Out in the undulating green farmland of Westmoreland County, Route 819 and Forbes Trail Road form a lonely crossroads in Hempfield.

This rural junction is watched over by a few faded barns, and is easily missed in a blink through the windshields of speeding motorists.

But if developers have their way, this piece of great wide open space soon will be the seed of a new community, the main street of a 700-acre "traditional neighborhood development" called Northpointe. The intersecting streets would be lined with up to one million square feet of retail stores, galleries, office space and restaurants topped with loft apartments.

Just beyond this central business district, developers plan to create a densely organized and pedestrian-friendly "town" featuring up to 2,000 single-family homes, townhouses, apartments, carriage homes and larger estates, said Mike Rosen, a Philadelphia architect hired by the developers, the Glasser family of Hempfield.

Homes will range in price from below $200,000 to more than $1 million. The community would most likely have its own fire station, post office, school and medical facility.

An existing housing development, also called Northpointe, located off Forbes Trail Road, would be part of the overall project.

Last week, Hempfield planners gave preliminary approval to the Glassers' conceptual plan, allowing engineering work on the project to go forward. The project would take eight to 10 years to complete.

Northpointe is designed to be a traditional neighborhood development, or TND, meeting the principles of New Urbanism, a "smart growth" planning philosophy that emphasizes density, walkability and sustainability. In a TND, the architecture is human-scale -- no big-box stores or ocean-sized parking lots. Sidewalks promote walking. Porches and small front yards invite conversation. Tree-lined boulevards and on-street parking slow down traffic.

"This is the hottest type of new development," said Rosen, who has been working with the Glassers on the project for more than year. "This is the most responsible, smart-growth design that exists."

Approximately 300 of these traditional neighborhood developments have been built nationwide, Rosen said, the most famous being Celebration, Fla., a town built by a division of the Walt Disney Co.

But in Western Pennsylvania, nothing like Northpointe currently exists. (The similarly named Southpointe in Canonsburg is an industrial park with some limited retail and housing.)

According to the Association for the New Urbanism in Pennsylvania, there are five TNDs in Allegheny County, but all of them are "urban infill" redevelopment projects inside the city of Pittsburgh, like Crawford Square and Summerset at Frick Park. Northpointe would be a fresh footprint upon previously undeveloped greenfield, a town made from scratch in a vast township without a real center.

Westmoreland County doesn't have any truly mixed-use communities, said Stuart Glasser, who has traveled to both Celebration and Kentlands, a "neo-traditional" community in Gaithersburg, Md., widely regarded as a successful model of New Urbanism.

"The people are happy in those communities," he said.

This is not the first development project for the Glasser family, although it may be the most ambitious. They also have done the 38-acre Lakeridge Townhomes community in Hempfield, the 122-lot Glenn-Aire in Unity, which is entering its third phase, and the Northpointe residential plan.

Hempfield does not have a zoning ordinance in place to accommodate a TND, but is in the process of developing one specifically for Northpointe, said township Manager Rob Ritson.

Because of the impact 2,000 new households would have on the surrounding area, planners from Hempfield, Greensburg and Westmoreland County all plan to work with Rosen and the Glassers to fine-tune the design, Ritson said.

"It's a big project, and we all just want to make sure it's done right the first time," he said.

As part of the plan, Route 819 and Forbes Trail Road would be widened to take some of the load off Route 30, said Rosen, and traffic would be slowed by a proposed traffic circle, similar to one in Ligonier, with a monument or statue in the middle as the identifying symbol of the development.

Rosen said Northpointe's best attribute will be its walkability.

"The major difference is, the typical development wastes land and spreads utilities everywhere; they are car-driven environments," he said. "This is ecologically friendly. It's a more responsible way to develop land. "

In his presentation, Rosen described TNDs as a "magnet" that would draw people from as far away as Pittsburgh. The idea is to have a wide range of housing prices for anyone that wants to move in, said Rosen, "housing for the teachers and firemen as well as the bankers."

One of the reasons traditional neighborhood developments have been so successful around the country, said Joan Barlow of Sustainable Pittsburgh, is the variety of housing they offer.

"It gives everybody the opportunity to live there and walk around and have that neighborhood feeling again," Barlow said. "The majority of the population is saying yes, this is how we want to live."

A different suburbia

But what does it mean to live in a new "traditional" development?

