AARON CORVIN; The News Tribune
Last updated: May 4th, 2005 03:08 PM (PDT)

Inside his office in a downtown Bellevue tower, a glassy, angular building that looks like a giant block from the video game Tetris, Patrick Kuo cracks open a book.

The pictures inside "Villages of England" reveal lush gardens, lovely cottages and sleepy cobblestone paths. Urban pleasantly meets rural.

Kuo flips through the pages. "People like to have a campus environment," he says.

The pictures offer glimpses of what will become parts of Cascadia, Kuo's greatest passion and the largest planned community in Washington.

On 4,719 acres of plateau land south of Bonney Lake, Cascadia is planned to evolve over 20 years, eventually housing more than 16,000 residents and harboring businesses providing roughly 10,000 jobs.

Kuo launched Cascadia - his first real estate development - in 1991 and has managed a $30 million investment to carry it this far.

After 14 years, four governors, three county executives, 22 Pierce County Council members and countless meetings, Kuo finally plans to break ground on Friday. Up to 300 people are expected at the ceremony.

The 50-year-old Kuo, president and CEO of Cascadia Development Corp., speaks softly and deliberately about building a community, about believing in something greater than yourself.

For inspiration, he looks to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Frost.

How did Kuo get to Cascadia? "I took the road less traveled," he says, quoting Frost.

FROM THE PIANO TO PRACTICALITY

The road began in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, the second-largest city in Taiwan, where Patrick Wuu-jong Kuo was born. His mother, M.W. Kuo, is a homemaker. His father, C.L. Kuo, works in retail, banking and construction.

When he was 13, Patrick studied piano, believing he might one day become a full-fledged pianist. His father nudged his son toward practicality: It would be easier to make money and enjoy the piano as a hobby, he told his son.

And so it was. Kuo plowed through his early education in Taiwan, passing mind-bendingly difficult entrance exams to climb to each new level. Along the way, American influences took hold: On TV, "I Love Lucy"; in movies, John Wayne. From literature, he absorbed the humor of Mark Twain and the poetry of Frost.

When he was ready to visit the United States, Kuo wanted to study law. In 1980, he went to Southern California to attend the University of La Verne.

Immediately, he tangled with American idioms. In a swimming pool at his apartment, Kuo met a fellow student. They talked awhile. "Well, I'll see you later," she told him, and left the pool.

Kuo took her literally. Fifteen minutes passed. Then 30. An hour later, Kuo was getting cold. Finally, he understood.

Now, Kuo chuckles about his misunderstanding. But it was OK then, too. After all, America was just temporary.

"I thought it would be a short journey," Kuo says, "get a degree, go home, be happy."

But the journey continued. It led him away from California to the University of Washington law school, where he earned a master's degree in Asian law and became one of the first foreign students at UW to earn a juris doctorate.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Kuo filled his résumè with prestigious law firms, including Perkins Coie and Bogle and Gates. He also served as legal counsel to various divisions of The Evergreen Group, which owns EVA Airways Corp., Taiwan's second-largest airline, and Evergreen Marine Corp., the world's third-largest container shipper.

When he worked at Perkins Coie, Kuo met powerful Seattleites, including Paul Schell, a future Seattle mayor. Schell was busy establishing the Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public policy think tank researching technology, science and culture.

Kuo joined the institute when it was focused on the Cascadia Project, an effort to develop an expanded transportation system, including high-speed rail, to move people and goods throughout Washington, Oregon and British Columbia. The project also sought to encourage thoughtful urban design that would reduce traffic congestion.

When Schell and others moved on to other pursuits, Kuo kept the Cascadia Project going. He refused to let it fade. He sought the physical manifestation of all those ideas in one massive landform - a planned community.

'Unshakable faith in the project'

All Kuo needed was plenty of uninterrupted tracts of land. He found it in East Pierce County. He created Cascadia Development Corp., and in 1991 bought about 5,000 acres of forest from the Weyerhaeuser Co. for $13.5 million.

So far, Kuo has sustained Cascadia with the help of investors in Taiwan, some local investors and his own money. It's a privately held corporation, and he won't divulge details. But people who know him say Cascadia is achievable in Kuo's hands. "He's well-capitalized and he has a long-term perspective," says Mike Brooks, who helped Kuo manage Cascadia for four years.

"He's had unshakable faith in the project. Evidently, his partners are quite comfortable with his approach. I've been in Taipei and met them. They're rare, outstanding individuals and competent business people. It's not as though he's without peer review."

