Provo, Utah
The result, his critics say, can be contentious.
Long before Hall realizes his self-sustaining city on 5,000 acres of Vermont soil near the Joseph Smith Memorial, he plans to build smaller prototype communities in Provo, Utah’s third-largest city and his hometown.
Over many years, he has bought up property in two Provo neighborhoods in hopes of eventually owning a contiguous piece of land that he can use for his developments — much as he has done in the past months in Vermont.
If residents in the White River Valley have been up in arms about Hall’s plan, which is to build an eco-friendly 20,000-person community based on writings of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, the outcry from the developer’s Utah neighbors has been even stronger.
“It was absolutely horrible,” said Mary Millar, chairwoman of the Spring Creek neighborhood in Provo, where Hall has bought 20 of 25 houses. “People were selling because they did not want to live where he was promoting this — this thing. …We have watched the neighborhood disintegrate.”
Spring Creek lies on the outskirts of the city, and Millar’s neighborhood mostly follows a single road, Mountain Vista Lane, along which Hall has purchased nearly every property. Nearby is Hall’s family business, Novatek, a technology company founded by his father, H. Tracy Hall, who invented a synthetic diamond used in cutting and drilling.
Hall sold the business this fall to oil and gas giant Schlumberger, pouring the resulting millions into his NewVista Foundation. He holds dozens of properties through that group and a limited liability company named after his father.
“What I’ve been doing for many years now,” Hall said in a telephone interview, “is slowly buying out people as they decided to move. Or, as the older people, like my parents, would die, their estate would come to me and say, ‘Hey, why don’t you buy my home?’ ”
“Any home that comes available, we purchase,” he said.
The properties, according to county land records, together are worth tens of millions. But Hall has paid even more. Millar and other residents told of neighbors receiving offers at twice their home’s value, or more.
“We’re the best purchaser in the area,” Hall said, “and people always come to us because we pay a premium.”
Once he owns everything in Spring Creek and Pleasant View, the other neighborhood where he has been active, the next step of Hall’s plan is to convert the land to mixed-used zoning from residential.
“Some of those owners are very opposed to this, and have been vocal about it for years and years,” Hall said, “and so I’m just going to have to be patient about it and wait for them to change their minds or decide to sell.”
City officials, for their part, said there was little to stop his re-zoning Spring Creek, as long as there were no homeowners left to protest.
“If he owns everything, and he wants to occupy all the houses and tear them down, I don’t see why we would want it to continue to be residential,” Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dixon Holmes said in an interview.
In Utah, planning and development regulations are under local control, city officials said. There is no equivalent to Vermont’s Act 250, the statewide law governing large-scale development.
R. Paul Evans, who is neighborhood chairman in Pleasant View, said that Provo’s zoning rules weren’t equipped to deal with someone like Hall.
“They’re all kind of based on the idea that people don’t have unlimited resources; that no one would buy land for more than what the market value is; and that, whatever you do purchase, you’ll realize an increase on your investment,” Evans said. “But that’s not what David has. Whether it takes 50 years or 100 years for his ideas to finally reach full potential, it’s not going to happen in his lifetime, and that’s not an uncomfortable issue for him.”
Of the four Vermont towns where Hall is acquiring land, Strafford is the only one with zoning other than flood plain regulations.
After he has bought all the land in Spring Creek and changed its zoning status, Hall says, he plans to build a prototype community for about 1,000 people there. He said he envisioned Pleasant View as a home for research centers and mixed-use housing “in the NewVista style.”
The more properties Hall has purchased, the more local opposition has grown, the neighborhood spokespeople say.Over the years, Evans, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University, has tracked the encirclement of his own house by the developer’s acquisitions.
Like Millar, Evans serves as a representative and adviser to the city government. He also has been Hall’s prime critic in Pleasant View, a residential neighborhood surrounded on three sides by the university campus.
Hall said he has bought 14 houses there so far, though not all of the purchases could be confirmed in county land records.
The dispute has turned acrimonious. Last week, Evans shared an email and voicemail that appeared to show Hall threatening legal action over the neighborhood chairman’s opposition to the NewVista project.
“If you don’t stop harassing me,” Hall said in a voicemail from August, “I will sue you, Paul, and you’ll never see the end of it.”
Reached by phone this week, Hall confirmed he had threatened suit, but said he had never followed through.
Hall claimed that Evans had gone door-knocking at his residential properties and had told the people who answered that they weren’t allowed to be there.
“It got so bad,” Hall said. “He would actually go up to the door and knock on it and harass my visitors.”
Evans, for his part, denied that he or others had gone door-to-door; however, he added, Provo city officials had visited some of Hall’s properties in response to residents’ concerns about possible rental violations.
Evans suggested that Hall was skirting ordinances that require a landlord to have a license and pay fees to the city. Hall denies this allegation, saying he is free to have “guests” in his houses without acquiring those permits.
Hall has said in past interviews that developers shouldn’t be able to “force anything” on residents. But as far as Provo goes, the neighborhoods’ complaints haven’t swayed him.
“They’re a minority,” Hall said. “If people didn’t want to sell, they wouldn’t, and so for most people they view my concept as a good thing for them because they get a premium on their home.”
And in actuality, Hall’s assertion may be true in Spring Creek, where the number of resident owners is dwindling in comparison with his renters.
As the conversation drew to a close, Hall returned to the subject of the legal threats he had made.
“I admit I probably need to learn more patience,” he said. “I shouldn’t have sent him an email telling him to watch out. I didn’t really need to do that.”
“… I need to learn to bide my time.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.