Development News

News Nugget

A coalition formed by the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the United States Botanic Garden has created the nations first rating system for environmentally sensitive landscapes.

As LEED has done for buildings and Energy Star has done for appliances, the Sustainable Sites Initiatives will do for outside spaces. The groups describe the program like this: “Voluntary national guidelines and performance benchmarks for sustainable land design, construction and maintenance practices.”

Nancy Somerville, Executive Vice President and CEO of ASLA said in a press release on the project, “While carbon-neutral performance remains the holy grail for green buildings, sustainable landscapes move beyond a do-no-harm approach. Landscapes sequester carbon, clean the air and water, increase energy efficiency, restore habitats and ultimately give back through significant economic, social and environmental benefits never fully measured until now.”

According to a USA Today story, “The rating will measure several criteria. They may include planting trees in a parking lot or paving with permeable materials to minimize heat and storm-water runoff. Or landscaping with native plants to reduce maintenance, irrigation and use of pesticides.”

Click here for that story and here for more information from the program itself.

[more]

Land Use

More than 3 million acres of farmland in the country is ready to be broken again this season, freed up from contracts from the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), a little-known farm program that has large implications for land-use in the West and Midwest.

Roxana Hegeman of the Associated Press details the changes afoot with the program in a story today. The basics are these: CRP was created in 1985 in the thick of the farm crisis. The program pays landowners to take their land out of production and let it “rest” in native grasses for a specified period of time. Contracts range from 10-20 years. In September of this year, 33.47 million acres were enrolled in the program. But, the 2008 Farm Bill, passed last fall, capped the total acreage at 32 million, so as contracts expire, more and more land is coming out of CRP.

According to Hegeman’s story, more than 3.4 million acres were taken out of the program in September—most of them in Texas, Colorado and Kansas, but “hundreds of thousands” of acres are also going back into production in Montana and the Dakotas. In September of 2008, more than 2 million acres were taken out of CRP nationwide compared to September the previous year.

The USDA has boasted CRP as the largest private-public conservation effort in the country and indeed, studies from the agency show great benefits to water, erosion and habitat since its introduction. But, in the last five years it has come under fire for a number of things, the largest being the criticism that it takes farmers off of the land and thus contributes to the depopulation of rural America. It’s also been panned for being a “retirement plan” for farmers, driving up land prices by making cropland attractive to amenity ranch buyers who are looking for places to hunt and fish while getting income from the land. 

[more]

Luxury Resorts

It’s no secret that the luxury second-home market in the Mountain West has taken a huge hit since the national housing market went south, and the Wall Street Journal today does a nice job of detailing the carnage at the highest of the high-end hot-spots. A 10,000 square foot house in the prestigious Starwood area of Aspen (6 acres, barn and guest house) is now listed at $9.95 millioin, down from $15.9 million - and it hasn’t sold yet. Sun Valley, Jackson Hole and Park City are all seeing dramatic declines in sale prices and transaction volume.

While there are some signals that the high-end resort market isn’t totally dead - Sam Byrne, the new owner of the Yellowstone Club in Montana, reported surprisingly strong sales activity when he spoke at NewWest.Net’s recent conference - the frenzied building of the 1990s and 2000s has left plenty of inventory of multi-million-dollar mountain homes that will undoubtedly take a while to absorb - even in Aspen.

[more]

New West Conference

Less can be more. The end is not nigh. The real estate market—including second-home and resort markets—will recover … eventually.

Predictions and advice about opportunity, realism, smart growth, environmentalism—and a slow-paced recovery—were the hallmarks of NewWest.net’s fourth annual Real Estate Development in the Northern Rockies conference in Missoula. The two-day event, which ended yesterday at the Hilton Garden Inn, included more than 30 speakers who discussed wide-ranging topics about development, planning, land use and the future of the West.

The boom-and-bling era of speculation and eye-popping returns on real estate have obviously vanished, said the planners, architects, developers, policy makers, real estate agents, green builders and others who took the stage. But the current economic downturn could fuel a shift that benefits people and the planet, speakers said. When smart growth replaces sprawl, when developers are good neighbors, when downtowns are revitalized and landscapes are preserved, the region will be protected from ugly booms and busts.
-

[more]

New West Conference

In the wake of the economic meltdown, the world seems to have changed. And that’s for the good, said Luther Propst, the keynote speaker on the second day of the NewWest.net Real Estate and Development in the Northern Rockies conference.

Speakers at the fourth annual conference, which brought together more than 250 developers, architects, city officials, real estate agents, planners, and others, said the shift in the economy has refocused the West on some formulas that would make a Boy Scout proud: simplicity, thrift, conservation, patience, and quality of life.

“This might be an economic reset,” said Propst, a leading smart-growth expert. “We can either be victims of change or we can plan for it, shape it and emerge stronger from it.”

[more]

NewWest.net Conference Kicks Off

The economic recovery has definitely begun, but it has a long way to go. Housing prices might have a lot farther to fall. And new waves of foreclosures could keep the economy on shaky footing—for years.

Those were a few of the views offered today by leading economist Christopher Thornberg of Los Angeles-based Beacon Economics, who took the stage in Missoula to kick off NewWest.Net’s fourth annual Real Estate and Development in the Northern Rockies conference—and to also predict the future. It’s something Thornberg has done with uncanny precision in past years, when he was one of the few economists to warn about a coming housing bust and its dire consequences.

[more]