Balancing Development & Conservation To Save Nature

After Steve Nygren brought small and large land owners in Chattahoochee Hills on board his development plan, it was time to take the project to the state. Three state foundations and a few private citizens had pledged money to invest in the project, and Governor Barnes was ready to push legislation through to allow Chattahoochee Hill Country to change land rights in the region. When Barnes didn't get re-elected, most of these investments disappeared. One person stayed in, and that money was used to buy the first TDRs from two land owners.

This was only the beginning of Steve’s journey through state government bureaucracy. Each time he wanted to incorporate an environmentally-friendly option, be it for wastewater treatment or putting in roads, he encountered pushback from the various state departments that oversee them. Steve continued to ask questions and pursue what he knew to be right.

Questions Answered

What were the steps you had to take to start building Serenbe?

What are land rights?

How do transfer development rights work?

What is the most photographed place in Serenbe?

Why are chain link fences always around conventional waste water treatment facilities?

Why should we choose to build in a new way?

How is balanced development possible?

Why are government departments so siloed?

Why does Serenbe have unique streetlamps?

People + Organizations Mentioned

Michael Ogden

Reed Hilderbrand

Robert Rausch

Serenbe Development

Turner Foundation

UGA Law Department

Woodruff Foundation

Chattahoochee Hills

Chattahoochee Hill Country Conservancy

Environmental Protection Division

Georgia Association of County Commissioners

Governor Roy Barnes

The Hill Restaurant

Mado

Episode Transcript

Monica Olsen (1s): Hey guys, it's Monica here. I wanted to tell you about a new podcast that I've started with my very good friend, Jennifer Walsh called Biophilic Solutions. Our last season of Serenbe Stories, Building a Biophilic Movement, was so popular that we decided to dedicate an entire podcast to it. Every other week Jennifer and I will sit down with leaders in the growing field of biophilia. We'll talk about local and global solutions to help nurture the living social and economic systems that we all need to sustain future generations. More often than not, nature has the answers. You can find Biophilic Solutions on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and follow us today so you don't miss an episode.

Monica Olsen (41s): All right, now let's get back to Serenbe Stories. Serenbe is a place where people live, work, learn, and play in celebration of life's beauty. And we're here to share the stories that connect residents and guests to each other and to nature. This is Serenbe Stories.

Monica Olsen (1m 24s): All right welcome back to Serenbe Stories. I'm here again with Steve Nygren. How are you, Steve?

Steve Nygren (1m 29s): It's always a good day at Serenbe.

Monica Olsen (1m 31s): Of course, we had so much going on in our last episode that we're kind of going to dig right back into that topic. After you were able to get the local county zoning approval, but really want to find out like what happened next? You finished up the local with the commissioner side in 2002 at the end, got approval for what you called the land use overlay zoning rewrite, but you realized in order to implement that you needed something else. What was that?

Steve Nygren (1m 60s): Well, as we looked at the tools, we realized that transfer developed rights was a key tool. As you have the kind of preservation we were talking about and Georgia at that time did not have a transfer development program that could work for us. And so we were in discussions with the University of Georgia, a law department and land use at the university. And so now we found universities were great cause we were, we were in these forward thinking, cutting ideas that the universities were just anxious to actually explore. And, and so they did all the research and created the model legislation.

Monica Olsen (2m 43s): That's great.

Steve Nygren (2m 44s): Now we realize that this was an entire new subject for a Southern state. Out west in Colorado, for instance, they were used to severing mineral rights, water rights. So they idea of severing development rights was just another right that you could sever from the land. One of the old fellows here said, "What do you mean? I either own the land or I don't what you're trying to tell me." And so this was a whole new concept for our elected officials as well. And so we brought in government leaders and elected officials from both Boulder county, Colorado and Montgomery county, Maryland, because those were the two most successful programs in 2003.

Steve Nygren (3m 33s): And I think continue to still be model programs. And so we wanted our elected officials and our government employees to really hear this from their counterparts in these two states where they worked, because it was, it was a complete concept that there was no basis for in the south. Right? And we did that. And in fact, we were so successful at that, that the association of county commissioners for the state of Georgia saw what an incredible land preservation tool this was because it's an economic model. It isn't, it isn't bringing in a nonprofit to get ahead of development.

Steve Nygren (4m 16s): It actually joins development and preservation together. And so the association of county commissioners for the state of Georgia carried that legislation for us in the 2003 legislative session.

