Open space and development are often seen as diametric opposites.
You can`t have development without destroying open space, and you can`t have open space without blocking development, the thinking goes.
This view has become particularly prominent in the last several years as open space has emerged as a political issue. Various ”save the land”
factions have painted developers in the blackest terms; developers in response have attacked some environmentalists as ignorant and self-serving.
But while the angry debate has grabbed the headlines, some developers are themselves quietly becoming committed to preserving open space-within the communities they are building.
The developers are not doing this out of pure love of nature, and a certain amount of kicking and screaming can precede a builders` espousal of an open space plan.
But a combination of wetland regulations, municipal land donation requirements, land scarcity and market forces are pushing builders into open space conservation. They are being forced to attend to the environment and at the same time are finding they can profit from this new approach.
Whatever their motivations, the developers are approaching land with increasing sensitivity and sophistication, sometimes hiring ecologists and botanists to advise them on their properties.
At the cutting edge of this trend, builders are beginning to ”think about marketing developments as integrated nature-human habitations,” in the words of ecologist Steven Apfelbaum, who advises developers on nature preservation.
”What we`re finding out is that these concepts are marketable and profitable and beautiful,” said Apfelbaum, head of Applied Ecological Services, of Juda, Wis.
Apfelbaum is associated with a controversial proposal by two developers to turn a 132-acre tract in Highland Park, known as the Highland Park Prairie, into a residential community incorporating some 90 acres of open space, including a state nature preserve.
To the west, suburban Streamwood, which has been under heavy residential development pressure in recent years, has become a kind of laboratory for builder involvement in open space preservation.
In three major projects under way in the community of about 28,000, the developers and the village are joining in shaping and maintaining different open space areas-two nature preserves and a 9-hole municipal golf course.
The creation of golf courses has become the most popular way among developers of preserving open space in the Chicago area. Golf course communities have proliferated, making it seem as if a golf craze of enormous dimensions has hit the region.
Yet golf mania is only one of the reasons for constructing a course. Many courses that form part of a residential community are built in low-lying flood-plain land that is unsuitable for building.
”Flood plain awareness has contributed to the popularity of golf courses,” said Tom Dyke, president of of Thompson Dyke & Associates Ltd., urban planners and landscape architects. ”But there is also awareness of the popularity of golf. And developers know it helps to sell real estate.”
Jon Nelson, head of JEN Land Design, which assisted in the plan for the Streamwood golf course, said that such courses are the most dominant form of open space contributions by developers of large projects.
”Where you have a substantial amount of land that is unsuitable for building or taken up by restrictions, and a reasonable percentage of buildable land, the golf course is more and more a vehicle to create usable, functional open space that creates land value,” Nelson said.
Streamwood`s new 83-acre golf course, scheduled to open next summer under village supervision, is being built by Centex Corp. as the centerpiece of its Oak Knoll development.
The project, planned for 421 single-family and 344 multifamily units, covers 265 acres, including the course. Most of the course area is unbuildable wetland and drainage area.
The history of the development, as related by Centex and village officials, is a typical tangle of competing, and finally converging, public and developer interests. Centex, one of the largest residential developers in the United States, obtained the land from another large developer in the late 1970s, then left it vacant through the early 1980s recession.
In 1983, Centex proposed a single- and multifamily development in 1983 that would have left some 70 acres of wetland adjacent to Poplar Creek as natural open space. That proposal, which drew protests from neighbors who did not want multifamily units near their property, was rejected by the village.
Centex came back in 1985 with a proposal for single-family homes, pacifying one interest group, but by that time village officials had become uncertain about future maintenance for a 70-acre wetland. In ensuing discussions of the project the village and the developer arrived at the idea of a municipally owned and operated golf course to be built by the developer. Centex added more acreage to the open area, incidentally helping to satisfy its park district land contribution requirements. At the same time, needing higher density units to compensate for its land donations, the corporation went back to its proposal for inclusion of multifamily units in the project.
