Downtown area of Ross Bridge
“It all started with somebody’s vision of building a hotel near the rail lines,” said John Gunderson, president of Daniel Communities.
That’s how many resort towns across the United States, such as Colorado Springs and Asheville, North Carolina, started, and that’s how Ross Bridge was designed.
“What I was able to do was to go back to that whole fabric,” Gunderson said, mentioning that the development of the community was modeled off of the original American resort town blueprint that had been successful in other areas. He said that for a while, only the train station stood in Ross Bridge. The hotel within the community was built in 2003, and the roadways and houses soon followed suit.
“It’s very different from your standard residential community,” Gunderson said.
Bob House, Hoover planning consultant, said the community includes a small village in the downtown area, but like the resort towns, the focus of the neighborhood is the large hotel as well as the Alabama retirement system’s golf course.
Located southwest of Birmingham, the land originally belonged to the Ross family, who immigrated from Scotland, Gunderson said. The land was eventually acquired by U.S. Steel in the early 1900s and was annexed into Hoover in 2002.
Gunderson admitted that when Ross Bridge was annexed, it was not in the general path of expansion that Birmingham had seen in recent years. “It was a property that had historically been in an area of town that … had not been in the path of growth,” Gunderson said.
The success of the community was noticed in 2010, when it was named the Best Community in America by the National Association of Homebuilders. “Little old Birmingham was in competition with some of the greatest areas in the country,” Gunderson said. “That was really important for us as a broader community.”
Now, Ross Bridge has nearly achieved complete sell-out of the neighborhood with 2,200 homes and 200 more on the way.
“Obviously, today it’s all about the families, the people who came here and believed in the story,” Gunderson said. “It far and away has surpassed anybody’s wildest dreams with how successful it could be.”
