-urban-center/article_363d9a46-353c-11ed-a9c0-27099876c999.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

Master plan hopefully will have some more information coming out soon about it by the end of the year or maybe first of next.

[shavethewhales]

Interesting. I remember working on some early concept sewer studies in this area since a previous company I worked for designed the upgrades and extensions to the Spunky Creek Interceptor. I didn't know about all the master planning and targeted projects though. To me at the time it just sounded like they wanted to keep building more BA style subdivisions all the way around the Lynn Lane reservoir. Will be interesting to see if anything pans out, but I'm not hopeful based on how many things have fallen through.

[LandArchPoke]

Interesting. I remember working on some early concept sewer studies in this area since a previous company I worked for designed the upgrades and extensions to the Spunky Creek Interceptor. I didn't know about all the master planning and targeted projects though. To me at the time it just sounded like they wanted to keep building more BA style subdivisions all the way around the Lynn Lane reservoir. Will be interesting to see if anything pans out, but I'm not hopeful based on how many things have fallen through.

The master planning has been going on pretty quietly and really only started pretty recently after being passed over by a few large possible projects that weren't published. The big take aways were lack of housing and so that's why the new urbanist type community is a big focus. The promising thing about it is that the master plan is being adopted into city planning documents versus it just being a 'master plan' held on to by a private developer with no enforcement mechanism if land is sold off. The land owner wants to make sure that the area is developed in the right way even years down the road, so this will allow for design standards, lot standards, build to zones, frontage requirements, etc. (essentially form based codes) to be established and can't be hyjacked by subdivision developers either down the road so it should be a pretty solid way to guarantee this is built out in the right way.

I did just remeasure this area and it's about the same size as Stapleton which has a population of about 25,000-30,000 people and several million sq. ft of retail and other commercial spaces. So this really is a major deal. It will make it a lot easier to recruit something like a semiconductor factory or other high-tech manufacturing firms to locate here.