Written By: Alan Scott and Tom Puttman

It’s the lay of the land: developers are in business to make a profit. From risk mitigation to added value, any ideas that offset the expensive proposition of development are welcome.

While sustainable design practices can now offer proven financial benefits, most of these measures have been used in isolation, either in green building design or infrastructure planning. An integrated approach to the conventional land development process, from rough grading and utility systems to light fixture and faucet selection, will save both money and resources.

The typical framework for land development follows a linear format. First, an opportunity is identified through experience. A pro-forma for the project is created using codes and standards that determine the extent of allowable building area and the capacity of utilities necessary to support it. Developers then embark on feasibility studies, preliminary design options, and a program pro forma. If the site is appealing, developers seek project financing and land acquisition, and bring in the necessary design disciplines as the project progresses from approvals through design, construction and occupancy.

An Interconnected Process
But there is a better means of qualifying the project and property up front. Well-calculated decisions early in the process can help you integrate your vision of the project with the math. By altering your approach from a step-by-step, compartmentalized process to an integrated one that leverages the dynamic between the finished product and the infrastructure, you’ll gain multiple benefits.

Begin to think of buildings and infrastructure as a symbiotic loop, recognizing the fundamental affects each aspect has on the other. Define ways in which your buildings and site can operate more efficiently before you even purchase the property. With this strategy, you move beyond infrastructure planning based on typical assumptions. Your new determinations for required utilities, roads, and other infrastructure becomes based on expected efficiencies in the development design. You can save money by reducing the extent of infrastructure you bring to a chosen property or even transform a marginal lower-cost property into an ideal site.

LEED‚ (the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program) has grabbed the attention of commercial and residential building owners nationally. Many decisions made pursuant to LEED certification can reduce infrastructure costs if they are adopted early on. For example, energy efficiency and water saving design elements can reduce power, water and sewer connections, as well as connection fees required for the project.

The Expertise
In order to select the measures and strategies that will best serve your overall project, you may need to re-evaluate how you work with consultants. Do you view your project design team as a group that delivers services against a defined budget or as professionals who can advance the project’s value?

Many project owners have concerns that involving consultants early in the process will increase costs. But bringing key consultants in after the property is purchased and the infrastructure is set restricts your opportunities for financial savings as their ability to influence the infrastructure is lost.

Having knowledgeable consultants on board at the project’s inception will refine the scope, which leads to an accelerated schedule and process. This will take the product to market faster and save you money. In addition, an integrated process produces synergy that can result in less systems’ development charges for infrastructure, fewer delays in construction, reduced construction costs, better marketability through environmental responsiveness, and a more desirable property that provides an aesthetic natural environment.

The Ideal Plan
In a model scenario, key team members will join forces during the initial phases to examine and map project systems and flows such as ecology, water, transportation, energy and materials.

Include the site’s ecology in your due diligence. Look at what’s working and use this as a road map for the overall development. Design a layout that creates environmental links between areas, and select indigenous plants that attract native habitat. Enhance or regenerate the ecological system and use the existing natural systems to your advantage. Tie your stormwater mitigation plan into the overall hydrology. Your efforts should exceed local jurisdictions’ code requirements, and significantly enhance the value of the project.

Set a benchmark for the quantity and quality of water your development will manage. Mimic the natural watershed conditions and spread stormwater management systems throughout the site. Location-specific, decentralized strategies may eliminate the need for large stormwater detention ponds – freeing up additional land and increasing the development potential of the property. Efficient water systems coupled with water reuse for irrigation and non-potable applications will help minimize water demand over the life of the project.

Reduce street widths to save money on materials, and create green streets with bioswales or rain gardens built into them for stormwater management (flow control, treatment and disposal). Combine this with adding street trees and landscaping to further reduce both stormwater runoff and heat island effect and create a more attractive and pedestrian friendly development.

New Columbia in Portland (OR) provides an excellent example of this strategy. Crumbling infrastructure and substandard housing required a total redevelopment of the 82-acre site. The developer, Housing Authority of Portland (HAP), spread stormwater filter and disposal systems throughout the site with pocket swales, filter boxes and dry wells.

“We estimate that we’re retaining 90 percent of the water on site, and that eliminated roughly 80 percent of underground pipe compared to a conventional development of this scale,” said John Manson, HAP Construction Manager of New Columbia. “We saved money by localizing the systems and it will result in less costly maintenance over time.”

Understand your project’s total energy requirements and choose systems that will reduce this demand as well. Green building design is a key factor here, but there are site-related solutions. For example, specify highly efficient streetlights or consider solar powered lights to eliminate electrical distribution costs and reduce energy usage.

Looking comprehensively at all systems of the development up front allows you to identify synergies across individual systems and strengthens the interface between buildings and infrastructure.

Advances in Action
Rick Prohov, J.D., LEED AP, a real estate attorney at Prohov & Associates, Ltd. in Chicago (IL), notes that more local jurisdictions are offering incentives and that increasing financial benefits from integrated designs are emerging.

“Higher efficiency equates to lower pass-through liabilities to tenants, higher forecasts for net operating income for landlords, and higher sales prices. As energy costs continue to escalate, integrated energy efficiency strategies for large projects will generate attractive return margins for long-term investors,” Prohov explains. “The economics of sustainability are taking hold, and developers and entire communities that do not embrace these principles will soon be left behind.”

Prohov points to the City of Chicago’s O’Hare Modernization Program, a comprehensive sustainable revitalization of the city’s massive international airport, as a reference for land developers seeking to incorporate an integrated design approach to their projects. The airport’s Sustainable Design Manual can be found online.

When a project includes multiple buildings, developers can increase efficiencies by sharing infrastructure systems between buildings.

Maui-based Dowling Company sought to provide this type of integration in its Kalumalu development in Hawaii. On one block, the company designed a storage cistern large enough to collect rainwater for irrigation and to flush toilets in the six buildings that lined the street. While the cistern reduced potable water demand, the county still required Dowling Company to pay the full source development fee. Although company president Everett Dowling won’t save on the fees, he says they will proceed as planned.

“By including the cistern we can provide quantifiable results to the county that it saves water and makes sense. When we try out environmentally responsible measures, we’re educating the county and community as well as ourselves” Dowling concluded.

As you examine opportunities, expand your vision to include enhanced building value along with reduced or scaleable infrastructure. Don’t settle for creating just a better building when you can orchestrate a better overall project.  SLDT