Wind Turbines and Property Values

  • An author of the report says they accounted for the housing bubble burst, and they still found that being close to a wind turbine did not affect how quickly a home sells. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

A new study finds living near
a wind turbine does not have
a noticeable impact on the
value of your home. Rebecca
Williams has more:

Transcript

A new study finds living near
a wind turbine does not have
a noticeable impact on the
value of your home. Rebecca
Williams has more:

Researchers looked at the sale prices of almost 7500 homes around the country over eleven years. The homes were as close as 800 feet to a turbine or as far as 10 miles away.

Ryan Wiser is a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He’s an author of the report. He says being near a wind turbine did not have a widespread impact on property values.

“There may be still some sense that the aesthetics of a place has been impacted either positively or negatively and that may affect one’s impression of value, even if it doesn’t affect actual home sales prices.”

Wiser says they accounted for the housing bubble burst, and they still found that being close to a wind turbine did not affect how quickly a home sells.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Red Tape Behind Green Living

  • For simple weatherizing - insulation, weather stripping, windows - the tax credits apply to 30% of the cost of materials, not the labor. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Tax credits for making your home
more energy efficient got a lot
of early buzz. The promise of up
to 1500-dollars back for insulation
and windows or efficient furnaces
led to a flurry of advertising.
Tamara Keith looks
into what might be stopping people
from taking advantage of the tax
credits:

Transcript

Tax credits for making your home
more energy efficient got a lot
of early buzz. The promise of up
to 1500-dollars back for insulation
and windows or efficient furnaces
led to a flurry of advertising.
Tamara Keith looks
into what might be stopping people
from taking advantage of the tax
credits:

My husband and I recently bought an older house that could no doubt use
some weatherizing. So, I called up Reuven Walder at EcoBeco.

(sound of door opening, people saying hello)

He’s a home energy auditor. He identifies ways to make a home more
efficient.

“I joke around, I consider myself an energy efficiency social worker.”

And he’s been getting a lot of calls lately from people like me – looking
to take advantage of the tax credits.

“Let’s look around the house and you can point out some things that are
of concern to you.”

Walder has all these cool tools, like an infrared camera that can see where
the insulation isn’t doing its job. He finds plenty of trouble spots,
including one in the attic.

“And if you put your hand in this little pocket here you can feel nice
cool air.”

That’s not supposed to happen.

“I’ll be honest with you. When I find these kinds of things, it makes my
day, because we get to fix them.”

Well, not all the time. Walder says only about a third of the homeowners he
works with actually follow through on his recommendations.

“I have talked to numerous homeowners and their primary reason for not
doing it is money.”

He says the tax credits are a great shot in the arm, but, for many people,
it’s just not enough. Part of the problem is, for simple weatherizing –
insulation, weather stripping, windows – the tax credits apply to 30% of
the cost of materials, not the labor. And labor is actually the most
expensive part.

“Our economy is just so slow right now that people are just hesitant to
spend any amount of money because, regardless of the incentive, they’re
still going to have to spend a lot of money to make the improvement. It’s
not going to cover a significant portion of the cost.”

At this point, federal officials don’t know how many people have been
inspired by the stimulus package to do work on their homes. They won’t know
until everyone files their taxes in April.

“It’s definitely driving additional business.”

Matt Golden is president of Efficiency First – the national association for
the home performance retrofitting industry. But he isn’t totally sold on
the way the stimulus package is distributing the tax credits.

“The biggest incentives are for the most expensive fanciest equipment and
as you move towards the most cost effective stuff, you get much smaller,
incremental incentives.”

So, there’s big money for solar panels and geothermal heating systems. And
if you want to put in a tank-less hot water heater or a super efficient
furnace, here labor costs can be counted towards tax credits. Golden says
the smallest credits go to insulation and other simple steps.

“It’s actually kind of an impediment to the type of retrofitting projects
that have the biggest return on investment, bang for the buck and create
the most jobs.”

