Can Real-Estate Developers Be “Green”?: Sprawl, Environmental Rhetoric, and Land Use Planning in a New Jersey Community

Abstract

Despite their immense influence in shaping landscapes and determining environmental impacts, American real-estate developers have rarely been a focus for study. This article tries to remedy this oversight, at least in part, through an ethnographic study of real-estate developers in an affluent New Jersey suburb. It focuses in particular on the environmental practices of real-estate developers who build for environmentally interested customers in environmentally concerned communities. Under these circumstances it becomes reasonable to ask whether real-estate developers can be “green.” The answer to this question depends on how one measures “green.” Developers who employ the “greenest” rhetoric preserve the most trees and donate the most open space to towns, but they also build the largest homes, thereby doing the most damage to the environment.

Keywords:

• development exactions
• land use
• real-estate developers
• regional planning
• sprawl

Acknowledgments

Karen O'Neill and the anonymous reviewers for this journal made valuable comments on previous drafts of this article. Funds from National Science Foundation grants SES0523309 and SES0624023 supported this research.

Notes

The “Highlands” region represents an eastern extension of the Appalachian Mountains and includes parts of four states, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. When we refer to “the Highlands” in the text, we mean the New Jersey portion of the region.

As of fall 2007, the Highlands Act still had not been fully implemented.

The term “built out” refers to lands that do not contain, given the current zoning regulations, undeveloped tracts of land (Conway and Lathrop 2005). If the local land use regulations were to change to permit denser development, then the community would no longer be built out.

The list of developers was derived from a list of site plan applications that had been submitted. The Planning Department in Rocky Ridge only had digital records of these going back about 10 years.