McKinney – We all know that the housing market is hot across the Lone Star State, but over in the Big D it’s an even bigger business. The metroplex is a mega market with over 8 million residents, and developers are constantly getting creative to create enough homes. But if you’re looking for a place to live that doesn’t feel like you’re in the middle of a big city, or America for that matter, the Adriatica Village in McKinney might be just for you. “This is the only village that was designed based on the evolution on how we’re supposed to live,” said Jeff Blackard.
Jeff is a DFW real estate developer. “Developers are weird breeds,” joked Jeff. Jeff should know, as he’s been around Big D for a long time. Originally from Illinois, Jeff was 24 when he came to the Lone Star State. “Land of opportunity back in ’81-’82, interest rates were terrible, and so I came down here, begged everybody for a job,” said Jeff. “Eventually a development company hired me. Within a few years I developed, I don’t know, 15,000 home sites. I branched out on my own and started doing master plan developments all over the United States.”
After years of making massive communities and traveling around the world, Jeff had an epiphany. “When I bought a village in Croatia, a big resort, 1800 room resort, and a lot of components of a village, I learned what a village really was,” said Jeff. “What I realized is I’ve been segregating our society. I’m the worst because I do these master plan communities and I say, okay, if you make so much money, you can live in this $250,000 house in this neighborhood. And then I have a hundred of these and a hundred of these, and then we call it a master plan community, and we put a gazebo and we’re a village. And I just said, I’m not going to do that anymore.”
Coming to this realization lead Jeff to figuring out a new goal for his developments. “From that point on, I’ve focused my whole life on how we can bring society back together again and create a village where the transfer of wisdom happens,” said Jeff. “We can get along. If you’re a Democrat and I’m a Republican or whatever it is, we need each other because we live in a village.”
So he built his own Adriatic village in the middle of McKinney and called it Adriatica. It’s modeled after the town that inspired him to do this, and the first buildings he completed were a small chapel and the town tower. “It’s after a little town called Supetar,” said Jeff. “It’s on the island of Brač. What I do is I take a lot of similarity to buildings and mimic them as the facial of the village.”
When constructing a village, there’s two structures that go up before any others to lay a foundation for the rest of the community. “There’s two components they’d always do first, they build the little chapel and they build the bell tower, and then over time they would build a bigger chapel and build a bigger bell tower,” said Jeff. “But the bell tower was the communication. It was like their telegraph or their telephone. When the centerpiece of the village is done, then the village is complete, even though the village may take hundreds, thousands of years to keep on evolving.”
Even the streets, which have the feel of a European roadway, have the symbol of Croatia on them. “I literally was up night after night stamping all those streets, so it felt like cobblestone,” said Jeff. “So if you look closely, you’ll see the little emblem of Croatia, a little stamp on the side.”
The chapel on the lake is the second to be built in Adriatica. Jeff wanted to have a more prominent pious centerpiece for his project. “This chapel’s exact dimensions of a chapel on a hill, on the island of Brac in Croatia,” said Jeff. “Jesus on the front of this chapel was from Italy from after the World War II. The bell was a gift from the Croatian government, and I got married here. This is probably the most photographed place in the Metroplex, people here all the time, every prom picture, every wedding picture. Even if they don’t get married here, they’re down there taking a picture of the chapel behind.”
Being a village that constantly evolved also meant making sure the businesses in the village were unique and provided residents with things they needed. “If a flower shop, you need it in your village, but it can’t make $25 triple net leases, then you don’t put a flower shop,” said Jeff. “But it’s needed by the people, and we just don’t do that. The little lady owned a flower shop where she provided flowers in her house, and I found her and I put it in her little building up here, and she couldn’t afford it at first, so I subsidized her but the village needed a flower shop. We have doctor’s offices in here, dentist’s offices in here, independent living in here so it’s a lot of people to believe and be part of the construction of a village.”
Jeff’s gone on to create more villages across the country and is working on two similar projects in Sulphur Springs and Corpus Christi. “What I create, people have to live or will live for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years,” said Jeff. “So for developers to go do neighborhoods and not really understand what impact they have on society is sad.”
As the state of Texas continues to boom, the way people live here will too. For Jeff, creating these Villages is what he believes will create a more close-knit bond between neighbors and provide folks with unique place to call home. “It’s the combination of a lot of people coming together to make a village actually happen and people believing in it,” said Jeff. “It’s a nice, peaceful spot in the middle of McKinney, in the middle of Metroplex, in the middle of Texas.”