In my house, Walder estimates we need almost $6,000 worth of work. But,
because not all of it qualifies, I’ll only get $600 of it back from the
government – but we won’t see the money until tax season.

I’ll admit – it’s a lot more money with a lot less of a tax benefit than I
was expecting, and that’s probably what’s giving some homeowners pause.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

The Future of McMansions (Part Two)

  • The study found that differences in architectural style stuck out most, but after that, height. (Photo source: Brendel at Wikimedia Commons)

There are some ugly terms used
to describe big, grandiose homes.
Critics call them “Garage Mahals,”
“starter castles,” or “McMansions.”
These insults are flung around
in towns where people worry big
houses are sapping the character
out of neighborhoods full of smaller,
older homes. Shawn Allee
met a researcher who hopes to tamp
down the heated rhetoric:

Transcript

There are some ugly terms used
to describe big, grandiose homes.
Critics call them “Garage Mahals,”
“starter castles,” or “McMansions.”
These insults are flung around
in towns where people worry big
houses are sapping the character
out of neighborhoods full of smaller,
older homes. Shawn Allee
met a researcher who hopes to tamp
down the heated rhetoric:

Jack Nasar studies city planning at Ohio State University.

He got interested in the term “McMansion” because it was used in his own neighorhood in Columbus.

“A realestate agent was befriending older people so that when they died she’d be able to get their properties, tear down the house, and then build a much larger house. I started to wonder whether this was happening elsewhere.”

Nasar says teardowns, and the insults used to describe them, are common in many towns. And some local governments are restricting how big these homes get or even what they look like.

Nasar says, with governments stepping in to the debate, there’s more at stake than just name-calling.

“You’re talking about controlling what goes on on somebody’s private property. So, you would want to have good evidence to use as a basis for that decision.”

Nasar recently studied just what it takes for a house to get big enough or different enough for people to say, “yuck” or hurl an insult like “McMansion.” Nasar and a research partner created computer models of streets with rows of houses.

For each test, they made most houses normal, but changed up something about one of them – stuff like the architectural style, the height, or maybe distance between the house and the street. Then, they showed these models to people.

“We had them rate these streets in terms of compatibility, we had them rate them in terms of visual quality or preference.”

Differences in architectural style stuck out most, but after that, height.

“The effect started to be most noticeable when the in-fill house was twice as large as the stuff around it. So, in terms of regulations, it suggests maybe a community could get by saying, ‘you could do a tear-down replacement that’s twice as big as what’s around it,’ but you wouldn’t let it get any larger than that.”

This is a controversial finding.

Some communities keep height range much lower than “twice as big” figure and sometimes they restrict width, too – something Nasar found doesn’t matter so much.

I thought I’d bounce some of his findings off someone involved in the teardown issue.

“This also was a demolition of a small home.”

Catherine Czerniak drives me around Lake Forest, a Chicago suburb. She’s the community development director, and she gets the praise or blame about how teardowns get done.

Czerniak says Nasar’s findings make sense, especially the idea that style matters most.

“We often say height and size aren’t necessarily the key roles -it’s how the design is done.”

But for Czerniak, there’s a hot-button issue Nasar did not measure.

Lake Forest has lots of tree-lined streets and people like how the trees obscure the houses.

“And really, the landscaping really defines the character of the community. Even the estates on the east side, were not there to shout from the street, here I am, look at me.”

To make the point she drives past a mix of old homes and replacements.

I can hardly tell which is which.

“As we go down the street, take note that even though there are some big homes back here, you still feel you’re in a country lane.”

Czerniak says Nasar’s research might quiet down some debates but people will always fight over specific details. After all, Nasar’s test subjects gave quick judgements on computer models.

