Taming the Elements - Progressive community builders attack the business of forging, adapting, controlling, and conserving earth, air, fire, and water in the development process.
by Chris Wood
Sustainable? Check.Transit-oriented? Check. Mixed-use? Check. Many of the progressive building trends on the forefront in 2007 will be de rigueur in 2008 as developers try to differentiate their projects and accommodate an ever critical public eye.
When it comes to sustainable community building, site planners, developers, and builders are beginning to stretch their reach, rethinking the basics of how land, water, and air can be transformed into foundational facets for the communities of tomorrow. For these industry groundbreakers, no part of the development process is left untouched as they get back to the basics of moving dirt, constructing buildings, providing energy, and dealing with waste.
While the practices described in this story may be iconoclastic today, they are nonetheless creating new opportunities for bottom line success and are likely to help define the leading edge of progressive development into 2008 and beyond.
[EARTH]
No Horsing Around - Embracing New Ruralism to capture the anti ’burb demographic.
It’s no secret that there’s a development market for people who are rejecting the suburbs and their associated homogeneity, congestion, and earth unfriendliness. In recent years, New Urbanists have sought to capture this demographic with transit-oriented and mixed-use developments. Some developers are now finding that out beyond the exurbs lies profit potential in creating communities that embrace “New Ruralism” ideals.
“Our culture is a constant bombardment of images and information— there is a real demographic that wants to calm down and have retreat,” explains Jennifer Donovan, a principal for Charlottesville, Va.- based Equestrian Services, a consultancy that is helping national developers such as Toll Brothers, Foster Enterprises, and Lake City, Fla.-based Dicks Realty create New Ruralist communities that use horses and equestrian riding as an anchor amenity, much like golf and the country club anchored suburban subdivisions of the 1980s and 1990s.
One such community is The Oaks, Dicks Realty’s Lake City development of 1,220 acres that includes 234 lots ranging from 1 acre to 5 acres and 348 acres of recreational space with 15 miles of riding trails that double as walking, jogging, and mountain biking trails. That ability to cross-amenitize equestrian trails is one benefit Donovan cites over traditional golf-centric development. “There’s also less manipulation of the land and no need for chemical fertilizers or costly irrigation.”
Developing communities over the river and through the woods doesn’t necessarily mean being off of the grid. Ironically, the advent of technology and the ability to network from home is driving the New Ruralism return to the earth. “It is still about having access to great technology and good coffee and gourmet shopping,” Donovan says. “It’s about giving people the opportunity to plug in on their own terms.”
[EARTH]
Through the Grapevine - Rethinking land use as part of larger soil remediation plans.
When Hemisphere Development and IMG Resort Communities teamed up in 2005 to redevelop the 1,000-acre Diamond Shamrock Painesville Works into an active adult, amenity-heavy resort community on the shores of Lake Erie, they knew soil remediation was the name of the game.
In 1980, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed a 120-acre clay cap over an area contaminated by chromium. Yet that was nothing compared to the settling ponds—the vast, shallow reservoirs that removed industrial contaminants from water used during manufacturing.
“There is an area of the site that—because of historical operations—[has] 300 acres of chalk,” says Hemisphere CEO Todd Davis. “From 1912 until 1976, they had a 300-acre pond filled with chalky baking soda and pumped 100 million gallons of water over it each day.”
To obtain maximum development value, Hemisphere used common tactics such as locating golf holes on more troubled dirt to obtain recreational remediation approval rather than the more stringent residential standard. “Savvy developers, and brownfield developers in particular, are becoming experts at pushing and pulling the master plan to achieve environmental standards cost effectively but also create value,” Davis says.
Covering remediation sites with golf holes is one thing, but Hemisphere saved its master stroke for the settling pond, transforming the chalky soil—which looked and smelled bad but was environmentally inert—into one of the largest commercial vineyards in Ohio. The vineyard that also serves as a viticulture amenity to the development, allowing interested residents to explore the art and craft of growing grapes and creating wines.
Making the Grade - Discovering hidden profits in grading management plans.
Scott Oldham has one simple rule for developers looking to contain costs: Don’t import and export dirt. “In hillside topography especially, your grading contractor will often be the No. 1 cost in the total development budget,” says the vice president of Irvine, Calif.-based based Developers Research, a land optimization consultancy specializing in grading analyses for 12 of the top 20 public homebuilders, as well as serving the institutional real estate arms of Lehman Bros., Goldman Sachs, CalPERS, and Hearthstone.
Oldham argues more needs to be done to promote grading management plans that orchestrate the efforts of civil engineers (i.e., site planners) and soil engineers (i.e., dirt movers and graders) in the design and grading stages of site development. He also prods many developers to consider soil and aggregate removal as a mining operation and profit center.
“It can be $10 per yard to blast and move material, and that could eat the entire profit off of a 10-lot subdivision,” Oldham says. “That doesn’t mean you avoid that alternative at all costs. It might be $10 million to remove the rock, but you might be able to grind it on-site, sell it for $15 million, and make your site more developable.”
Total Impact - Aboriginal construction techniques make a comeback.
