Green Development in Action--Haymount

Update September 1998

Haymount, Virginia, is about to become a reality. First conceived in 1989, Haymount is a new town for approximately 12,000 people. It will be constructed on a site in Caroline County, on the Rappahanock River, roughly 50 miles south of Washington, DC, and eight miles east of Fredricksburg, Virginia. The community will contain 4,000 homes, 250,000 square feet of retail space, 500,000 square feet of commercial and light industrial space, 14 church sites, numerous parks, 2 schools, a college campus, and an organic farm. Only one-third of the 1,650 acre site will be developed; the rest remains as forested lands, wetlands, and farming areas.

The first section to be constructed will contain 350 homes in a mixture of single family detached housed (ranging from $58,000 to $450,000), row houses, town houses, and apartment buildings. Within the first year a general store, an inn, a spa, two restaurants, a childcare center, three office buildings, and a marketing center will be built. The first house should be available in the summer of 1999.

The Haymount town plan was designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk Architects and Town Planners. This firm is probably best know for the design of Seaside, Florida, the first community to be built as part of the planning movement know as New Urbanism. This philosophy of planning puts pedestrians first and focuses on recapturing the street as a part of the public realm, looking to traditional urban patterns for inspiration. In general communities are laid out with a significant mix of homes, businesses, civic buildings and parks. No home is more than a five minute walk from a neighborhood center. This approach can lower the number of necessary car trips and lead to more compact land use, thereby lowering air pollution and habitat destruction.

In addition to the innovative land planning, Haymount is addressing other opportunities for sustainablity. The project will have extensive habitat preservation and restoration programs and the buildings are all subject to an energy code and review of building materials for environmental safety and impact. Supply systems giving preference to locally produced materials and products are being established. Three areas of innovation are particularly interesting and are of value for others thinking about the creation of sustainable communities: Just-In-Time financing, biological waste treatment, and planning roads for people.

Haymount is nearer to completing construction financing. The system for the project could be described as Just-In-Time financing, which translates to releasing financing and assuming debt only in a series of stages as each new neighborhood or commercial project comes on line. Rather than carry a large overhead of debt, each section of development is financed in separate pieces from the same source. Haymount will be using a system of asset backed securities instead of conventional bank loans. This type of financing involves an insurance company creating a series of bonds against the original project value. These bonds would usually be considered low grade or high risk. However, part of the financing includes an insurance policy from another insurance company. This policy covers the bond risk and upgrades its rating. This is a relatively new form of project financing that has been used mainly for industrial and corporate financing, and is just now coming into use for real estate projects. Once the bonds are in place, then additional bonds can be created to finance subsequent phases of the project. The first bonds are anticipated to be issued in November, 1998.

The wastewater treatment system for Haymount is based on the concept of "Living Machines" or biological treatment as created by Dr. John Todd, formerly with Woods Hole Oceangraphic Institute. These systems use a series of increasing complex engineered ecosystems to digest sewage. They have been used for community sewage treatment, for cleaning industrial wastewater, and cleaning toxic water ways. The Haymount system will treat 1.2 million gallons per day. The outflow water is typically cleaner than EPA drinking water standards, although at Haymount it will be used for wetlands enhancement projects, and not for drinking. The final construction drawings for both the water treatment system and the biological waste water treatment system will be completed once the financing is in place in November. These two systems will probably be under construction eight months later.

The focus on creating a pedestrian friendly environment, and devoting less land to infrastructure translates into narrower than conventional roads. The narrower streets slow down traffic, and make it safer for people trying to cross the street. While several New Urbanist projects have succeeded in achieving more reasonable road widths. Just this year the traffic engineering society has moved to new standards, but the Virginia Department of Transportation has been somewhat resistant to change. The street widths in the first neighborhood of Haymount represent a compromise between the developer and the state. It is hoped that in subsequent sections the streets can be adjusted.

Haymount was documented in Rocky Mountain Institute's book, Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate and CD-ROM, Green Developments that was funded by the Department of Energy with additional support from the EPA. Both products have been extremely well received in the market.

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