Monica Olsen (4m 29s): And that's a pretty big deal that they would have done that really helped push it forward.

Steve Nygren (4m 33s): It was a huge deal. And then the fact, if, if you're around the state house at this time, you find that people see something that's kind of apple pie and going to sail through. And then they start attaching things that are problematic to the coattails. And so one of the big things is we felt pretty good about the case and it wasn't something that anyone was paying much attention to. It was kind of like, oh, okay. I don't quite understand it, but okay, go ahead. No problem. One of our biggest concern is that we would have coattails attached to it and would complicate the issue about that transfer development rights for the state of Georgia was passed in 2003, we had so inspired government people as to what could happen that governor Barnes pledged a million dollars to a, our bank that would be through the Chattahoochee Hills country Conservancy because the people in his administration saw that this could really be a value for Georgia with that the Woodruff foundation pledged another million dollars.

Monica Olsen (5m 48s): Wow.

Steve Nygren (5m 49s): And two additional foundations in an individual pledged a third million. So we were moving forward, really have a model bank. We started assessing the land and through a grant from the Turner foundation, we were able to engage Georgia Tech and they did a assessment of all parcels of land in the Chattahoochee hill country. And this was on historic significance, agricultural significance, threat view sheds. And there was one, there are five filters they use to prioritize the most desirable land from a public perspective to remove the development rights from.

Steve Nygren (6m 37s): And so this was a, a very key tool. Of course, we, we kept this fairly confidential because what happens is many times land speculators will then jump. Bonds dropped buying the, the land that you, that you want to designate. We found out the reason that governor Barnes was doing that is he wanted it to test it. And that then it could be rolled out in his last year of his second term, as a model for the state. Governor Barnes was not reelected. And thus that complete commitment from the state disappeared.

Steve Nygren (7m 18s): It took, it takes a while to get, you know, we had spent a couple years educating everyone and now suddenly we were having to start over with a new team from the state level, the all three foundations then

Monica Olsen (7m 32s): because of the pledges were tied to the governor. Yeah.

Steve Nygren (7m 37s): That, so they all went away. But the individual who asked to remain anonymous, stayed in. And we were able to use that money to buy the first grouping of transfer, development rights from two separate landowners. And thus walk through all of the local paperwork. You have to have local enabling legislation, which the Fulton county commission immediately gave us once the state law passed and was signed, but there's all the paperwork does this really work like it was laid out to do and you have the tax commissioners in the value of the severed rights and where are they held?

Steve Nygren (8m 20s): What does the deed, how does this attach to the deed? And so we had to work all of that out then. And so that was the next year or so using that.

Monica Olsen (8m 31s): So let's step back to a little bit of what TDRs are, cause we've talked about them in a previous episode, but if you could sort of walk us through what that looks like. So there's a million dollars that's been pledged that sits in this Conservancy that you kind of mentioned as a quote bank that sort of holds the funds. Tell me a little bit, walk me through if I'm a land owner, what happens?

Steve Nygren (8m 58s): In Boulder county and Montgomery county, the local government acts as the bank. And so they, in both cases, they set a specific value on the transfer development right for the purchasing and they use county funds to purchase those dollars. And then the county is the person who sells them. Other models that seem from a financial piece that stood better was to where you have a nonprofit that acts as a bank. And we decided that we would allow the transfer development rights to be valued on market, whatever the market would pay for.

Monica Olsen (9m 48s): Okay I was going to ask you that. That seems fair, right?

Steve Nygren (9m 51s): It seemed like this being in the south, we didn't want to have a heavy government overhand. And so this was, this was more, the free market is what we could get past and have acceptance on. So that was the real reason for doing that. We were able to look then as we were going through a nonprofit and, and, and where we talked to the foundations on what we were doing, the idea is that the nonprofit would buy the development rights when there wasn't a demand for it. Okay. And they were, would be able to hold it until there was a demand. That means a developer is meeting them to, to, to build out and that the price for those who then float up and then this would give a permanent funding source for the non-profit Conservancy.

Steve Nygren (10m 45s): So it, it really, you know, it, it, as long as you have sellers and buyers, and it's actually better that the buyer is a delayed about three years so at the value appreciates up. Then it's a great system.

Monica Olsen (10m 60s): Well, and it also lets the land owner be able to sell at any time and not having to wait for a buyer to be available.

