CIVANO: A REPORT FROM THE FIELD
by Mark Smith
January 24, 2001
Integrating Sustainable Design and Programming into Mainstream Real Estate Development
Make people happy and they will consume less.” This simple statement, a definition of sustainability by the citizens planning group Sustainable Seattle, hits the core of sustainability in urban development. Among the difficult process changes necessary to become more sustainable, it is helpful to keep in mind the basic goal of making people content, allowing them to focus energy in a more productive behavior.
Located in Tucson, AZ, the Civano community is an important step in sustainability. Currently in the construction period of the first residential neighborhood and town center, Civano has just emerged from the predevelopment period tasks of financing, entitlements, and refining goals of sustainability. It is the first large, mainstream real estate development to integrate sustainability as a key personality characteristic of the community. To accomplish this, the major tasks involved in planned community development are being recast to include sustainable design and programming. This new emphasis is affecting areas as diverse as design, construction, marketing, debt and equity lending, municipal infrastructure design and finance, and business park design and marketing. Indeed, these changes to the real estate development process may be one of Civano’s most important contributions to sustainability.
The Project
Civano is a new urbanist plan that includes 820 acres, 2,800 homes, and 1.3 million square feet of commercial space. (An additional 325-acre purchase option is being exercised.) Homes will include five to seven types of production housing in a wide price spectrum, plus alternative material homes that will include rammed earth, strawbale, and other resource-conserving materials. The planned community also includes retail and industrial uses, which will make it a complete urban environment with stronger-than normal links between homes, workplaces, and the environment.
The design of the development promotes not just resource conservation in all areas, but also focuses on human well being, with Civano’s new urbanist characteristics promoting a sense of community. The relationships between different land uses, such as the interaction between Civano homes and workplaces, has been carefully considered to achieve such goals as providing housing that meets the needs of workers, and to allow easy (and attractive) ways for people to walk to work, or to take locally based, efficient transportation. The emphasis on walking, bicycles, and alternate fuel vehicles for internal circulation should yield less pollution and noise. In neighborhoods, shops, and community facilities are designed to foster social interaction. Narrower, shaded streets will encourage walking and discourage speeding cars. These features should allow better opportunities to know one’s neighbors, thereby lowering the potential for crime and provide a more nurturing environment for families.
There will be more open space with desert-sensitive vegetation. The developer is striving to save important vegetation on the site by removing it from areas where buildings and roads will be located and relocating to other areas on the site. The use of harvested and reclaimed water (treated effluent) for irrigation will reduce water consumption and sewage. Also, improved collection and disposal methods will enhance recycling and composting. The first commercial building at Civano, the Global Solar manufacturing building, includes electric charging stations, a technology that will continue to be incorporated throughout the community and possibly into homes.
In commercial and residential structures, passive solar design will be used (while a community photovoltaic system is possible if economically feasible). Units will have high-efficiency windows, walls, heating, cooling, and fixtures. Importantly, building plans will closely relate to the local climate and represent a change from mainstream production.
Currently, Civano is entering the development stage. Obtaining equity and debt financing partners has been a substantial, year-long task. With major financing secured, detailed home plans are now being created by builders and the developer, Community of Civano LLC, and the detailed design of the first neighborhood center is being conducted. A test home is being built to experiment with the many changes to building systems, design, equipment, and specifications. A sales center, including facilities for education about Civano’s environmental characteristics, is also being designed. (Since Civano’s fundamental design is ecologically friendly, many common-area features offer an opportunity for well-integrated education.)
A grand opening for the first neighborhood, Neighborhood One, is scheduled for the fall of 1998. The first commercial building, the industrial facility for Global Solar, a photovoltaic manufacturer, was completed in June, 1997. Global Solar, partly owned by Tucson Electric Power, wanted to locate in Civano because of the community’s association with sustainability. Planning for an eco-industrial park is progressing, and by the end of 1998, Civano should be emerging as a complete, vital neighborhood with occupied housing and workplaces.
