Saving green by making it green

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Conservation subdivisions in rural areas. Clustering smaller lots in transitional zones. New urbanism developments in higher-density centers.

Those are the financial mantras of residential developers in the Charlotte region, as undeveloped land becomes scarcer and costlier in many areas, market demand for smaller lots swells, and public support grows for environmentally friendly and infrastructure-efficient developments.

But as developers and planners push for more tightly clustered subdivisions, and as more towns consider rewriting their zoning codes to allow for more such development, there is blowback. Neighbors of smaller-lot projects often vocally oppose them, asserting political pressure on the politicians they elected to office.

With clustering becoming a hot development topic in the Charlotte region, On the Level decided to turn to the man many planners point to as the authority on clustered residential development: Randall Arendt, the planner widely credited with coining the term “conservation subdivision” in the early1980s.

Now 67, Arendt drew on three 1960s concepts – clustered lots, open-space design and the back-to-nature movement – to formulate his own, which he believes leads to sustainable development, protection of delicate ecosystems and preservation of rural character.

And, he asserts, conservation subdivisions are “twice green” – they decrease the environmental impact of development while at the same putting more green into the pockets of developers, who save cash on up-front costs such as grading and road construction and create neighborhoods that sell out quickly and for more money.

In our conversation, Arendt proved to be more than passingly familiar with the Charlotte real estate market, in part because the worlds of land-use planning and landscape architecture are small and because he has had a hand in designing several subdivisions in the area, including Weddington’s Stratford Hall.

Arendt was educated at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. One of his 20-plus publications, the 450-page “Rural by Design: Maintaining Small Town Character” (1994, Planners Press), is required reading for the American Institute of Certified Planners’ qualifying exam.

After a long career as a planner, site designer, teacher and conservation-planning advocate, Arendt now has his own consulting firm, Greener Prospects, whose greenerprospects.com website has Arendt’s full biography.

OtL spoke with Arendt via telephone from his home in Brunswick, Maine, where, he said, “Winters are not necessarily that cold, but they are long.”

You draw a strong distinction between clustering and conservation subdivisions. We often see residential developers and town zoning ordinances calling any clustered plan a conservation subdivision. A lot of developers, they save 30 percent of the subdivision and pat themselves on the back, or 40 percent including wetlands. Conservation subdivisions are a higher-octane version, the best of the best, 50 percent or more of conserved land. There are PRDs, planned residential developments, and planned unit developments, PUDs ,which are more mixed-use, residential and commercial. Conservation subdivisions are more amped-up. A lot of developers say: “We love it. It reduces the cost in site-grading. We don’t have to do as many streets and sewer connections. And we can sell homes for more money because we can market it with open space, trails; it’s like living in a park.” So what I’m defining as a conservation subdivision is when you’re off the (infrastructure) grid, really rural, low density and no water. If you’re within the grid, you’re getting into new urban design, in the water and sewer areas. New urbanism is where, instead of one unit per 2 acres and 3 acres, you’ve got three to four units per acre – which is really not all that much – and it’s hard to get 50 percent open space. The open-space subdivision is a merging of conservation and new urban subdivisions, with 30 percent open space, with the wetlands already protected.

But still, clustered subdivisions aren’t a bad thing, right? Well, it’s a great thing to cluster homes on dry land, if you leave wetlands and floodplains, where you’re not supposed to (develop) anyway, out of the percentage equation. The percentage of open space in many clustered-style subdivisions is 25 to 30 percent – not enough, especially if you’re including wetlands.

We have some clustering in the Charlotte market, and even a few conservation subdivisions. But in some submarkets, they’re just now getting some attention. Many communities don’t have clustering options, and there’s a central conflict at play. Many communities have comprehensive plans that say, “We want to preserve our greenways and our rural feel,” but their zoning ordinances don’t support that with clustering and conservation subdivisions. I used to insist on mandatory clustering to get out of that schizophrenic state where you have comprehensive plans that say, “You can have large-lot subdivisions,” and land-use plans that say, “We want to keep our greenways.” You can say that communities have a right to preserve “normal” densities, but there is no constitutional right to sprawl. You can keep whatever the density is in the ordinance and make the lots a lot smaller.

Mandatory clustering would go over like the Hindenburg around here, but I see your point. You want to balance out all those large-lot subdivisions built when clustering wasn’t even an option. Right. There was mandatory large-lot development for a long time. So we need two big changes: ordinances that call for up to 50 or 60 percent of buildable land, and that doesn’t include the wetlands; and if not, mandatory clustering, at least the ability to legislate it.