She says, in the real world, critics spend years nit-picking every little thing they hate about a teardown replacement home and whether it’s going to ruin their neighborhood.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

The Future of McMansions (Part One)

  • Brian Hickey runs Teardowns.com, a real-estate marketplace for teardown properties. Some communities complain that the teardown market encourages the growth of so-called 'McMansion' replacement homes that are seen as too large and out-of-place for their neighborhoods. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Your home may be your castle,
but, for some people, too many
homes are as big and grand as
castles. Critics call these homes
‘McMansions,’ and they complain
they’ve ruined neighborhoods
filled with older, smaller houses.
The McMansion fad fizzled during
the real-estate bust. Shawn Allee looks at whether it could
return:

Transcript

Your home may be your castle,
but, for some people, too many
homes are as big and grand as
castles. Critics call these homes
‘McMansions,’ and they complain
they’ve ruined neighborhoods
filled with older, smaller houses.
The McMansion fad fizzled during
the real-estate bust. Shawn Allee looks at whether it could
return:

I head to a Chicago suburb called Hinsdale to understand the hub-ub about McMansions. Over the past twenty years, one in three Hinsdale homes got torn down to make room for mostly bigger ones.

Brian Hickey drives me past one-story brick and wood houses.

Then there’s a huge one, with stucco and Spanish tile.

Hickey: “This is an example of something where someone would go, this is more Florida-like.”

Allee: “It looks like it walked off the set of Miami Vice or something like that.”

Hickey: “Yeah.”

Bigger, mis-matched homes sprouted up in Hinsdale during the real-estate boom, and for some, Brian Hickey’s partly to blame.

He runs tear-downs dot com. Hickey finds and sells homes to tear down, and maybe replace with McMansions … or ‘replacement homes’ as he calls them.

Anyway, during the housing bubble, teardowns increased … and so did complaints.

Allee: “Some of the arguments I’ve heard against the teardown phenomenon is that we’re basically tossing perfectly good houses into landfills.”

Hickey: “See, that’s not accurate. To take some of these homes and bring it up to what people in this community would expect in terms of housing amenities, it doesn’t make sense to renovate when you can build new for less.”

The big-home trend faded recently, but if the soft real-estate market improves, you gotta wonder: will people build big again, or will they keep smaller, older homes?

Hickey thinks old homes might lose.

Hickey: “At some point a buyer simply won’t pay that price to live there.”

Allee: “In that one story …”

Hickey: “In that one story, two-bedroom, small kitchen – that the land will be where the value is.”

Some real-estate pros say Hickey’s right: people want big, and they’ll build what they want, where they want.

Others say, the game has changed.

Local governments in Dallas, Denver, and other cities are starting to regulate teardowns, like Hinsdale did.

(sound of a printer)

Robert McGinnis prints me 60 pages of Hinsdale’s zoning codes.

“Hot off the press, it’s still warm.”

McGinnis runs Hinsdale’s building commission. He says the code got up to sixty pages partly because of teardown complaints.

McGinnis: “Pollution issues, the loss of sunlight in some cases.”

Allee: “Loss of sunlight? What do you mean by that?”

McGinnis: “Some of these houses are so tall they end up physically blocking out some of the sunlight.”

McGinnis says it’s hard to stop teardowns – you can just delay or improve them.

“I would like to think, at some point, Joe Q. Public says, ‘I’d really like to live in Hinsdale, but I can’t afford to heat and cool a McMansion,’ so they’re going to look at building a smaller home.”

But McGinnis says this could be wishful thinking.

So, I thought I’d ask some Hinsdale homeowners about the small-home idea.

Just outside McGinnis’ office, I find Greta Filmanaviciute. She’s stuffing official demolition signs into her car.

Filmanaviciute: “I was getting permits. We’re going to tear down old house and building the new house.”

Allee: “Are you guys looking at a house that’s bigger than what you have now?”

Filmanaviciute: “No, actually, we are sizing down, but that’s because we’re a three-person family and I don’t want to have a huge house and then we have high utility bills. This is perfection for us, actually.”

Filmanaviciute says preservationists might not like that she’s tearing down her place, but her neighbors are glad she’s keeping things modest.

