Master-Planned Communities in St. Charles offer a Hometown Feeling
When Charles County Commissioner Gary Hodge and his family moved to the county in 1980, they chose to live in St. Charles – a 9,100-acre master-planned community just 23 miles south of Washington, D.C.
Hodge still lives here more than 25 years later, and he has plenty of company.
At least a quarter of the county’s population lives in St. Charles, where children can walk or bike to neighborhood schools and houses offer a lot of bang for the buck.
“It offered the best of both worlds – an attractive, well-planned community between the country and the city, with good-quality housing we could afford, close to schools, parks, recreation, shopping and services,” Hodge says. “St. Charles is still growing because it offers this winning combination of a well-planned, conveniently located community with an attractive mix of housing choices.”
St. Charles has been around since the 1960s, and it’s the most ambitious planned community started by American Community Properties Trust, a real-estate organization with headquarters in St. Charles.
The overall community is designed to include five mixed-use villages with residential neighborhoods – each with a school, places of worship, shopping centers and recreational opportunities. Two villages are complete, and a third – Fairway Village, adjacent to White Plains Regional Park and its 18-hole public golf course – is in the works.
St. Charles also includes an active-adult community called Heritage at St. Charles, which is open to people age 55 and older.
“One of the strengths of St. Charles as a planned community is our ability to adapt to emerging housing needs over time – and there was a need for active adult housing in the county,” says Craig J. Renner, assistant vice president for community relations at American Community Properties Trust.
As part of ACPT’s development agreement with the Charles County, St. Charles must create more tax revenue than it receives in county services.
No worries there, Renner says. In fact, the community offers many additional benefits to the rest of the county.
For example, St. Charles is the only community in the county that donates school sites to the county free of charge. “Those become neighborhood schools that serve our residents and residents outside of St. Charles as well,” Renner says.
The company also builds neighborhood community centers that it deeds over to St. Charles’ neighborhood associations.
And ACPT builds the infrastructure that supports St. Charles and those who live outside the community, including work on a current project that will extend St. Charles Parkway to create an alternate north-south route from the Charles County line to La Plata.
Through ACPT, “St. Charles builds infrastructure to keep pace with the growth of the community,” Hodge says. “It has donated land for recreational facilities like White Plains Regional Park and the new Southern Maryland Stadium and Entertainment Complex, which is now under construction. Because commercial development is integrated into the planning of St. Charles, the community is more than self-sustaining. It contributes positively to the economic well-being of the entire county.”