North and Central American aboriginal peoples and 17th-century Spanish colonizers both knew there was nothing quite like using 4-foot-thick earthen walls to control the harsh climate of the southwestern United States. But forget the dark clay caverns of yore: Today’s homes of the earth are decidedly more functional—and fashionable.
In fact, the use of rammed earth as a structural material is limited only by imagination and wall width. “Height gets more expensive, but structurally if your wall is 4 feet wide, you can go 40 feet high … 5 feet wide, you can go 50 feet high,” explains Tom Wuelpern, president of Rammed Earth Development, a Tucson, Ariz.-based design and development firm specializing in rammed earth and adobe, the construction of custom homes, and the development of mixed-use and multifamily sites.
In addition to offering environmental benefits such as promoting interior thermal mass and reducing lumber use, rammed-earth construction also fits naturally into traditional Southwest community architecture. This is an advantage that Wuelpern says mainstream green architecture needs to recognize with greater credence.
“There is a whole new wave of green buildings that are ultra modern and all glass,” Wuelpern says. “They may have been built with sustainable materials, but in this climate that glass turns the building into an energy pig. Sustainability is great, but we need to keep track of what is going to be timeless architecture for our locales 50 years from now.”
The Mayans and missionaries likely couldn’t agree more.
[AIR]
Up on the Roof - Ducted wind turbines promise higher power gains.
For auto advertisers, smoke trails flowing effortlessly over a car in a wind tunnel are a key visual to demonstrate the convergence of high performance and über design.
When Marquiss Wind Power used similar smoke trails to study wind patterns around multifamily and commercial building envelopes, the results were less impressive. “Inherently, on rooftops, you get very turbulent winds,” explains Paul Misso, CEO of the Folsom, Calif., start-up that is among a handful of companies exploring new ways to harness the chaotic power of rooftop wind.
Since rooftops create a natural uplift that can increase ambient wind speeds by up to 50 percent, alternative energy addicts have long tried to install turbines there, but because of turbulence, rooftops have never been a good place for traditional open-bladed or tail- and rudder-directed wind turbines. “In normal, 60-foot wind farm conditions, [turbines] work well, [but] on a rooftop, the unit fishtails back and forth so the turbine itself is rarely directed into the wind,” Misso says.
Marquiss hopes to offer one solution with its Ducted Wind Turbine, which uses a patented system of flaps and ducts to both direct and deflect wind into the turbine for a steady, even flow of air into the unit. Used as part of the 100 percent renewable energy solution at Ted Turner’s Vermeho Park Ranch, the DWT is set to be a Pacific Gas & Electric grid-certified California utility at the start of 2008. (Any power source in the state must either be approved by PG&E or be independent of the public grid.)
After that, Misso will look at every rooftop. “We’re starting with low-rise commercial, industrial, and multifamily developments, but high-rises are not out of the question.”
Sky’s the Limit - A Boston project redefines a corridor—and the use of air rights.
Life around the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston is about to get a lot cleaner and quieter. For decades, the community has been bisected by the Massachusetts turnpike, a diesel commuter and freight rail line, and the Boston Metropolitan Bay Transit Authority’s Orange line. With air rights secured from the Turnpike Authority, a consortium led by Boston-based Winn Development is set to conjure three new city blocks out of the nothingness above the transit corridor.
The $500 million mixed-use, multiphase project will eventually contain more than 450 housing units and will turn bridges over the corridor at Berkeley Street, Arlington Street, and Columbus Avenue into typical urban promenades with storefronts and sidewalks, reconnecting Back Bay to the South End and Bay Village neighborhoods.
“It is a tremendously ambitious project,” says David Hancock, partner with lead project architect CBT Architects in Boston. “It is going beyond what we have seen before, in terms of development over rail yards and transit areas.”
Roughly 50,000 vehicles and 800 trains pass through the corridor on a daily basis, causing air emissions to eventually drift into nearby communities. As part of the new development, emissions will be directed through an exhaust and venting system that will prevent the concentration of fumes and result in a net decrease in neighborhood air pollution. Additionally, noise studies have determined that the three-block deck will drastically cut traffic and transit sounds from the turnpike and rail lines.
[FIRE]
Rising from the Ashes - Insurance firms promote rebuilding of wildfire-devastated real estate.
The insurance company that paid all claims in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the 1872 Boston Fire is making a difference in rebuilding homes damaged or destroyed by wildfires that blazed across California last fall.
The Novato, Calif.-based Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. is offering affected policy holders an upgrade that allows them to implement green building principles in the redevelopment of their property. (So far, more than 400 policyholders have made claims.)
“It’s pretty early in the rebuilding process to determine how many will rebuild green, but [there’s] a lot of interest in the program,” says Fireman’s manager of media relations, Janet Ruiz, who notes strong interest in a landscaping benefit that provides up to $50,000 for replacing destroyed plants with those that reduce the risk of spreading wildfire.
When suburbs are carved from sagebrush- strewn canyons, “the challenge for developers is to balance consumers’ simultaneous demand for homes and open space with fire protection,” says Kraig Kast, CEO of Redwood Shores, Calif.-based real estate investment firm Atherton Trust. “Planting fire resistant trees and vegetation near homes is a big step in the right direction.”