She says she’d be proud to start a small-home trend.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Interview: Cape Wind Controversy

  • The proposed Cape Wind Project in Nantucket Sound is upsetting to some of the resort area residents (Source: Les Salty, at Wikimedia Commons)

The first offshore wind power
project expected to go online
is in Nantucket Sound near the
Cape Cod, Massachusetts resort
area. Some of the residents
of the region are rich and powerful.
They don’t want 130 wind turbines
ruining their view. Lester Graham
talked with the CEO of the Cape
Wind project, Jim Gordon, about why
the wind farm couldn’t be installed
over the horizon and out of sight:

Transcript

The first offshore wind power
project expected to go online
is in Nantucket Sound near the
Cape Cod, Massachusetts resort
area. Some of the residents
of the region are rich and powerful.
They don’t want 130 wind turbines
ruining their view. Lester Graham
talked with the CEO of the Cape
Wind project, Jim Gordon, about why
the wind farm couldn’t be installed
over the horizon and out of sight:

Jim Gordon: Well, first of all, hopefully, in the next ten, fifteen, or twenty years we’ll be able to bring wind turbines further off-shore, and they’ll be commercially and technically viable. But, right now, if you look at the off-shore wind farms in Europe that are commercially and technically viable, those projects are being built in near-shore, shallow waters, lower wave regimes. So, it’s really what’s driving the selection of the Cape Wind site is that it has some of the best wind resources on the East Coast, it’s outside of the shipping channels, ferry lines, and air flight paths, it has a reasonable proximity to bring the transmission line to the shore, and it has shallow depths and a low wave height. And, with all of this, it’s 13 miles from Nantucket, 9 miles from Edgar Town on Martha’s Vineyard, and 6 miles from Hyannis. So, if one were to go to the nearest beach and look out on the horizon, it would have to be a very clear day for you to make out tiny specks on the horizon. People want this project built, because they recognize that our energy security, climate change, sustainable economic development, the clean energy jobs that go with a project like this are important. And, we have to live with trade-offs if we’re going to transition to a more sustainable energy future.

Lester Graham: I wonder what you think of the Kennedy’s, who have been so active on the environmental front, fighting your proposal.

Gordon: You know, I have a lot of respect for Senator Kennedy, and our hope is the more he reads about Cape Wind, and the more he looks at and his staff looks at the final environmental impact statement from the federal government that was extremely positive, as well as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I mean, I’m hoping that the more Senator Kennedy thinks about this project, and looks at how it’s going to address the urgent energy, environmental, and economic challenges facing Massachusetts and the region. You know, I’m hoping that he’ll come around and support the project.

Graham: How do you think what happens with your project will effect other off-shore proposals?

Gordon: I think that this project is going to set an important precedent. If a project like Cape Wind – which has run this exhaustive regulatory gauntlet, and has shown that the public is in favor of it, and that it’s passed muster – if this project is not approved, I think that it’s going to set a terrible precedent. I think that other developers that are looking at moving away from coal or some of the fossil fuels to tap our abundant off-shore wind resources, I think that they’ll have some real second thoughts about investing the enormous amount of time and resources that it takes to get one of these projects in the water.

Graham: Jim Gordon is the President of Cape Wind, the off-shore wind project proposed to be built there in Nantucket. Thanks for your time.

Gordon: Thank you, Lester.

Related Links

All Eyes on the Cape Wind Project

  • The Cape Wind Project proposes to build 130 wind turbines miles off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean (Source: Kmadison at Wikimedia Commons)

Offshore wind farm developers are closely
watching a proposed project in Nantucket
Sound. Lester Graham reports the Cape
Wind offshore wind energy project could be
the first in the nation to be approved:

Transcript

Offshore wind farm developers are closely
watching a proposed project in Nantucket
Sound. Lester Graham reports the Cape
Wind offshore wind energy project could be
the first in the nation to be approved:

For nine years, Cape Wind has been working its way through the permitting process.

But some residents in the Massachusetts resort areas around Nantucket Sound have fought against it including Senator Edward Kennedy.

The 130 wind turbines would be miles off the coast, but some residents say it would ruin the view from their coastal houses.

