Residential Real Estate
 
Premium content from Houston Business Journal - by Jennifer Dawson

 

The 1,800-acre Springwoods Village master-planned community will be a uniquedevelopment in the Houston area — and not just because it’s next to the newly announced 385-acre corporate campus of Exxon Mobil Corp.

Springwoods Village is incorporating sustainable development concepts into its design that will touch all aspects of development, said project for developer Coventry Development Corp. in New York.

The $10 billion Springwoods Village will include 8.5 million square feet of office space, 1.2 million square feet of retail space, more than 500 hotel rooms and 4,500 to 5,000 homes.

The community is south and west of the Exxon site, on the west side of Interstate 45 near the Hardy Toll Road.

Springwoods Village’s overall development standards will require residential and commercial developers who build there to significantly reduce energy and water usage in their structures. Regulations will apply to the initial design, construction process and longterm operation.

For example, the developer wants to use low-energy LED lighting for streetlights.

“CenterPoint is just starting to investigate using those for street lights,” Simon said.“We’re working on a prototype program.”

The development standards may be an eye-opener for residential builders, said Simon.

While some have implemented green elements into previous projects, they have only scratched the surface, he said. 

“It will be a big shock to homebuilders,” Simon predicted. “We’re trying to elevate the sustainability of these merchant-built homes.”

A dozen or so homebuilders will be invited by Coventry in late August to compete for the chance to build in the community. About five homebuilders are expected to be selected by the end of the year, though Simon has said commercial development will take place before residential.

The Houston office of San Francisco-based Gensler architecture firm is still working on the development standards.

“They’re going to push people from what they’re used to doing,” Simon said.

The ultimate goal is to integrate the community with the area’s natural ecosystem, much like The Woodlands did in the 1970s, according to Design Workshop, the land planner and urban designer.

Denver-based Design Workshop studied the area to see which way drainage naturally occurs through the land and forest, then integrated the development pattern around that. The infrastructure will incorporate a new approach to storm water called low impact design, a project segment being handled by Houston-based Walter P Moore engineering.

Storm water will be transported through natural drainage swales to detention ponds, being cleaned by plants along the way. It’s a cleaner, more natural way for storm water to travel than through a pipe that collects sediment, Simon said.

Jim MacRae, firm principal and landscape architect. The trees are the project’s art,Charles Penland which can be dangerous — to take water away from roadways, they will use ditches filled with rocks, which will allow the water to seep beneath and also filter out sediment.

Penland said the firm has not implemented this concept to this extent before for roadways.

“We’ve done similar things on commercial sites,” he said. “We’ve not really done it on anything of this scale.”

Houston’s Costello Inc. is designing the waste water system, which will use reclaimed wastewater for landscape irrigation and amenity ponds.

“You’re reducing your demand for potable water dramatically,” Simon said.

Some of the sustainable concepts in Springwoods Village are new; some are not. I wonder if this will be a sign of things to come for future master-planned communities and residential developments?

.NEW GREEN CONCEPTS FOR:

• streetlights

• drainage

• landscape irrigation

• storm water