[WATER]
Hanging Gardens - Perched wetlands offer a glimpse into rooftops of the future.
Although construction on the 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park just began this year, Mark Laska is eagerly anticipating its completion. In particular, the president and CEO of New York City-based Great Eastern Ecology can’t wait for the completion of Great Eastern’s first perched wetland on Pier 6 at Atlantic Avenue. The completely self-contained wetland will be “perched” on an old pier, suspended in the air and stretching over the East River but not having any interaction with the river itself.
“We are all thinking about the challenges of development in an urban setting and how we can add an ecological layer to that setting,” Laska says. “This is a 5-acre perched wetland replacing industrial warehouses built in the ’50s that cut people off from the river.”
If successful, Laska argues, the perched system will prove the viability of rooftop wetlands that could remove air pollution and clean stormwater more efficiently and completely than current green roof installations. “I hope it will be a model for perched and rooftop systems with wetland environments for all types of development,” he says. “I can hardly wait until that thing is built.”
Runoff Recharge - Stormwater treatment systems solve a conflict when conservancy clashes with construction.
Like most sustainability-minded developers, Boston-based Cabot, Cabot & Forbes is trying to implement high-density and transit-oriented design into its communities, including Westwood Station, its current 4.5 million-square-foot marquee mixed-use project in Westwood, Mass., which will eventually have 1,000 residential units.
But trouble arose when Westwood, which promotes water efficiency with dual-flush toilets in residential units and zero-water urinals in ground-floor retail, found out that its footprint unfortunately covered a natural aquifer feeding the Naposet River and four public drinking water wells. “We want to move everybody geographically towards the train station, but that meant moving them toward the wells,” says CC&F project manager Abe Menzin.
The solution was the creation of an entire stormwater management system featuring green roofs and permeable pavers that leverage the surface area of the development to increase water recharge into the aquifer by 75 percent. Underground cisterns will also collect and store some of the stormwater for on-site irrigation.
“But even when you take out the consumptive uses of [this] project, we are putting 22 million gallons of water back in the ground as opposed to the 7 million going into the aquifer before,” Menzin says.
Cold Play - Subsurface constructed wetlands solve winter treatment issues.
North American Wetland Engineering founding partner and executive vice president Scott Wallace was pretty sure a constructed wetland system would help save British Petroleum $9 million by cleaning 300 million gallons of gasoline-contaminated groundwater at one of the oldest and largest petroleum refineries in the Unites States.
Skeptics questioned whether a wetland system would work at the remediation site in Casper, Wyo., where winter temperatures dipped to minus 35 Fahrenheit. NAWE’s answer was to build the wetland underground. While subsurface wetlands have plants that help to remove toxins and heavy metals from water, they differ from traditional wetlands in that the water is filtered through substrate soils rather than on the surface.
“It’s basically a subsurface slough,” Wallace explains. “There’s no standing water. It goes from a sewer pipe into a septic tank to remove solids and into a gravel bed underground where bacteria interacts with it and the wetland plants sink their roots into the water. Plants bring the oxygen down to the bacteria, the bacteria break down waste, and the resulting nutrients feed the plants.”
The BP project was a success and attracted the attention of Minneapolis-based developer Robert Engstrom Cos., which enlisted NAWE (now the water treatment arm of St. John, New Brunswick-based environmental remediation consultant Jacques Whitford) to construct a wetland system to handle septic and stormwater runoff at the award-winning Fields of St. Croix community in Lake Elmo, Minn. Although the wetlands system is only supporting 150 residential units, it has been recognized as visionary by NAHB, the Urban Land Institute, and others for its adaptation of constructed wetlands for closed-system, self-sufficient residential water treatment.
Lateral Thinking - Horizontal wells play a key treatment role in zero-carbon development.
Grady Pridgen is trying to develop the first self-sustainable, carbon-neutral mixed-use community in the country. La Entrada, Pridgen’s planned 133-acre project in St. Petersburg, Fla.’s Gateway District, is a bike-friendly, transit-oriented development built around an electric trolley system. The site will include four-story rental buildings at a density between 75 and 100 units to the acre.
As part of the self-sustainable effort, Pridgen is attempting to wean his development efforts off of reclaimed water as an irrigation resource, primarily because the reclaimed water has a high nutrient content that leads to algae blooms downstream. As an alternative, he is looking to the stormwater retention ponds ubiquitous to Floridian development.
Still, besides evaporation, retention ponds offer little in the way of stormwater treatment. As part of a self-contained “treatment train” that includes green roofs and permeable pavers, La Entrada is beta-testing horizontal wells that will pull water via perforated pipes located approximately 20 feet deep and 5 feet from the side of retention ponds.
“The result is that you get stormwater treatment through plant absorption on green roofs, through permeable pavement, through evaporation, and finally by drawing the water through roughly 20 cubic feet of sand,” Pridgen says. “We’re trying to prove that this isn’t science fiction. Yes, it is a lot of work, but it is worth the effort.”