Are you still in the mandatory camp? I’ve mellowed out a little bit. Now I say, “Let’s do by-right clustering.” In the past, and currently in most places, it’s a conditional use, which is basically consigning it to the dustbin because developers don’t want to go to all that trouble and expense getting the approval. (The zoning authorities) would be saying, “Here’s a brilliant idea,” and come up with a whole list of standards where it is basically by-right. The conventional development, which preserves nothing, doesn’t follow the comprehensive plan, make that conditional-use, gets some consistency between comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances.

When I ask planners about conservation subdivisions, they almost always send me chapters and sketches from books by you. Did you invent the conservation subdivision? I came up with the idea and thought it was original, and it was because I thought of it on my own, but it happened in two places – parallel worlds. On the eastern end of Long Island, there was mandatory clustering.

But you coined the name? Coined it, yes.

Some of the clustered/conservation subdivision additions to new zoning ordinances enacted or under consideration here offer density bonuses to developers. The more land they conserve, the smaller the lots and the higher the density. That’s a slightly different animal, which is not to say it’s a bad animal. Charlotte, really the Carolinas, is a pretty sophisticated land-use market. You come to New England, you see a lot of pushback on the kind of development we’re talking about. In the six New England states and New York – seven states – there is one new urban development, Warwick Grove in Warwick, N.Y. We’ve seen development of this kind in Charlotte for years. The best states are Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina – those are the real leaders in new urban design. It’s not unheard of anywhere else, but in the Northeast and Midwest, in particular, it has not caught on.

Developers here are really pushing for more clustered subdivisions in transitional and rural areas. They say it makes them more money, as you mentioned, and meets a growing market demand. Are those legitimate reasons to cluster? I’m not surprised. The Urban Land Institute has been pushing for more flexibility in design. The National Association of Home Builders is a real advocate. New urbanism and clustering are appealing to developers; they get more density and do it in a more esthetic way, and the way the public likes it. It helps them market their communities. Clustering was outlawed by many communities that saw it as a tool of developers.

That is at least partly true, to the extent you indicated. But it is architects and landscape architects really leading the movement, making really handsome streetscapes. I’m not a landscape architect, though I received an honorary certificate. Planners are really following architects; planners haven’t led the way. Planners don’t get design training in school. Planning departments need to have non-planners in them. Davidson has done a good job with this. Their planners have also been designers. The Davidson Planning Board understood clearly that they had to have planner-designers, and it shows. Even the assistant town manager, Dawn Blobaum, is an architect. Architects can learn planning easily, but not the other way around. Architecture is more specialized, not as general. I’ve pilloried academics for gutting planning schools of design instruction.

Who are the leaders of the movement in the Charlotte area? David Walters – he’s a Brit who teaches architecture and urban design at UNC-Charlotte – has been a great advocate of new urbanism in your area. Then there’s Tom Low, who leads the Civic by Design forums; he just did one (last) month at the Levine Museum of the New South (in uptown Charlotte). There have been a succession of great people in the planning department in Davidson, and the planning board, really dedicated people, people who go over and above and bring in the community. Developer Doug Boone, who died (in 2012), helped bring the idea of new urbanism into the Charlotte area, starting with the New Neighborhood in Davidson. And you’ve got some other really good planning directors around, like Jack Simoneau in Huntersville; he understands open-space design and smart growth. I worked with him to show what conservation design can be in a rural county, back when he was planning director in Currituck County. He’s a really great planner, even without the design background.  You just won’t find as many well-rounded, dedicated planning people like that in other places. The Philadelphia area is another good example (of clustering), and Milwaukee to a certain extent, Chicago. But the Charlotte area is right up at the top.

But a lot of people who live here in big-lot subdivisions near proposed clustered ones get very unhappy, and loudly so. They believe higher density means their property values will drop. So they put political pressure on elected officials, who often vote against clustering. What do you say to opponents? They need to get out more.

Ha. Whether it’s a new urbanist or conservation subdivision, when (opponents) visit them, drive out through them, those concerns pretty much evaporate. They should take group bus tours of subdivisions with smaller lots, a mix of housing types. They will see that you don’t have to have big lots for the value of the homes and neighborhood to be high. They will fall in love (with clustering). Better yet, they should find great examples of new urbanist and conservation subdivisions and walk through the neighborhoods and talk to people, say, “Nice dog there.” Or just walk around with a camera around their necks. People will come out of their houses and wonder what you’re up to, and they’ll tell you what they love about their neighborhood. The planning boards, the planning directors and people like me, we’re all in favor of this; the doubting Thomases are on the city council. Once the abutters become converts, the politicians will, too. They might not always say, “We like it a lot”; but they will generally say, “We no longer oppose it; we don’t believe it will affect our property values.”