Jim Gordon is the CEO of Cape Wind.

“If this project is not approved, I think it’s going to set a terrible precedent. I think that other developers, I think they’ll have some real second thoughts about investing the enormous amount of time and resources that it takes to get one of these projects in the water.”

Developers are considering offshore wind energy turbines along the mid-Atlantic coast, the Great Lakes and the Gulf Coast, close to the populated areas that need additional power.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Sea Levels Threaten Coastal Towns (Part Two)

  • A living shoreline near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. The native grasses and sandy shore provide habitat for terrapins, the University of Maryland mascot. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

Scientists are pretty certain climate change is going to cause the sea level to rise. It’s
happening already, actually. In communities around the Chesapeake Bay, people are
getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with
nature rather than resist it:

Transcript

Scientists are pretty certain climate change is going to cause the sea level to rise. It’s
happening already, actually. In communities around the Chesapeake Bay, people are
getting a sneak preview. Tamara Keith reports some people there are trying to work with
nature rather than resist it:

(sound of kids planting)

It’s been raining in Woodland Beach. The community is just off of the Chesapeake Bay
in Maryland. The ground here is so soft you sink into it. Mud is everywhere. And that’s
just fine with the volunteers planting native grasses on a sloping hillside.

Stephen Hult is trying to keep things in order.

“And when we plant them we want them all the way down. I’m telling everyone twice.”

Hult heads up shoreline restoration projects for the local property owners association.
And there’s a lot of shoreline to restore.

“The shoreline, in parts of the community since the 1930s, have eroded 20 feet. Year to
year, one barely notices, but if you look at aerial maps of what it used to be like
compared to what it is, it really is quite dramatic.”

There’s been tons of erosion here. The land all along the mid-Atlantic coast is also
slowly sinking. Combine that with global sea level rise and you get erosion in overdrive.

Hult says the community is trying to restore the beach with rock and dirt and sand and
grasses to hold it all together. This is what’s called a living shoreline.

“We have now, with this project it will be well over half a mile of living shorelines that
we’ve installed.”

It’s a relatively new concept, a more natural approach to the gnawing problem of
shoreline erosion. Living shorelines create buffer between the water and homes. They are
kinda like the tidal wetlands that used to be here – before property owners started building
sea walls, also called bulkheads.

Jana Davis is associate director of the Chesapeake Bay Trust. It’s one of the organizations
funding this shoreline restoration. And Davis also happens to live here.

“It’s a wonderful alternative that provides just as good shoreline protection while also
providing a lot of really important habitat benefits that a bulkhead or rock sea wall does
not provide.”

Good for wildlife, and she says, it’s adaptive in the face of sea level rise.

“If sea level were to rise another foot, for example. The marsh could kind of migrate
inland, whereas if you had a bulkhead obviously there’s no migration because it can’t
move.”

But most of the people with bulkheads are NOT buying it. They want to protect their
property from the sinking land and rising water, and a lot of them don’t think a bunch of
rocks and grass are going to cut it.

Kevin Smith is chief of restoration services for the Maryland Department of Natural
Resources.

“There’s many places you can go and look at miles of shoreline and not see any natural
shoreline at all. It’s all armored off.”

Smith met me at a nature center along the bay. A few years ago, a stretch of bulkhead
here was replaced with a living shoreline. The natural ebb and flow of these shorelines
has made some property owners skeptical. They want the shoreline to stay put.

“If these types of projects don’t protect that shoreline from erosion, then homeowners are
not going to want to do it.”

But Smith insists these projects do work, and long term they’re going to be more
sustainable and more flexible than bulkheads – which over time will lose the battle
against the constant pounding of the rising sea.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tamara Keith.