Those Who Are Making It Happen
Civano was purchased from The City of Tucson (which had nurtured the development from its early stages) by the Community of Civano LLC, managed by Case Enterprises. Case Enterprises, owned by David Case and Kevin Kelly, has been successful at commercial and residential development, including office, retail, and for-sale and rental housing. Many of Case Enterprises’ projects have been affordable for-sale and rental housing, which has allowed the firm to gain experience working with public and private interests and required them to gain experience creating a sense of community in their projects without spending lavishly. With over a decade of financial and community-building success as foundation, Case and Kelly wanted Case Enterprises to contribute to the benefits of sustainability. They bought Civano and set forth with a commitment of beneficial change.
The Civano project owes much of its existence to the public-sector. The project was supported during the many years of planning by the Metropolitan Energy Commission and the City of Tucson. Now, Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest source of home mortgage funds, is also working with the development and has invested in it as co-owner. The lending agency understands the importance of this kind of development – according to Linda Davenport, managing director of the Fannie Mae American Communities Fund, the agency has spent half a year researching the project’s implications – and has continuously provided insight into how economic and natural capital can be enhanced by new ways of thinking. Energy efficiency, reduced home maintenance costs, reduced commuting time and expense, a stronger community, and healthier homes and workplaces should contribute to greater productivity and higher disposable incomes to better secure mortgages and increase the number of people that can afford to buy a home. Fannie Mae’s investment comes from its American Communities Fund, a $100 million dollar investment fund.
The Builders
In the first neighborhood of homes just now beginning development, three production builders will build four products ranging in price from $80,000 to $250,000, with most below $160,000. One of Civano’s important roles is to demonstrate to the mainstream real estate development community that sustainable building methods are viable and that the consumer values the result.
Two of the three builders, KE&G Homes and TJB Construction, are from Tucson. Both have played important roles in Tucson’s production housing market and see their involvement in Civano as a way to learn new skills and to gain a competitive edge in the future housing market. KE&G Homes has been growing rapidly and is one of the largest housing producers in the area. Some of Civano’s fundamental objectives were compelling to many of the executives of KE&G Homes, who had themselves grown up in neighborhoods where there was a strong sense of community. Concern about the project’s present-day appeal, however, was still strong in a company that often finds itself in a competitive position where, according to Rudy Torres of KE&G Homes, the ultimate question is often one of “who can have the best price, not how can you sell based upon the uniqueness of what your are offering.”
KE&G decided, therefore, to test the Civano ideas at some of their other eleven projects around Tucson, where they did consumer surveys about Civano design concepts. “People enthusiastically said that it would be a great place to live,” said Torres. “They valued the re-creation of real neighborhoods that contained homes with authentic territorial design but modern amenities.”
The third Civano production builder is RGC, a homebuilder located in Newport Beach, CA. RGC has a long history of innovation and has been working for almost three years with IBACOS, an energy engineering team that is part of the U.S. DOE’s Build America Program. (IBACOS is now assisting other Civano builders too.) RGC will build two production housing products at Civano.
The Community of Civano LLC has been actively involved with each builder’s line of homes. Lee Rayburn, Civano’s director of Design and Planning, says that the trick has been to achieve a successful balance between reaching Civano’s sustainability goals and time and cost associated with changing the builders’ existing processes. “We have worked very closely with our builders to help advance design, energy efficiency, water systems, successful integration of the building into the landscape, and permaculture.” The Community of Civano LLC has invested a considerable amount in seven model home designs for its builders, helping them with the challenge of moving toward more sustainable design and programming. The result is a substantial change in plans, orientation, windows, and the relationship between the home and the outdoors.
Homebuilders specializing in alternative materials will also be an important part of the housing delivery process at Civano. In addition to the goal of having a positive impact on production homebuilding methods, Civano is also trying to provide a larger market for builders that use renewable and local materials for homebuilding, helping this small portion of the housing market become a meaningful part of the home delivery system. These environmentally responsible, alternative-material methods were commonplace for centuries, and were only displaced in Tucson in the late 1800s when railroads were able to bring non-local materials – mostly mass quantities of lumber – to the region. Interest is once again returning to the locally sourced materials, and over 100 potential homeowners have indicated that they want a Civano home built from materials such as rammed earth or straw bale. The biggest challenge has now become finding builders who can mass-produce homes built with alternative materials.
