Residential Developers' Perception of Ecological Alternatives for Exurban and Suburban Development

Abstract

Residential real estate development on the urban fringe affects patterns of forest and agricultural land, terrestrial and aquatic habitats, water quality, and biogeochemical cycling. Because ecological design can support ecosystem services, we investigated whether real estate developers accurately anticipate the market for homes in ecologically designed subdivisions and whether they are likely to employ ecological design in their own firms. We conducted twenty (20) one-on-one ethnographic interviews with leading single-family residential developers in southeast Michigan and compared their responses with preferences of 494 homebuyers who participated in a 2005 image-based web survey (Nassauer et al., 2009). We measured how developers perceive homebuyers’ preferences and how their perceptions compare with homebuyers’ actual preferences. To understand what affects developers’ adoption of ecological design, we also investigated what visible neighborhood landscape characteristics influence developers’ perceptions of profitability and their stated likelihood to develop a project, as well as interactions among these variables and perceived homebuyer preferences. Results suggest that developers understand homebuyers’ relative preferences for different types of subdivision designs, including their preferences for different forms of ecological design over conventional designs. However, developers’ perceptions of the profitability of ecological designs, and their expressed likelihood to adopt ecological design in their own firms is not strongly related to their perceptions of homebuyer preferences, especially for developers in the middle-to-lower priced market segments.