Master Planned Communities, 2000s

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Chandler’s population boom managed by careful planning

When Dr. Alexander J. Chandler envisioned the town that would bear his name, his vision was for a planned community. He had a zoning map drawn up in 1911, one year before the town’s founding, making Chandler one of the first planned communities in the country.

Three decades of slow or no growth ended at the conclusion of World War II. Chandler’s population boomed, and that boom has yet to slow down. Starting in the late 1940s, so many people were moving to Chandler that it was impossible to keep up with the growth and a housing crunch ensued. To ease that housing crunch, developers started planning communities. Rather than building individual houses one at a time, they started to build blocks of tract homes. As growth continued, those tracts became larger and larger. Some of the newer developments in Chandler take up almost an entire square mile, with row after row of tiled roofs and stucco walls.

Build out, which is the point at which there is no more vacant land on which to build new developments, is rapidly approaching. Chandler has started to examine what developments of the future may look like, including building high-density vertical housing.