One of the most frequent criticisms of developers is that they don't care what the community thinks about what they build. Frame it, slap the vinyl siding on and let the money roll in.

Not Kuo. Fourteen years is not exactly a get-in, get-out kind of mindset.

"I've sat in numerous living rooms with Patrick," Brooks says. "He and I had a road show. In the early days, before PowerPoints, we were carrying boards around and sitting with small groups of four or five neighbors."

"That's how he ingratiates himself," adds Tim Thompson, another former consultant who spent 11 years helping to shepherd Cascadia through a thicket of land-use regulations. " 'I'm part of your family, you just don't know it.' "

And it's worked. Unlike some development plans, there is no organized opposition to Kuo's Cascadia. It's taken years, but he has agreements with neighboring towns for road and other infrastructure needs to accommodate the growth.

Thompson says Kuo is just plain rare.

"I've never met anyone who has a better understanding of the strategic place of Puget Sound as it relates to Asia and growth and commerce," he says. "He's traveled everywhere. He's not a planner. His intelligence has always been to know how things are interrelated, ultimately where the growth will occur."

Local elected officials, many of whom have received campaign contributions from Kuo, know him well.

"As soon as I became a council member, he wanted to get me out to see the property," says Pierce County Council Chairman Shawn Bunney (RLake Tapps). "I remember being in a Jeep for several hours going down little roads. Each stop had its own piece of vision to it. 'This is where we will have our concentrated center. This is where the industrial site is. This is the trail system.'

"We literally spent hours riding around the plateau and little crazy trails that one would never know they existed unless you're Patrick and you spend hours and hours to understand the land."

Building a community

Today, Kuo carries many titles. Attorney. International businessman and founding investor of the Commerce Bank of Washington. He continues to advise the chairman of The Evergreen Group on a flexible fee basis through his global strategy firm, Kuo & Company. He's also a member of the Economic Development Board of Tacoma-Pierce County.

On Friday, his development company moves dirt for the first time for Cascadia.

In that capacity, Kuo says, he prefers another title: "community developer."

But even with all the work Kuo has invested in the project, it still won't be easy. Essentially, he wants to build a city from the ground up, with a pedestrian-friendly town center, houses, apartments, jobs, schools, trails and parks. He envisions East meeting West, where you could walk into a Zen garden one day and grab coffee in a town out of a Norman Rockwell painting the next.

And there is a science to Kuo's art. Under Washington's 1990 Growth Management Act, Cascadia is what is known as an employment-based, master-planned community. The idea is to build efficiently to reduce long commutes, traffic congestion and sprawl by designing places where people can live, work and play.

Kuo says he's talked to national, international and regional companies about coming to Cascadia, including those in software, life sciences, aerospace, energy and sustainable-technology industries.

He says it would be inappropriate to list them until formal agreements have been signed.

What if the economy tanks? What if the pressure to build just another gigantic sprawlburb mounts?

Kuo isn't wavering. He says he wants to set an example for Pierce County, for the Central Puget Sound region. And why not? For the world, too.

"I feel like I'm a man on a mission," he says.

Patrick Kuo

FAMILY: Wife, Nancy; two daughters

HOME: Bellevue

OCCUPATION: President and CEO of Cascadia Development Corp.; attorney

EDUCATION: Undergraduate law degree from National Taiwan University; master's degree in Asian law from University of Washington; juris doctorate degree from UW

HOBBIES: Golfing, reading, music, outdoor recreation Cascadia at a glance

Cascadia At a Glance
· 5,000-acre planned community about 12 miles southeast of Tacoma
· 6,500 homes
· 626 acres for a high-tech business and industrial park
· A pedestrian-oriented town center with retail stores and restaurants
· 183 acres for seven schools
· 1,280 acres for parks and open space
· A state-of-the-art telecommunications network
· The Cascadia Institute, a nonprofit designed to promote international cooperation
· A performance hall and outdoor performance area to showcase music, dance, theater and other arts and cultural activities
· 2005 - construction of roads, sewer and water systems
· 2006 - construction of houses, a school, a business park, a conference center, a hotel and other amenities
· 2007 - first Cascadia residents and businesses expected to move in, followed by the conference center, the hotel and a golf complex
· Cascadia is designed to be the largest planned development in Washington - bigger than DuPont's Northwest Landing, which rises on 3,000 acres, and South Hill's Sunrise, which fills out 1,500 acres.


Originally published: May 4th, 2005 12:01 AM (PDT)
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