Related Links

Repairing Backyard Rivers

  • The Conservation Resource Alliance works with property-owners to repair their rivers from problems such as erosion (Photo courtesy of the Conservation Resource Alliance)

American rivers have gone
through a lot in the last century.
Their twists and turns have been
turned into straight channels.
Their banks have been washed away.
And pollution is still flowing off
farm fields and city streets. Fixing
these rivers is a big challenge. A lot
of the land that rivers run through is
privately owned. So that means – to
fix a river, you often have to work with
landowners. Rebecca Williams has the story
of one group that thinks they’ve found
the secret to winning people’s trust:

Transcript

American rivers have gone
through a lot in the last century.
Their twists and turns have been
turned into straight channels.
Their banks have been washed away.
And pollution is still flowing off
farm fields and city streets. Fixing
these rivers is a big challenge. A lot
of the land that rivers run through is
privately owned. So that means – to
fix a river, you often have to work with
landowners. Rebecca Williams has the story
of one group that thinks they’ve found
the secret to winning people’s trust:

(bird sound)

Di Rau is the fourth generation of her family to farm this land in Northern
Michigan. Her grandpa homesteaded the land and set up a sawmill.

“It was the primary industry – I mean there was logging camps just
everywheres you turned.”

Back then the rivers were the only way to get those logs downstream. But
years of rolling logs down the bank into the river were causing serious
erosion. Huge trees were crashing into the water.

Rau says she didn’t know any of her family’s legacy until one day, when a
local group gave her a call. The more she learned about the problems, the
more she felt, well…

“Guilt! (laughs) Because of my ancestors. It’s like practicing medicine. It’s
always evolving and you don’t really know lots of times what you’re doing
wrong until another generation comes along and tells you this is what
you’ve created. Then it’s like okay let’s do something about it.”

So Rau let construction workers on her land. And now, ten years later, she
says it’s beautiful.

“Go down and just listen to creatures. You have deer come splashing
through, we have a bear around here, he likes to visit, couple bobcat.
There’s a lot of wildlife – it’s pretty cool.”

The woman who won Di Rau over is Kim Balke. She’s a biologist with the
group Conservation Resource Alliance. She says working with Di Rau was
pretty easy. But not everyone opens their doors so quickly.

There was the divorced couple who still owned land together, the fighting
brothers, the neighbors who nobody liked.

“Other people have said you know don’t go to their house they’ll greet you
with a shotgun!”

So far, no shotguns. Balke says she’s learned not to listen to what neighbors
say about each other. She approaches each person one by one, and talks to
them about what’s at stake. Her sales pitch? We’re just here to help – and
hey, we’ll pay most of the bill.

“You know a lot of our projects are erosion control, when banks are
completely falling into the stream – landowners, it’s not hard for them to
realize they’re losing property.”

But Balke says, still, you can’t just rush in and tell people what to do. She
says it can take months or even years to warm homeowners up to the
project.

That’s because fixing rivers is serious work. If a riverbank is eroding or an
old bridge is falling into the water, we’re talking about heavy construction
equipment. You have to be willing to have bulldozers and port-a-johns on
your lawn for a long time. And you might have to lose a tree.

“Things can look a little rough when you’re doing construction and some
people are a little worried about change.”

Balke says she just takes her time. She sends letters, sits down for coffee,
lets people think it over.

And it’s not just homeowners who Balke’s group needs to win over. There
are road commissions, tribes, sportfishers, and environmentalists. People
who sometimes just don’t trust each other.

Amy Beyer directs Conservation Resource Alliance. She says her group has
gotten all those people together.

“Yes they have been historically mortal enemies and that doesn’t mean all of
the baggage falls away but I can tell you it feels awfully good to go around
the circle when we complete a project and hear all the different voices and
how they’re celebrating that success.”

Beyer says this is not a quick and easy process – it can take years to get
people to actually find some little thing to agree on. But she says you can
fix a river without ever going to court.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Interview: Why Big Houses?