Alternative-material homes are an important part of the Civano product delivery, for several reasons. First, they represent important advancement towards sustainable design because of their being built with a large amount of renewable materials. Second, they provide an important aesthetic for Civano, promoting indigenous styles different than those found in the competitive market. The alternative material style is being concentrated around the neighborhood center, enhancing its attractiveness as an activity center. The developer is setting aside 30% of Neighborhood One lots for the alternative material homes. According to Rayburn, “We are encouraging a mix of materials and techniques that are both backward-looking and forward-looking. Backward-looking materials include straw bale and adobe, acknowledging historical methods. Forward-looking materials include rastra and bra, more technology-oriented but using materials wisely.” The combination of advancements made in production homes and the introduction of alternative-material homes in the planned community product mix represents a considerable accomplishment.
A Model Development
The City of Tucson, which is a development-agreement partner with the developer, sees their participation in Civano as an investment that will provide positive returns, not the least of which is helping the city gain knowledge of how to build and operate more sustainable communities. This knowledge could then be transferred to the rest of the Tucson region where the investment would provide even greater returns. According to the City of Tucson’s John Laswick, who managed the project for the City prior to its sale to the Community of Civano LLC, Tucson has many goals for sustainability at Civano. Sustainable design can reduce the annual cost of supporting the community. For example, the strong connection between homes and workplaces can reduce automobile travel in Tucson, reducing road construction and maintenance fees. More efficient use of water will reduce demand of this limited resource. A safer community should reduce policing and other social costs. Importantly, from the City’s perspective, lessons learned at Civano can be transferred to other areas in Tucson. The City will then become recognized for its accomplishments, and for its quality of life.
Laswick indicates that substantial benefits for the community will accrue if these design and planning criteria are successfully implemented. Civano will create a model for environmentally sensitive development by:
- Demonstrating marketability of resource-efficient construction
- Reducing demand for new roads and easing strain on existing streets
- Establishing new markets for reclaimed water
- Easing strain on City landfills by reducing solid waste generation
- Improving air quality by promoting pedestrian and bike travel
- Preserving the desert by building at higher densities and leaving 35% open space
- Maintaining affordability through construction that conserves natural resources
- Saving the City of Tucson $500,000 annually through avoided costs of water, roads, & landfills
- Creating additional savings that accrue from air quality, sewage treatment, and social cohesion.
Additionally, the City wishes to establish a new land use pattern based on a traditional neighborhood design. This pattern will facilitate social interaction and sense of community, reducing crime and its accompanying costs (both social and monetary), promote land use patterns that allow efficient mass transit and walking to work, benefit children and families through mixed land uses and social integration, and allow people to work, shop, and play near their homes.
Part of Tucson’s return on investment will be the transfer of technologies throughout the Tucson region. The Civano building standards will be available to homebuilders anywhere in Tucson, while the development will be used as a template for planning the 20 square miles in the area known as Houghton corridor in Southeastern Tucson. Furthermore, Tucson will apply the sustainability principles to infill and redevelopment, and use the participatory planning model for a new vision of a Sustainable Tucson, the vehicle the City of Tucson is using to transfer lessons to the region.
Finally, on a larger scale, Civano hopes to gain recognition as one of the largest sustainable developments in the world, thereby aligning Tucson with national and international goals for appropriate development, showcasing the city as proactively dealing with environmental effects of growth, and attracting new business and investment supportive of sustainable development.
Such benefits do involve public costs, as described in the Development Agreement:
As the developer gains more experience with sustainable design and programming and its implementation, and as participating homebuilders and commercial developers gain experience, these standards may be modified and improved to keep Civano a leader in urban development standards.
Civano’s New Urbanism and Sustainability
New urbanism is a key element of the Civano community plan. It contributes benefits that are meaningful and tangible to households and businesses. Families should appreciate a sense of community in which children are better nurtured, and everybody should find pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and neighborhood centers attractive, and appreciate lower costs associated with higher density development.
There is considerable overlap in sustainability’s scope and the way some new urbanists are applying new urbanism. Indeed, the fundamental concepts of new urbanism very effectively achieve sustainable objectives – for example, enhancing a community social system for security and better human development and relationships, and land use objectives that include more open space and better efficiency of developed land. Some new urbanists are also embracing the ecosystem quality of open space, designs that include solar orientation, better material selection, and, perhaps most importantly, willingness to be flexible during design and implementation to accommodate specific project objectives or organizational issues. At Civano, the firm of Moule Polyzoides has been instrumental in taking project characteristics and constraints and blending new urbanist objectives with those of sustainable design and programming. As a new urbanist land plan, Civano is unique in its accommodation of natural drainage and the location of existing vegetation. The first phase is a major step in the integration of new urbanism into the broad topic of sustainability, with protection of the natural ecosystems on a site and its surrounding area. More progress will be made as future Civano phases are planned, and as ecological systems are united with effective urban systems in other new urbanist communities.
