Jonathan F.P. Rose Q&A
Green and Affordable Neighborhoods
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On January 6, 2009, developer Jonathan F.P. Rose talked about how urban affordable housing can also be environmentally-friendly, and how federal and local governments can encourage this kind of development. His firm's Highland Garden Village, a walkable, transit-oriented development in Denver, Colorado, is featured in the Museum's Green Community exhibition. This program was presented as part of the Sustainable Communities lecture series.
After his visit, Rose answered selected questions from audience members and online visitors submitted through an online Q&A Forum:
Q: Could you please discuss the ongoing operational challenges (or benefits) that some of your initiatives face?
A: The biggest issue is entropy—the natural degradation of information over time, which works against the project's ability to continue to carry forward the initial concepts. I will give you a very simple example—we built an apartment complex and painted the walls a soothing off-white, but the ceilings a brighter white, so as to reflect the daylight more deeply into the room. We often repaint an apartment when new tenants move in. The management people decided it was easier just to paint the whole apartment off-white, so we lost the whiter ceilings. Or a project where we installed BTU meters to carefully meter heating and cooling to allocate costs, but they were never tuned properly, so never gave us accurate readings.
And then there are the unintended consequences, such as a retail project to which we added bike paths, which attracted skateboarders who drove the tenants crazy, rather then bike riding customers. It takes a tremendous effort to retain ideas, advance them, adjust when the unintended consequences happen. We are developing a "JRCOpedia" as an internal resource, and hold lots of "lessons learned" sessions to try to overcome these.
Q: What type of education is provided to residents of your housing developments regarding some of the sustainable materials or responsibilities?
A: We try to educate not only residents, but also office tenants. Frankly, we have the best luck with office tenants, because they are often green firms coming to a green building. With residents, we give them explanatory materials when they move in, and try to engage them in the ongoing greening of the projects. We have the best luck creating gardening clubs—people love to garden.
Q: I have been involved with a for-profit LIHTC [Low Income Housing Tax Credit program] for 10 years. What needs to be done to move us past the multitude of subsidies that seem to be required for fully sustainable projects?
A: I think we will continue to need to patch together a variety of funds to make projects work. The best solution might be a unified funding application. As a first step, we need to eliminate conflicts between programs. I would also like to see more mixed-use, mixed-income credit enhancement, and funding programs that would make it easier to put commercial, social service, and housing elements together.
Q: I and many other people I know are looking to change career paths and work on green development. What skill sets do we need to develop, and what kind of jobs exist within the industry?
A: The good news is that any job or project can be done greener, and the whole development industry is going greener. If you want to work in the real estate industry, you need foundational real estate skills on which to build a career. You can enter the field from whatever angle best suits your background and nature—from finance, construction, design, management, law, leasing, or marketing. All these touch real estate development. The most important skills are to understand real estate design, construction, and finance. One good way to get started is to volunteer with a community development organization that is building housing. There are jobs in architecture, engineering, banking, leasing, property management—and most importantly, the project management to bring all of these components together.
Q: As someone who prefers urban living, I very much appreciated your presentation on the environmental (and other) benefits of living in a more densely populated setting. However, I know that many equate the American Dream with a more suburban or exurban home. Is there a way to make that kind of lifestyle more sustainable? Or do you advocate a redefinition of the American Dream?
A: Actually, there is no longer an American dream, except perhaps the dream of responsible freedom. Rather, there are many dreams, in many places, of many different types of people and families, and we need to serve them all. As it happens, after the recent housing binge, we have more suburban housing than the market seems to want. And urban infill housing is holding prices much better then suburban edge housing. So it is clear that the market itself is indicating a change in preferences. But remember, there will always be multiple markets. The issue facing us is first, how will we grow? Suburban sprawl simply imposes too many economic and environmental "externality" costs on society, so in a time of economic responsibility, we shouldn't continue to subsidize more sprawl. Next, we need to serve all of what we have built, whether urban or suburban, with better transit, and to allow for more infill. We can measure our progress by the reduction in VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled). And in general, Americans want cars, but are happy when their community form allows them to travel less, and without traffic. If we simply design communities in ways that reduce VMT, if we have our cars traveling fewer miles, the result is less traffic. So transit, mixed uses, smart streets, etc., are not only environmentally better, they are more satisfying solutions!
Watch the video of Jonathan Rose's entire presentation.
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The Sustainable Communities lecture series is sponsored by United Technologies Corporation. The Museum's online Q&A Forums are made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. |