Steve Nygren (11m 7s): Yeah, correct. So you'd have a bank that's just doing collecting. Now, the real advantages that we saw is through development rights, it's different than, than the conservation easements that people are familiar with because that's many times that you're, you're, you're putting an easement on a piece of land that's environmentally sensitive, whether it's it streams or birds or animals and, or the, the trees, there's a lot of environmental reasons that you're wanting on that. With a transfer development right, it just prohibits housing basically.

Steve Nygren (11m 47s): And for our regulation on any land that had been severed, any traditional agricultural use that's permitted under the agricultural zoning could continue on that land. Okay. So, so you could do, it can be equestrian, It can be farming, it can be forestry, it can be recreation, right? All those things still exist. And so as we had educated the community in getting this passed, then we were able to say, we are going to have funds and we're ready to purchase cause we want that set up. And we had 30 landowners that agreed, and we had assessed their land and we were matching them with that study we had from Georgia Tech and these were mostly people with 20 to 50 acres.

Monica Olsen (12m 37s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (12m 37s): So this is where the small land owner who never is able to participate in development. They generally end up selling their land because taxes get so high or they've had an offer and they're forced off the land or the area just changes so much that they didn't want to be here. And so this is the beauty of transfer development rights. It really is a tool for the smaller landowner in a path of development,

Monica Olsen (13m 6s): Well they get to stay on that land.

Steve Nygren (13m 8s): Well, That's right. I mean, that's the beauty Monica, Because the, that landowner then continues to maintain the land and they continue to pay local taxes on the land where in the conservation model, generally the, person holding the conservation has to pay maintenance taxes and an annual assessment to make sure nothing's happening that shouldn't be. And so this is why it's a, it's a great economic model. And it keeps the local landowners, whether they're farmers or whomever, it is, it keeps them on the land. They can also sell it.

Steve Nygren (13m 49s): They, you know, you, you leave it to your heirs, all those things. I think one of the great models is when you many times, the next generation does not love the land or they all don't. And so when you have siblings that are split on, whether you're going to sell it or keep it, this is a good way to have both because you can keep it and you can monetize it for the other heirs.

Monica Olsen (14m 17s): And So if I have 50 acres and 40 of them, I, you know, transfer my development rights on those, but I keep the other 10 for myself, or my kids are willing to build on that. The 10 I'm still paying the straight taxes on whatever the typical taxes, but the other 40, right. That changes because right, there's a, what has that also helps me out if I, from our landowner, right?

Steve Nygren (14m 40s): In the Metropolitan area, the tax appraisers appraise it at the highest and best use. So if you're in the path of potential development, it's always praised developable land. If you, if you removed the development rights, then it only reverts back to pure agricultural land and it cannot be valued at that high rate.

Monica Olsen (15m 3s): So that's beneficial as well to the land.

Steve Nygren (15m 5s): Then that re that reduces your, your taxes.

Monica Olsen (15m 9s): And we saved the land.

Steve Nygren (15m 11s): You saved the land, the land. Yeah. It's a quality of life. And then the concept was, and Serenbe's proving it now, that that protected land would be a value. And this is, I think I mentioned in one of the others that I use, the urban land Institute study on golf course lots and the value they were bringing. So here we're bringing farm land and forestry land and showing that it has the same or greater value than those golf course lots we're bringing in.

Monica Olsen (15m 48s): Well in everything that we're reading these days is talking about nature and forests and gardens, and how just stepping out into them for 25 minutes a week brings you health benefits. So it's like one more reason that we should be saving all this land. It shouldn't just be, I mean, economic model is fantastic and maybe we lead with that. But I do think that,

Steve Nygren (16m 9s): Well what I love is that we sense that clearly I sense that, and that's why when our children were very small, we moved out here, but we're talking 18 years ago and none of those studies were there, right? So we were really purely looking at that economic model of value. I think I'm going to be very excited at the day that, that we really can understand our true costs and our true benefits. So when you put energy and I think we're at that point, now, the people are understanding that in an environment built building things like geothermal and solar, you actually do save a lot of cashflow.

Steve Nygren (17m 3s): so even if it costs you more. I where we have not gotten and where I hope we're headed is understanding that we have lower medical costs if we live in, in clean housing with fresh air and non-chemical environments. And if we can put all those monetary savings from energy and the health to understand, we need to build better places for people to live so that we're not putting that money in non-healthy non-sustainable areas.

