The sign out front proclaims that the new housing development is ”where man and nature dwell.”
Drive through the front entrance to Hybernia in Highland Park, and it is clear where man dwells. The houses are big. No, make that BIG. The smallest, a two-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath model, has 3,300 square feet. That`s barely a postage stamp compared to the largest design, which has space for five bedrooms, 5 1/2 baths, three fireplaces, two curved staircases, a music room, an exercise room, and a library in its 7,642 square feet.
There wouldn`t seem to be room left over for nature at Hybernia, but in fact about three-quarters of Hybernia`s 160 acres is open space-including 17 acres of streams and serpentine lakes, 10 acres owned by the Highland Park Park District, and 28.5 acres of woods-that has been designated an Illinois nature preserve, a highly restrictive status that makes any alteration of the preserve difficult.
Of course, until Red Seal Development Corp. started to build there, the whole parcel had been open space. In fact, it had been the last large undeveloped property in the North Shore suburb. Now, it is developed.
Hybernia poses in a specific case a general question that the metropolitan area is likely to see repeated throughout the decade, a period that open-space planners predict will be the last chance for the region to preserve its natural areas:
Is there an accommodation between man and nature?
Developers and open-space advocates, so often in conflict in the past, seem to think there is.
”We would like to see more of it done,” said Tom Hahn, associate director of the Open Lands Project, the area`s leading advocacy group for open space. ”Where a developer proposes something innovative and the community doesn`t take the traditional subdivision approach and instead looks to cluster housing and finds ways to preserve open space. Hybernia is probably the best example of that. I think things can be done better than Hybernia, but it did at least preserve a prairie area.”
”The world is not going to stop,” said Red Seal President David Hoffman. ”The world needs new housing. I`m not going to stop being a developer. The question is how to do both.”
Although conservationists and builders are arriving at similar conclusions, the forces that are pushing them there are quite different.
From the open-space advocates` position, the ideal would be to have all ecologically significant land government-owned, so that the land would be open to the public and its care would be under public scrutiny.
That is not going to happen in many, if not most, cases. Public money is scarce, taxes and bond issues unpopular. The available sites, such as the Hybernia property, which was owned for decades by the Polk family of local appliance-store fame, usually carry a high price. Condemnation proceedings in the cases of unwilling sellers are lengthy, messy affairs.
Furthermore, public bodies, especially forest preserves, want property to meet certain requirements besides ecological significance before they sign a check for it. They want to buy large parcels, more than 200 acres if possible, to keep the cost per acre for maintenance low and to provide significant chunks of recreational space. They also want to link new acquisitions with existing public land wherever possible.
So rather than dig in their heels and risk losing an entire site, conservationists aim to save as much as they can by working on agreements with landowners. Their goal, after all, is to save open space. The means are secondary.
”When there are no other alternatives, you have to look at where compromises can be made,” said Hahn. ”We understand that there`s a development community out there. There are local officials who view development as a way to diversify and increase their tax base. What we`d like to see is planning ahead of time to preserve open space.”
From the developers` position, the ideal would be to have no restrictions on their actions so that they could do as they please with a piece of land to turn it into a money-making property.
Their ideal is no more likely to be realized than the conservationists`. Zoning restrictions and building codes automatically limit a developer`s freedom of action. Furthermore, if a site contains wetlands, the developer may have to meet federal requirements under the Clean Water Act. The act`s wetlands provisions are administered by the Army Corps of Engineers, which usually requires that any wetlands that cannot be saved must be ”mitigated,” or artificially constructed, elsewhere on the property.
In addition, developments that call for widespread demolition of natural features tend to be controversial these days. Plenty of acrimony attended the Hybernia proposal when it went before the Highland Park village board in 1989, and it was supposed to be one of the ”good” projects. Too much controversy, like too much garlic, gives projects a funny taste.
At the heart of such controversies is the greater public awareness of things environmental and ecological.