The proposal was well received. The golf course reconciled the neighbors who had protested the multifamily units and additionally provided them with some measure of flood protection. A series of finger lakes was created in the course, providing for storm water retention and creating challenging hazards for the golfers.
The proposal was approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which monitors wetlands under the federal Clean Water Act of 1972. In 1987 it finally was okayed by the village, which by that time had adopted its own local wetlands policy.
In addition to the land donation, Centex is spending $1.5 million for construction of the golf course alone, although some of that is coming back in the form of discounted village building permits.
All in all, company officials like the deal.
”The amenity outweighs giving up additional land from our vantage point,” said Richard Howe, Centex vice president. ”We can market a golf course community.”
Prices at Oak Knoll range start at $131,000 for single-family homes and $89,400 for multifamily ”manor” homes (stacked flats). Premiums for sites adjacent to the golf course are about $8,500 for the single-family units and $3,000 for the multifamily dwellings.
The stringent environmental reviews Centex went through are relatively new for developers, who in former years, abetted by lack of public interest in open-space preservation and lax federal oversight, have been able to ignore wetlands and the regulations governing them, often simply filling them in and building over them.
”A few years ago there wasn`t much public awareness about the ways a swamp operated,” said John White, Streamwood`s public works director. ”Most people just saw a mosquito factory. Now they see other types of wildlife and other functions, including partial treatment of storm water discharge.”
Now, White said, ”anything with a cattail” is likely to be considered a wetland, and a developer tampering with it is likely to be reported to the Environmental Protection Agency, which was given the power to fine Clean Water Act violators in 1987.
Indeed, the Kirk Corp., a developer involved in creating a nature preserve in Streamwood, was hit with a $15,000 fine from the EPA for working on wetlands before concluding an agreement with the Corps of Engineers in its Oak Ridge Trail residential community last year.
Kirk paid the fine and came back with a plan for a 14-acre prairie area in its 75-acre project, which is to contain 99 single-family homes, with prices starting at $127,900, and 106 duplexes, starting at $107,900.
The firm hired a consulting botanist and devised plantings to restore the wetlands to what a prairie would have looked like a century ago, according to company chairman Don Kirk. The plan won Army Corps and village approval.
”This is the prettiest project I`ve ever dealt with, and the biggest pain,” said Tom Loftus, Kirk Corp. president. ”The more you work with nature and try to preserve it, the more work and detail it takes. It`s not just grading a farm and developing it.”
The area will be maintained under an unusual arrangement set up by the village, which passed an ordinance establishing special-assessment districts for the maintenance of open spaces. The districts tax only the residents of the developments containing the open space.
The advantage of this system, according to Streamwood village president Billie Roth, is that the village can oversee the area, but only those homeowners getting the greatest use of it are taxed.
The same taxing arrangement covers a 20-acre preserve in the 80-acre Meadows South subdivision being developed by Burkart & Oehlerking Inc. The wetland area in that project is being converted to a natural area with a small lake containing islands and a nature trail running around the lake.
Negotiations with the village and Corps of Engineers leading to creation of the preserve out of what had been a cattail swamp took about a year, according to Richard Szatko, Burkart & Oehlerking vice president.
The project has 211 single-family homes, with prices starting at $116,900, and 60 townhouses, starting at $99,000. Premiums for lake sites begin at $4,000. The 60 townhouses, called nature homes, are built on a peninsula jutting into the lake.
Although forced to come up with a wetlands plan, the company now takes pride in its creation.
”I look at this as the jewel of Streamwood,” Szatko said.
”We are in a position to be able to create something that is not only going to be exciting to the home owners that come here but helps us sell faster,” he said.
”People want open areas, to feel that their children can observe nature and that they have a good place to walk off the stress they built up throught the day.”
Urban planner Steve Lenet, head of Lenet Design Group of Chicago, which advises the village of Streamwood on planning matters, said that the combination of developer sophistication and public awareness on environmental issues has created a new atmosphere in suburban development.