Some TNDs, like Celebration, have been criticized as too-perfect, theme-park versions of small town life -- all forced merriment and social engineering. But the fact is, people are increasingly drawn to that combination of Norman Rockwell Americana and modern upgrades, such as wireless Internet and open space plans.

In more conventional suburbs, homes are fronted by huge garages and set way back on large lots, like far-flung satellites each occupying their own half-acre universe. Their cul-de-sacs, looping roads and lack of sidewalks discourage exploration. Daily errands might be a 15-minute car ride away. Critics complain that suburban design inevitably results in social isolation.

With a traditional neighborhood development, people are willing to pay a premium for a sense of "community." In Kentlands -- possibly the closest parallel to the Northpointe proposal -- everybody keeps their gardens up, said Elizabeth Jones, who has lived there for several months. You see children playing outside, she said, and you feel like you're in a different world.

"Everybody exercises, indoors and outdoors," said Jones, whose two sons attended Carnegie Mellon University. "They keep the community connected with parties, concerts, races. Even in the winter, people are out walking."

Kentlands' playgrounds, lakes and other open spaces are so attractive, she said, even outsiders come in to use them. And in the heated real estate market of the D.C. metro area, the price range in Kentlands is from $300,000 for condos to more than $1 million for some homes.

Jones is a former interpreter for a hospital, her husband a research physicist; she calls Kentlands "uppity, but not too uppity."

Because everyone knows each other, Jones feels safe in her new neighborhood. She is also comforted by the fact that "there are no more areas for growth here. There's no way this area can get bigger, no way it can change."

A TND is a controlled environment with the appearance of history and spontaneous, organic growth. Carefully orchestrated architectural variations are built into the look of the place -- neighboring Victorian-style houses might have different roof styles or height. Strict covenants offer residents the comfort of knowing their neighbor can't do anything unsightly to their homes that would lower property values.

"From a design standpoint, they were very smart to make sure it didn't look too uniform," said Grant Perry, a political consultant who lives with his family in Kentlands. "I think I like the idea of a place where the idea of community trumps the desire for McMansions."

Alex Stavitsky-Zeineddin probably wouldn't be living in the suburbs at all if not for her family, which includes two young children. And she emphasized that Kentlands is still suburbia, no matter how much it might resemble a 19th century New England town.

The former war correspondent and producer has lived in cities all over the world -- most recently Washington, D.C. -- and prefers that lifestyle. But Kentlands is a sort of oasis in the sprawl, appealing to both her aesthetics and her desire for a tight-knit community.

"People spill out onto the streets here, which I think is unusual," said Stavitsky-Zeineddin, who put her journalism career on hold to stay home with her children, and now writes a parenting column for the Kentlands Town Crier, the monthly community newsletter.

Some of this communal atmosphere might be due to Kentlands' self-selecting population, she said.

"People make a conscious choice to live here," she said. "Unless you've done your homework, you wouldn't necessarily know it exists."

Sprawl or good growth?

It is one thing to create a brand-new "Olde Towne" in an area already surrounded or threatened by the creep of suburban sprawl -- such as Celebration, near Orlando. But is it still "smart growth" to build a TND out in the middle of the countryside, within miles of small towns like Irwin and Jeannette, which are struggling to revitalize themselves?

"The density of housing makes sense, no matter where it is," said Barlow of Sustainable Pittsburgh.

Alex Graziani, executive director of the Smart Growth Partnership of Westmoreland County, said that modern zoning has found a way to separate and segregate residential and commercial land use in a way that is contrary to 2,000 or more years of community development. A traditional neighborhood development represents a positive change, as well as a response to market demands.

"People are looking for that neighborhood diversity and community, a small-town feel," Graziani said. "The challenge that many towns in Western Pennsylvania face is that their infrastructure has not kept pace with the needs of today. A lot of us love the look and feel of the older neighborhoods, but we don't like old wiring."

Creating a new community in a region like southwestern Pennsylvania, which is losing population, begs the question: Why build anything new when you're not adding more people? After all, a development like Northpointe imposes a larger human footprint on the environment, consuming more "greenfield" and turning it into development, while other, older areas are abandoned or neglected.

But in reality, the development of greenfield would probably happen anyway. For the most part, traditional neighborhood developments like Northpointe don't end up cannibalizing small towns. Most of their growth comes from urban areas like Allegheny County, said Graziani.

Rosen said his development "is going to look like a Western Pennsylvania small town."

"We're going to borrow from that," he said. "There's very nice small towns [in the area] that we're going to borrow from."