Community connection

On a Saturday in November a little more than a year ago, Debra Schultz and Penn Fix heard about 112 acres of land for sale on Spokane County’s West Plains. Within a week, they’d made an offer.

They’d been talking to friends about creating a community of like-minded people, who shared common values, including environmental awareness and a desire to live among friends. Eventually, three other families signed onto the idea of building homes in a planned eight-house development on the land. The four families began holding regular meetings to address development regulations and get to know each other better.

In August, Spokane County’s hearing examiner approved the Palisades Meadows cluster housing development. The four families are planning to develop eight home sites on 14 acres of land, with an average lot size of 1.7 acres. The homes will be located on a single private road, less than a quarter-mile long. The remaining 98 acres will be preserved for wildlife, with perhaps a community garden.

“We are not developers,” said Schultz, a seventh-grade science teacher at Chase Middle School. “We are private citizens who are creating a little community.”

And in the process, they’re going down a path that can be daunting for private citizens. Learning the ins and outs of road construction, storm water runoff, drainage systems, water, sewer and utility line installation, wetland studies and a myriad of other issues can become a full-time job. Though they hired civil engineer Dave Wall of Thomas, Dean and Hoskins, they’ve also taken on much of the work and research themselves.

Doing so required splitting up the work. Schultz and Tim Sweet, who owns a landscaping business with his wife, Elaine, took the lead on development regulations. Bob and Catherine Oviatt are taking a class on forest management at Washington State University Extension. The families met regularly to flesh out neighborhood covenants and deliver updates on topics like the benefits of concrete walls, drought-hardy plants, and renewable energy sources. They’re calling for homes to be built with environmentally friendly, and fire-safe, building materials.

Aside from the Sweets and Schultz, who has a background in soil science, none of the group members has experience related to land development. They are professionals: a jeweler, university professors, a school teacher and social worker and an information technology specialist.

“Finding the land served as a catalyst for making it real and giving us something to work toward,” said Mike Hendryx, who is planning to build a home at Palisades Meadows with his wife, Melissa Ahern. They plan to move from their condominium in Browne’s Addition. “We want something that’s going to be energy efficient, something that’s going to put a small footprint on the land.”

The land lends itself to slowing down. Big fir trees rise from a sloping hillside, framing the view across an expansive meadow that abuts Riverside State Park. To the south, aspens grow in and around a small wetland. Elk, moose, cougars and wild turkeys roam the land, which is only 10 minutes from downtown Spokane.

“This is an opportunity to slow down and build a community,” Schultz said. “Neighborhoods are really important. People don’t take care of each other anymore. People don’t take time.”

The desire to create a minimal impact on the land led the families to take advantage of a relatively new county planning policy that allows the clustering of homes in rural zones. As long as applicants abide by the permissible number of homes per acre for the entire parcel, they can place the homes closer together and preserve the remaining land for future development or for conservation. Up to 11 homes would be allowed at Palisades Meadows, but the group decided instead to plat eight lots, clustered on a 14-acre parcel, and preserve the remaining 98 acres as open space.

Since the cluster housing regulations went into effect in January 2002, said Tammy Jones, a Spokane County planner, the county has probably received a “little less than two dozen applications” for clustered development. And, she said, Palisades Meadows is a little bit different than the others because the applicant is not dividing up the land solely to sell to someone else.

That’s been refreshing for Wall, the civil engineer serving as the group’s consultant. Most of his clients who are new to development want to maximize their profit on a piece of land by building as many homes as possible on lots as small as possible, he said. That’s not the case with this group, he said.

“They’re really trying to look at the site and build something that’s going to fit in the area, have the least impact on the site and give them the best product,” Wall said. “That was a nice change for me. I’m not being asked to do something to squeeze everything you can out of a site.”

Wall said developments that try to put in as many homes as possible frequently run into trouble with neighbors concerned about the impact on their neighborhood. Legal challenges can delay the time frame of a potential development by months, he said.

In the case of Palisades Meadows, the Palisades Neighborhood Association supports the cluster development, said Robbi Castleberry, the association’s past president.

“We’re really fortunate they’re the ones that ended up buying it,” Castleberry said. “As it did not come into public ownership, the best case is that it be purchased by conservation-minded people who cherish open space.”

Though they’re planning fewer lots than what would be allowed, group members are hoping to recoup their investment in the property through the sale of the remaining four lots. One group member said the hardest part of doing this development has been the debt he’s incurred while waiting for the additional lots to become available for sale. The families have not decided upon prices for the remaining lots.

The families also acknowledge that it may be a challenge to retain the goals of their community as they sell lots to strangers. Though a 1.7-acre lot in the country may be appealing to many, the Palisades Meadows families want to insure those who buy them share their values.

“How do you market those ?” Tim Sweet asked. “How do you see if those people have common values? I don’t know that we have our answer yet.”

They view their planned development as an “intentional community,” part of a growing national movement, in which groups of people join together to form a community with shared value systems. A recent New York Times story highlighted the nation’s first self-planned housing development for the elderly. It emphasized the group’s desire to grow old “on their own terms.”

In the case of Palisades Meadows, the four families have in common a value system that calls for minimal impact on the earth in creation of housing.

The neighborhood covenants should help protect those shared values. The group is limiting the size of the homes, calling for the use of environmentally friendly building materials and encouraging homes that fit in well with the natural environment. They’re planning a community garden, planning to landscape with drought-hardy plants and are encouraging the use of renewable energy sources.

“When people read those covenants, they’re either going to know it’s something for them or it’s not,” Hendryx said, adding that their plans already have attracted attention from other potential landowners. “I don’t think we’re going to have the slightest trouble selling four more lots.”