”Developers are more aware of the value of incorporating environmental features in planning and marketing,” Lenet said. ”Simultaneously, villages have become more aware that with more of their buildable areas developed, their fragile areas have become overloaded.
”In some suburbs there is flooding in houses that were built on sensitive areas. Villages have come around and said, `We can`t do this anymore. We can`t do it environmentally, legally and politically.` People are voted out of office because basements are flooding.”
One of the reasons villages and developers are coming together on the environment is that, in many areas, only environmentally sensitive areas such as wetlands remain undeveloped.
”It`s the only land left,” said Lenet.
All three Streamwood projects incorporating open space are being built under a zoning concept known as the planned unit development-PUD for short-that first gained popularity in the 1960s as a way of varying land plans from the standard layouts that divided all the land into equal lots.
PUDs allow the clustering of houses in certain areas of a project to create open space in other segments, in theory without changing the overall housing density permitted in a given zoning category.
Though PUDs were a boon to landscape architects and site planners, opening the way to more creative design, they got a bad reputation in the early years of their use because some were employed solely as devices to get around development constraints, according to JEN`s Nelson.
”They didn`t necessarily create open space,” he said. ”Though there were some creative clusters, with linear parks and greenbelt walk systems, a byproduct was the relaxation of zoning codes. In some instances there was an increase in density.”
The emergence of the environment as a development issue, however, has given new vitality to the PUD concept. In most cases, the only way builders can afford to incorporate wetlands and other open spaces into their projects is by clustering homes on the remaining buildable land.
One of the most ambitious open space plans to be put forward by area developers is a PUD proposal for the 132-acre tract in west Highland Park, sometimes called the Highland Park Prairie, owned by interests connected with the Polk family of discount store fame.
The land, which contains wetlands, prairie, woodlands and farmland, is home to two endangered species of plants, the sundrop and the white-fringed orchid.
Red Seal Development Corp. and Jacobs Homes Inc. are seeking to build 119 single-family homes on less than 40 acres of the land, leaving the rest for common areas, a public trail, 17 acres of lakes and ponds and a 23-acre preservation corridor to be dedicated to the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission.
They claim that their development, called Hybernia, would create more wetlands than presently exist, protect the endangered plants as well as some deteriorating oak trees and bring back other plant species that have disappeared from the tract.
Under the plan, which has won the endorsement of the Corps of Engineers and the backing of the Nature Preserves Commission, maintenance of the corridor would be paid by the homeowners and the developers.
”We think it`s a fabulous idea,” said Red Seal president David Hoffman of the nature preserve dedication. ”It guarantees the land will always be held open and never be built upon.”
Hoffman, however, may never see the realization of his plan. The Lake County Forest Preserve Commission has voted to buy 110 acres, contingent upon an appraisal of its dollar value.
The commission is scheduled to take final action Aug. 18.
Hoffman argues that buying the land, which has been estimated to be worth anywhere from $11 million to $25 million, is an inefficient use of public money.
”They shouldn`t buy it,” he said. ”There are hundreds of other parcels of land from 1,000 to 2,000 acres they can buy. This is too little land for too much cost of management. It`s the most expensive piece of land they`ve ever considered buying.”
Ecologist Apfelbaum, whom Hoffman hired to study the natural makeup of the land, said that the developers went ”well beyond the letter of the law” in devising their plan for the tract because only three acres of wetlands had been identified there by the Corps of Engineers.
”There are no regulations covering the area beyond the three acres,”
Apfelbaum said. ”My estimate is their proposal would essentially establish a preserve with buffer areas of about 50 acres.”
Apfelbaum argued that developers have to be involved in the future preservation of open space.
”Most of the land is owned by private citizens, and it (preservation)
takes an educational process and development of ethics and feelings by the private sector.
”When developers look at the economics and public relations benefits associated with preservation, many can afford to preserve and would choose to preserve nature.”