”The entire population is aware of these issues,” said Hoffman.
”Twenty years ago, they were foreign issues. A hundred years ago, people would have laughed. They would have said there`s more open space than we can use.”
So rather than dig in their heels and risk alienating the buying public, developers are turning a potential problem into an opportunity. Their goal, after all, is to make a profit. The public wants open space and natural amenities, such as prairies and wetlands. Better yet, the public is willing to pay extra for them. And so developers are seeing the value of preserving such things.
The reality of this new state of affairs is marked out in red pins on the scale model of Hybernia that occupies a place of honor in the development`s model home. The pins, which indicate sales, are most heavily concentrated in an ox-bow where the lots are the smallest but also the closest to woods and prairie. The buyers did not snap them up because they were cheaper than other lots. In fact, they paid a premium of up to $50,000 for the views.
”Does nature sell?” asks Hoffman. ”Yeah.”
Each piece of open land has its unique set of owners, location, natural features, and potential buyers, so there is no single approach to negotiating the balance between man and nature. But one of the legal mechanisms that is becoming increasingly useful to both sides of such bargains is the
conservation easement.
Under such an agreement, a landowner transfers development rights to a local government or nonprofit organization in perpetuity, no matter if the land is later sold to a third party. In return for granting a conservation easement, the landowner usually gets some kind of tax break. It might be considered a charitable deduction for income-tax purposes, or it can be used to reduce a property`s value for purposes of inheritance or property taxes.
”Conservation easements are never going to fully replace direct acquisition, which you really need when you`re going to have a lot of active use by the public,” said Hahn. ”But they`re good for buffer areas, areas that don`t really need a lot of public access.”
County forest preserves are beginning to use conservation easements to avoid condemnation proceedings and to acquire open-space guarantees to link pieces of their property. That was the case when the Du Page County Forest Preserve District negotiated an easement with the owners of the Old Wayne Golf Course to secure a trail connection.
Considering that home prices at Hybernia start at $679,000 and top out at $1.1 million, it is natural to wonder whether all of this concern over the coexistence between development and nature is a rich man`s worry.
”Highland Park is an affluent community, whether it`s natural or not,”
said Hoffman. ”The amount of expense to incorporate these natural features is really not that much more than it would be to cut everything down and start from scratch. It`s more expensive to provide natural water retention, but not that much more expensive.”
As evidence, Hoffman cites Red Seal`s newest development, Sedgewood Cove, to be built on the shore of Crooked Lake in north suburban Lindenhurst with a variety of prairie plots, a wetland, and an existing woodland that is to be preserved. The 150-acre tract will have 168 apartment units and 144 single-family homes, starting in the $160,000s.
”That`s going to be about 85 percent open space, and every homeowner will have a more beautiful view than (Hybernia),” he said.
What strikes a visitor to a development such as Hybernia is the seemingly odd juxtaposition of houses with neatly manicured lawns against broad expanses of untamed prairie, which also must be burned off annually to keep out non-native plants.
”People still want a lawn, but they don`t come out and complain that we didn`t cut the weeds,” said Hoffman, referring to the fact that prairies were once regarded as nothing more than weedy patches. ”We burned last fall and they didn`t complain.”
Steve Packard, science director of the Illinois Nature Conservancy and a leading advocate of prairie preservation and restoration, resists the urge to take a poke at lawn lovers.
”It`s fine to have a green lawn,” he said. ”It`s fun for kids to play on and you can practice putting on it. It`s just that there is another option and it has its advantages, too.”
Going all-prairie, right up to the front door, may be the next stage in the balancing act between human habitation and natural habitats. So far, developers have not offered whole subdivisions covered with Indian grass, lead plant and hoary puccoon and other native species, but scattered homeowners are trying prairie lawns.
”It`s part of this business of newness,” said Packard. ”It takes a while. The culture is in its early stages, but a prairie burn is going to be the Chicago-area equivalent of the clambake or surfing.”