The average new American home is now 2400 square feet. Smart Growth
advocates say we’re buying big houses on big lawns and making the
problem of urban sprawl worse. Lester Graham talked with Chris Micci.
He’s a land development manager for a residential homebuilder. He’s
also a former lobbyist for the Real Estate Building Industry Coalition
in Charlotte, North Carolina. Micci says buyers see bigger as better:

Transcript

The average new American home is now 2400 square feet. Smart Growth
advocates say we’re buying big houses on big lawns and making the
problem of urban sprawl worse. Lester Graham talked with Chris Micci.
He’s a land development manager for a residential homebuilder. He’s
also a former lobbyist for the Real Estate Building Industry Coalition
in Charlotte, North Carolina. Micci says buyers see bigger as better:


CM: Typically, most suburban home buyers are looking for that larger lot, larger home.
And, you know, I can’t say there’s an absolute reason for why that is, but it’s what the,
what the customer or the consumer in the marketplace looks for.


LG: A lot of people see home as status and in fact, generally, I’m wondering how people
view their home or their house as it relates to their status in life.


CM: Oh yeah, absolutely, people definitely relate their home to their status. Obviously,
you know, for the majority of us out there, the home is the single largest purchase
financially in a person’s life…in their lifetime. As such, they see that home as a symbol of
their status and you know, appropriately so, want it to reflect that kind of status. Which,
you know, in turn reflects a larger home.


LG: Homebuilder associations say that local governments often drive the market for
bigger homes and bigger lawns because they zone areas so that lots have to be a certain
size. The idea is to draw those wealthier residents, upscale neighborhoods, so tax revenue
will come with those valuable properties. So builders have to build big houses to recoop
their money from the large land purchases. How much of a factor is government zoning
and regulation in the trend of big houses and big lots?


CM: Oh, I think it’s enormous. I think it’s probably about 95% of the entire equation when you
look at it. What they see is, they have to be able to see the ability that the development is,
in their minds, paying for itself. It’s paying for the government services that it provides.
As such, they see larger lot, larger home, higher sales prices as an answer to that to help
pay for those services… and that may or may not be the truth.


LG: Do you see places where towns are working with developers so that they can have their big
suburbs but still find a place for affordable housing within the same general area?


CM: There’s been one approach to it that I don’t necessarily agree with, but it’s called
“inclusionary housing.” What it typically does is the local government will require a
developer to include about 10% of dedicated housing as considered “affordable.” And
affordable can mean just about anything. There really is no clear, working definition of
what affordable is. A lot of folks out there that have their homes, they see that as a large
investment in their life. They see a lot of high value in that investment. As such, they get
concerned that with a proportion of affordable housing in their community that has to be
mandated and dedicated as such, that it could, in fact drive values down.


In a better case scenario is when local governments work with the folks in the industry to
put together, you know, a master plan community where you can include both segments
of affordable housing, higher end housing… a mix of retail, commercial space, et cetera. I
think you’ll see more success in efforts like that than you will in mandated housing.


HOST TAG: Chris Micci is a land development manager for a residential homebuilder in
North Carolina. He talked with the Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

Related Links

SIGNING UP LANDOWNERS FOR WILDLIFE CORRIDORS (Short Version)

Most of the land that sustains wildlife is in private hands. Some organizations have identified key areas that are important to wildlife migration. They’re now working with private landowners to try to enhance those areas for wildlife. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Most of the land that sustains wildlife is in private hands. Some
organizations have identified key areas that are important to wildlife
migration. They’re now working with private landowners to try to
enhance those areas for the wildlife. The GLRC’s Lester Graham
reports:


While there are large public parks and preserves, some wildlife leave to
migrate from one area to another, crossing private land. Migration is
sometimes part of finding food or mating. Across the nation, not-for-
profit organizations are letting landowners know if their property is part
of a migration corridor. Landowners can get help to plant trees and
shrubs good for the animals… and help managing the resources for
wildlife on their property.


Matt Thomas is with one of those groups, Conservation Resources
Alliance…


“When we identify landowner-to-landowner, larger tracts where the buy-
in will create a dramatic and long term, sustainable difference for the
entire corridor and community, then we’re going to have some results.”


Because there’s less red tape and no regulations to follow many
landowners prefer working with not-for-profits rather than
government programs to enhance wildlife habitat.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links