Boundary Spanning and Change
In the past, most sustainable projects have been individual buildings, often owned by institutions, or small tracts of homes. Small projects do not face the same kind of financing and marketing tasks required of large-scale community, mainstream real estate development. That is not to say that these “non-mainstream” projects haven’t served an important role in the integration of sustainability into mainstream development: without those projects and their objectives and designs to use as early examples, we would not be as far as we are now. Civano, however, is taking the next step towards integrating sustainability into the fabric of mainstream real estate development on a community level by showing homebuilders, lenders, and government the processes and benefits of these new methods.
At this point in the effort to integrate sustainable design and programming into real estate, extra time is required for implementation, and the effort often meets varying degrees of resistance. Civano’s planning reflects the vision and commitment by the City of Tucson to nurture Civano along to the point where, in late 1996, the project was sold to the Community of Civano LLC. It was then, however, that the project went from a relatively comfortable planning phase to the current periods of pre-development final approvals, financing, and now, construction. The planning process yielded an impressive plan but it did not consider the details of implementation.
It takes extra effort to gather process participants in new ways and at different times, an effort that includes identifying who the true stakeholders are and how inefficiencies can be reduced. Doing this is much like cross-cultural communication and relations: there are, in effect, different languages between disciplines, different communication channels, different values for time, and different accountability – even thought all are part of the same overall process working toward the same goal. Civano’s implementation continues to require a great degree of what Pario Research calls “boundary spanning,” or the bringing together of participants in an urban development process that do not usually interact with one another but who individually make fundamental contributions. It is here that urban development is being recast from its current relatively discreet tasks and sequencing to a more integrated process and in the process overcoming a loss of efficiency that occurs when the overall development process is fractional rather than integrated.
The development process was redesigned to involve participants in tasks in which they may not traditionally be involved, and, importantly, where they can contribute to better design and programming. An important realization for success in sustainable design and programming is the need to evaluate and design a site plan, building, and all component systems concurrently. In process language, this is a form of parallel processing, allowing communication between disciplines and functions while the process is occurring, so that designers can respond to inputs from others and affect design, instead of simply reacting to what others have done without the opportunity to benefit the process.
Pario Research uses its Passiflora Process model to span the boundaries in urban development. Passiflora is a comprehensive view of the planning, implementation, and management of real estate investments for the integration of sustainable design and programming. In the implementation module, Passiflora compares the ‘as is’ real estate development process with the ‘should be’ version. This serves as an education tool and a way to overcome perception of implementation risk. At Civano, Pario used Passiflora to anticipate the involvement of key participants and as a basis for education in several builder workshops.
For effective implementation, it is necessary to go well beyond this ‘whole systems’ design approach. Better design is the starting point. But until sustainable design and programming become common, a more immediate need is getting owners to understand and to adopt the principle. Scientists and designers are making remarkable progress toward sustainability. The biggest challenge is with the business integration of these issues.
Indeed, the biggest future catalyst for this movement will be our society’s finally coming to terms with the amount of capital that is lost because of inefficiencies, combined with the refreshing benefit from sustainable design that yields better human environments. Real estate as an industry has not been effective at boundary spanning, due mainly to the relatively limited span of control that real estate managers have when compared with other industries.
Though it is difficult to redesign real estate development to achieve these goals, there is magic in the process. Tangibly, some people identify with the need for the changes Civano represents. Unique commitment is evident on all levels of this project, from senior executives to staff, from master developer to the vendors and trades associated with builders. In Tucson, design professionals, scientists, and citizens have for many years been an important part of the push to move Civano along. The vision and commitment of all of these companies and individuals has been a key Civano’s progress.
After a long talk about the meanings of the term sustainability, someone once said to me, “I believe if you make it beautiful, people will love it, and if they love it, they will take care of it, and it will last.” Both this and the definition at the beginning of the story apply at Civano, where ultimately, after all of the hard work, Civano hopes to make people happy (content), and to make the community beautiful, so it will last.
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