With Dubai Defaulting, Sonoma Profits From Restraint

There’s a luxury development in Sonoma County that intends to reach zero-emission output within the next few years, chiefly by modifying residents’ behavior. And there’s an affordable development in New Mexico with the same goals. It reminds you that building a palm-shaped resort hotel, even with renewable energy, means encouraging people to isolate themselves and in the bargain making each person consume more resources- including money- than she can digest.

Contrast the crazy developments in Dubai with the sumptuous but understandable one in Sonoma, Sonoma Mountain Village. A consultant to the project named Greg Searle told a conference last month that his client plans to turn a former Agilent factory into  200 acres with “27 acres of interconnected parks with a daily farmer’s market” and hundreds of housing units in the next 18 months. He said 46 percent of the site’s food will come from within 300 miles and some of it will go on sale at Sally Tomatoes’, an on-site market and nightclub with “sustainable Daiquiris.” Forecasts show that such mechanisms should reduce residents’ carbon output by 14.8 tons- more than Searle expects to save through technology.

The predecessor to this project, a British development mischievously named “BedZED,” gives Searle some credence. His organization, BioRegional, also advised that development. At the conference, Searle said that survey respondents who live at BedZED report knowing 19 neighbors by name. “That’s rare, and it’s key to reducing the ecological footprint.”

Jonathan Rose, a visionary developer and project manager of affordable housing, told me something similar a few days earlier- that “occupant behavior,” which he aims to stoke through tenants’ guides- can keep people excited about sustainability. When people know each other, they take walks together. Their kids meet for low-electricity playdates. They fix each other’s caulk and compete on recycling. They host potlucks.

You can call that hippy-dippy, but it sells: the waiting list for Sonoma Mountain Village runs to the thousands. And all the splendid desert isolation in Dubai now looks likely to make junk of a city-state’s finances.

Sustainability in real estate, and in anything else, becomes viable when we share our goods and restrain our take. If you want to call yourself a rebel, you can swallow that truth as a function of free markets. If you want to call yourself an adult, you can find a place to live that rewards common sense.