You can color the development community green in 1992, according to several industry officials, but developers should take care to avoid wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of environmentalism without providing any substance.
That warning came from, Toni Alexander, president of Intercom Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif., communications and policy consultant to the development community, who said the danger is developers coming across as ”watermelons-green on the outside and seedy on the inside.”
Some of the hallmarks of green development are already emerging in projects that are in the planning stages or were recently completed. They include waste water recycling, better building energy management,
transportation solutions, wetlands protection and the preservation of wildlife habitat.
”The greening of community development should be accepted as a given,”
said Ted Brown, general counsel for the Arvida Corp., a major developer of golf course communities based in Boca Raton, Fla.
Evolving into an environmentally sound developer extends beyond the building site to an awareness of the project`s impact on the surrounding environment and community as a whole, said Timothy A. Tosta, a San Francisco attorney who has won several project approval fights on behalf of developers. In addition, developers need to remain flexible during the planning and permit approval stages, giving ground to environmental advocates when need be, Tosta said. ”Do not fall in love with your dream too early,” he said.
The Irvine Co. in Newport Beach, Calif. is successfully managing to keep green while turning a profit, said Carol Hoffman, the company`s vice president of community relations.
”As developers, we are choosing to make the future environmentally sensitive, environmentally satisfying and financially rewarding. Those are not incompatible” goals, she said.
The experience of the Irvine Co. indicates that going green is not necessarily easy, however. It took the developer 25 years, three proposed plans and a court fight with an environmental group to get the final go-ahead to start construction last year on the Newport Coast, Hoffman said. The beachfront project will consist of 2,600 homes, five hotels and two golf courses.
The Irvine Co. was able to reduce the project`s water consumption by half, Hoffman said, by reclaiming used water to irrigate the golf courses, median road strips and open space.
The ”meter stick” by which national environmental organizations measure green development is a project built in 1975 called Village Homes in Davis, Calif., said William Browning, a senior associate at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a research foundation in Snowmass, Colo., that helps developers create more energy-efficient and environmentally compatible buildings.
The development of 240 passive solar homes on 70 acres incorporated 24-foot-wide streets instead of the standard 40-foot width, which reduced summer air temperatures at least 10 percent, he said.
Developer Michael Corbett was also the first in the country to use natural swale drainage instead of concrete, he said. The resulting $800 per house savings was plowed into edible landscaping. The homeowners association now turns a profit on the almond orchard that serves as the community`s green belt, Browning said.
The small homes, which originally sold for $40,000 to $60,000, are now the most expensive in Davis, fetching $200 a square foot, he said.
Riverwest Development Co. has made pedestrians rather than automobiles the focus of Laguna West, a project of 3,300 homes now under construction in Sacramento, Browning said. The developer has sited every residence within a five-minute walking distance of the town center and plans a bus shuttle within the project.
An optional Eco-Home package is also available to home buyers to improve energy and water efficiency, Browning said. Trees and a lake added $1,500 in costs to each lot, but the lots now appraise at $30,000 more than those in adjacent subdivisions, he added.
At Bel Marin Keys in Marin County, Calif., the Venture Corp. is planning on replacing 112 acres of wetlands with 600 acres of more functionally valuable wetlands, Browning said. The environmentally fragile habitat will ring the 800-home development.
With the homes of virtually extinct butterflies, songbirds, lizards, foxes and 600 endangered species often lying in the path of construction, developers are turning to habitat conservation plans. Creation of protected areas offer an alternative to confrontation and litigation, said Timothy Beatley, a professor in the architecture and urban planning department at the University of Virginia.
The protection plans, which currently range in size from 55 acres to 3,200 square miles, give builders a way of disrupting the habitat of an endangered species in exchange for setting aside a larger and more
ecologically viable habitat area.
Most of the 50 protection plans since the inception of the idea 10 years ago still remain to be completed, Beatley said. Most of the plans are located in Southern California, but a few are in the works in Nevada, Texas and Florida, according to Beatley.
On the office side of the develpoment industry, the Irvine Co. has made several environmentally-driven inroads, Hoffman said.
The company was the first in California to use reclaimed water for toilets in an office building, resulting in a 70 percent to 80 percent water savings, she said.
Before the development company could proceed with the cutting edge technology, however, it had to convince an ”unenthusiastic health
department” that a separate piping system and well-marked hookups would prevent any accidental mixup between sink and toilet water, she said.
It is also saving energy dollars in several ways. It provides the area`s utility with load shedding capacity, meaning it lowers power demand for its buildings at peak usage times.
The Irvine Co. has also installed thermal storage systems at some of its sites. Those buildings pull electricity at night to pre-chill water rather than following the normal course of cooling water during the high demand and more expensive afternoon hours.
The developer also engages in real time pricing with one of its office towers, which means it purchases electricity as a commodity, on an hour-by-hour basis depending on when the price is lowest. That practice has reduced central plant costs by 10 percent, Hoffman said.
