Habitats - Keeping It Green - Alumni Contribute to Sustainable Building

Nell Porter Brown, 10/28/2008
Website: http:/harvardmagazine.com/2008/11/p-keeping-it-green.html

In the recent issue of Harvard Alumni Magazine the contributions of Bundoran Farm Project Manager David Hamilton and QROE founder, Robert Baldwin, Sr. to preserve and protect working agrarian landscapes were highlighted. The article speaks to the issues and problems surrounding the conversion of productive farm land to residential development around the country and how Preservation Development is being used as a market based solution to address these concerns.

Below is the excerpt from the article that mentions Hamilton, Baldwin and Bundoran Farm.

"DAVID HAMILTON, M.Arch. ’00, grew up in rural North Carolina, surrounded by a lush green landscape of tobacco farms, “many of which are now Bed, Bath & Beyonds,” he says. At Middlebury College, he grew to love another rural environment, full of dairy farms. “Vermont,” he says, “has had tremendous success with protection of land, but at great cost to housing affordability, economic development, and to the state’s political unity.”
At the Graduate School of Design, where integrated urban planning was the focus, Hamilton plunged into work on Professor Rem Koolhaas’s Harvard Design School Project on the City because, he says, “urbanization was, and remains, the greatest demographic shift afoot in our world.” Still, he could not help but notice that rural landscapes, like unfavored children, did not receive equal attention. “While we designed our urban spaces, we seemed, as a profession, to simply wave off rural areas: downzone them, donate them, or think, ‘Maybe someone will farm them,’” he explains. “Of course, if you’ve spent time in rural areas, you understand that this is not just empty, natural land that needs protection from development. It’s an economy, a culture, and a man-made landscape: all needs that must be addressed by planners who hope to shape a regional future.”
Such is his role these days as a principal in Qroe Farm Preservation Development, based in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Qroe (pronounced “crow”) was founded 30 years ago by the late William Baldwin ’52, M.B.A. ’56, and has developed or is still working on eight innovative properties in New England. These include Running Brook Farm, in Derry, New Hampshire—the 72-acre property, with its woodlands and open fields, has roughly 57.5 acres preserved through conservation easements—and, in Massachusetts, Todd Pond in Lincoln and Myers Farm in Greenfield.

Baldwin was a leader in the Urban Land Institute (and its sustainability council) and believed, Hamilton says, that private-sector developers were responsible for helping to control unplanned sprawl and preserve communities. Myers Farm is a good example of such “smart growth” philosophy. The 50-acre development encompasses an historic farmhouse, a fully enrolled charter school, and 39 new “farm-style condominiums” clustered on six acres. Most of the property will remain as it has for more than a century: working farmlands for hay, corn, and wildflower meadows. “What we’re trying to do,” Hamilton explains, “is find a way that development can occur without eliminating farming.”
Qroe is targeting a mixed-use population, too: families who need a good school and older people who want to live in the country while enjoying access, via walking trails, to amenities like free classes at the nearby Greenfield Community College, to which Qroe donates a percentage of every home sale. Most of the acreage is permanently assigned to farming; in 2005, Qroe sold about 37 acres of the land to the Franklin Land Trust, which then sold an agricultural preservation restriction to the state, and then sold the protected land to a dairy, Bree-Z-Knoll Farm.
Such “preservation development,” while not altogether new, is more critical now than ever, Hamilton asserts. Farmland is being converted for development at “alarming” rates nationwide. According to statistics available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent National Resources Inventory, between 1992 and 1997 the average annual rate of conversion of farmland to development was 1.23 million acres, and the average annual rate for all rural land was 2.3 million acres.

The main problem in rural land conservation, Hamilton points out, “is that farmland worth $1,000 an acre is worth $100,000 an acre if it is to be developed; it’s a gross differential.” Conservation projects and/or easements do protect land—and Qroe utilizes them to permanently safeguard farm belts—but however you slice it, he adds, someone is paying: “Property taxes are lost, equity is lost. Sometimes a land trust can purchase the land and use state tax credits, et cetera, to offset costs, but the amount of land covered by conservation easements is less than half of the land being converted to developments.”
For the last two years, Hamilton has focused on a much bigger landscape: the 2,300-acre Bundoran Farm in North Garden, Virginia, near Charlottesville, which is owned by Qroe and its partner, Charles E. Adams, M.B.A. ’89 (one of the leaders in refurbishing the Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire). This bucolic southern property has mountainous terrain, rolling hills, and hardwood forests and currently boasts 400 cows and calves and a 200-acre commercial apple orchard. Hamilton stresses that about 93 percent of the farmland will be permanently preserved and used for agriculture and forestry. Qroe is also exploring the cultivation of non-timber forest products, such as mushrooms, ginseng, and herbs, which it views as a growth market.

The goal, ultimately, is to sell up to 108 building lots, sized at two to 100 acres, for between $350,000 and $1.3 million each. Qroe does not build the homes in most of its projects, but does issue guidelines encouraging vernacular rural architecture and local materials. “We’re most concerned with how homes sit on the land,” says Hamilton. “What we’re watching for and are more worried about is people bringing designs from Orlando, Florida, and trying to fit them into a hillside in New England; that’s the problem with McMansions.” Qroe does require a basic standard of sustainable construction called “Earthcraft”; LEED certification is recommended, but not enforced. “Most homeowners are not interested in LEED,” he notes, “because it’s expensive and there is a lot of paperwork.”

Eleven lots have been sold and the first house is set to be occupied in April. Although there is no doubt that multimillion-dollar homes will go up on Bundoran, most Qroe project buyers “are land people,” Hamilton says. “They want a modest home that fills their needs (which is not necessarily inexpensive), but they are more interested in their gardens, their landscaping, in being outdoors, and walking on trails and having beautiful views—and in the permanent protection of those things.”

This is self-funded conservation. “Qroe asks its buyers, ‘Do you like that view? If so, then pay for it,’” Hamilton explains. “Each homeowner pays for a chunk of the conservation land and what they get is to live in a place where they will always be looking at a farm because we’ve eliminated the potential for that land to ever be developed and become a Wal-Mart.”

Such a concept was a much harder sell when Baldwin started out 30 years ago, Hamilton says, but because of high energy costs, global warming, and cultural shifts, “There is a class of buyers out there in the market for five acres next to conservation land; it is a well-defined market that we serve.” Indeed, the number-one amenity requested by baby boomers and empty-nesters, he reports, is neither a golf course nor a tennis club (as it was a decade ago), but walking and biking trails. “You’re not only getting the right to build in a discrete location, you get the right to walk the land,” he says. “And in Virginia, that’s 2,300 acres. You can walk anywhere and go have a picnic in a field, as long as the cows aren’t using it at the moment.”"

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