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Tree-Lined Green

Drive through North West Crossing in Bend, Ore., and right away you notice some-thing different from almost every other new community: mature pine trees, with lots and homes and parks and roads designed around them. The trees not only preserve the area’s rich timber history, but also represent the developer’s desire to create a sustainable community that would transcend market fluctuations.

 

North West Crossing has certainly done that, more than tripling its local market share of home sales since the downturn began in 2006 and recording 54 sales (16 of them spec homes) last year amid one of the hardest-hit economies in local history. “It’s the shining star of Bend,” says David Ford, the project’s general manager. “Buyers consistently tell us that the design of the community influenced their purchasing decision.”

 

Developer West Bend Property Co. commissioned a detailed tree survey of the 483-acre parcel (a former tree farm) to help drive the master plan and integrate the ponderosa pines into the community as both a sig-nature feature and a competitive advantage. More subtle (if no less effective) measures to create a sustainable community include multiple road connections to downtown Bend and surrounding streets and a carefully planned and scaled retail center that fronts the city’s main boulevard. “It feels like an extension of Bend, not an exclusive or separate community,” says Ken Pirie, an associate with Walker Macy of Portland, Ore., the land planner.

 

Pirie also attributes the project’s success to well-scaled homes. Beyond the lure of mature pines, he says, “The homes aren’t overblown. They’re com-pact, well-designed, and efficient. It feels like old Bend.”

 

 

  By keeping existing pine trees, North West Crossing looks

like a mature neighborhood—only with housing that performs

much better than the competition.

 

And it helps that the developer created a committee of pre-approved, financially stable local builders to conduct lot sales lotteries and enforce strict home design guidelines, including mandated alley-accessed garages. By those rules, builders can not purchase adjacent lots to cluster their homes, mitigating model home parks and creating design diversity that harks back to suburban development of the early 1900s. “They challenge each other to build better homes,” says Pirie.

 

Homes within North West Crossing, now at 560 occupied units toward a 20-year build-out of about 1,350 homes by 2020, are not only regulated in their design, but also must be certified per Earth Advantage, a regional, comprehensive sustainable building program crafted to the building culture and climate of the area. “Buyers expect green-built homes now,” says Ford. “Even if they’re not willing to necessarily pay more for them.”

 

In addition, two of the commercial buildings with-in the project’s Neighborhood Centre are certified under the LEED-Commercial Structures rating sys-tem, the first in the state to achieve that distinction.

 

Still, the overriding design and construction of the master plan, trees and all, is what truly drives the ability of North West Crossing to sustain its success. To that end, the developer is reworking the project’s next section of 300 lots slated for release by tweaking lot sizes, reducing the number of parcels offered per phase, and adjusting the phasing sequence per cur-rent market demand. “The developer’s goal from the beginning was to be sustainable,” says Ford. “It drives everything.”

 

In the Wind

 

Wind power may not be for everyone, but it might work for your next project.

 

It’s ugly. It costs too much. The ROI doesn’t pencil out. What people used to say about residential solar-electric power generation is now being applied to another renewable power option, wind.

 

Then again, offering new, better-built homes that generate “free” energy and amortizing its up-front costs (minus tax credits and other rebates) into a 30-year mortgage may be just the ticket to push your homes into the sales column.

 

Like solar, a small wind turbine de-signed for a single residence is most effective (and only practical) when added to a high-performance home. Assuming other optimum conditions—namely, average annual wind speeds over 12 mph—a 10 kW turbine can off set up to 80 percent of grid-sup-plied electricity.

 

Recent support among policymakers (tax credits), utilities (re-bates and net-metering), and local zoning authorities (height variances) has helped push wind power closer to practical reality. Despite the economy and a $20,000 in-stalled cost, the residential wind sector grew 78 percent in 2008 and another 15 percent (about 10,000 installs) last year to crest the 100,000-unit threshold.

 

Even with its limitations, the potential market for small-system turbines is about 13 million installations, says Ron Stimmel, small-systems manager at the American Wind Energy Association. “It’s the next step beyond making a home energy efficient,” he says.  A wind resource map from the DOE shows a swath of optimum conditions from the Dakotas to North Texas, while a table produced by the National Climate Data Center shows average annual wind speeds for hundreds of cities.

 

A more realistic opportunity, says Stimmel, may be in systems that serve a community instead of individual homes, such as La Casa Verde in San Francisco, where a trio of turbines generates 40 per-cent of the project’s electricity.

 

Wind energy may not be suitable for every home,

but the market for free, maintenance-free, renew-able energy,

still in its infancy, is growing.

 

 

The Guts of Green-Approved

At first glance, the Green-Approved product qualification program launched last year by the NAHB Research Center may appear to be just another third-party certification to consider in your sustainable building specs.

 

But that’s only if you build to the ANSI-approved National Green Building Standard (NGBS). The Green-Approved program is designed to identify and qualify products and systems specifically for the NGBS, in large part to streamline the specification and verification process (and costs) for builders seeking certification.

 

The program essentially pre-approves products and systems that comply with and earn points under the NAHB Green rating system instead of requiring builders to submit documentation of a product’s qualities, such as VOC emissions or recycled content, to a verifier. It also enables builders and design professionals to find and consider products on the list prior to beginning green projects built to the NGBS.

 

The Research Center, which acted as the secretariat for the ANSI consensus approval of the NGBS and is an established and accredited testing facility, evaluates products submitted for inclusion in the online Green-Approved directory. “We will accept third-party data or verification [of a product’s claim] from any competent and accredited lab” to conduct that evaluation, says Research Center president Michael Luzier. “It’s a straight-forward application and verification process” that typically takes the Center’s staff  mere days to con-duct once the applicant (a manufacturer) submits the required paperwork.

 

Applicants pay a one-time fee of $200 and an annual fee of $1,000 for each product listing and $250 per practice area for which the product qualifies for NGBS points to retain their status in the directory. They must also submit written reconfirmations annually or resubmit data if the product has been altered.

 

  Engineered structural lumber from i Level is among a growing

number of products and systems on the Green-Approved list