Monica Olsen (17m 41s): Right. Well, and that leads me to another question, you know, after you got the approval on the local level approval on the state level, you were like full speed ahead. All right. We, we, we think we've got everything done, now, we're going to build this place, but you still kept running into sort of policy issues or silos. And this kind of goes a little bit to what you're saying that, and I think it is hard and economic model, and we have to lead with that sometimes to get the funding and to really get the attention of the markets, but you kept running into,

Steve Nygren (18m 15s): Well, I'm, I'm clearly an optimist and I was a naive developer by, by default. And so I just knew the fact that we had really created something amazing. The editorials were just praising us on this large land use change in zoning rewrite, and, and now transfer developed rights. We were so progressive. I just knew everyone was gonna love us, of course, and having borrowed money to expand our restaurants.

Steve Nygren (18m 57s): And I was sure I was never going to go into debt again of course, but I knew this was such a brilliant idea that several investors were certainly going to line up and be happy to take a piece of the pie. And that's when we created these wonderful boxes that showed our tagline is that we were creating a community of people in a community of trees. And we created commissioned various artists to do hand sketches because we wanted to let everyone know that this was going to be something very special. And so I used those to leave at people's offices. I mailed a couple to investors in Chicago that I knew were going to be are in New York and Chicago that I knew were going to be very excited.

Steve Nygren (19m 43s): And now these many years later, they've shared with me how hard they laughed at this idea. So, you know, we, we were, we were way out front, but when I was so in the passion of it was there, it, it felt we were very current, but financial institutions really want something that is proven and no one was doing, this is part of why we we've found out. And many of the financial people, when I had to explain what we were doing, they would ask questions like, you mean those straw bale house communities.

Monica Olsen (20m 19s): Right.

Steve Nygren (20m 20s): And, you know, in, in 2000, 2002, we still had an image that environmental meant a lot of the things in the seventies that had come out, the experimental things. So, and I realized that here we were in, in the capital of the south, That my, my words and the ideas that I was so excited about, were communicating a very different image that I had about what we were doing, but along the line, Ray Anderson and others had pushed me through that threshold of passion.

Steve Nygren (21m 5s): And, and at this point I felt I had to do it right. And so I was not going to let money, stop me if you will. And I had been very bullish about Midtown Atlanta in the seventies and bought land there for my restaurants, for our corporate headquarters. Another land that, that I thought Midtown was gonna even be more of an art center than, than it was a, especially on the Southern end. So I was buying that property there. And then in downtown Decatur to go into Decatur, the only reason I was willing to do the restaurant is, is if we could buy the building.

Steve Nygren (21m 47s): So we had a, a multi-use building on the edge of Decatur. And so I finally found a banker who was very interested in what we're doing because he lived out in Madison, east of Atlanta, and they were worried about the same things with urban sprawl. And he brought a group of landowners here to understand what we had done with our zoning and our transfer development rights. And so I said, by the way, we want to prove this works, but nobody wants to give me money or invest in it. And he then asked his banker to meet with us. So because of that introduction, they did agree to loan me money. But once I looked at the papers and what they wanted, I realized that they, they were levering to chain my holdings about four to one.

Monica Olsen (22m 31s): Oh gosh.

Steve Nygren (22m 32s): So they were doing it just because they had been asked to do it, but they really thought they were going to be taking a lot of property back in exchange for it is I realized, but it, it gave us the resources to put the infrastructure in for the first 40 lots. And so, as I crossed that barrier, then I thought, wow, I'm ready now. I've got all my zoning. We've gotten the, the, the, the rewrites. So I can do things like live works, and I can put commercial across from residential, the things that we'd had in the thirties, but zoning laws across The country had been so sanitized that you couldn't do any of those things anymore.

Steve Nygren (23m 12s): And now I had the so we're ready to go, right? And of course, there are several checkboxes that I was learning that you had to have before you could actually go. Now we had found our civil engineers and we had all the construction drawings for the, the roads. And we'd gone through all those battles about grades, but the Hills I'd have to cut down to give the required grades and that was going to cause stream buffer problems. And that's where I found out that a lot of the regulatory communities were so siloed that they did not realize the unintended consequences that one requirement did to the other.

Steve Nygren (23m 54s): For instance, the minimum grade, this required for rows require a lot of Hills to be torn down.

Monica Olsen (23m 60s): And what's the minimum grade?

Steve Nygren (24m 1s): So it's 12%.

Monica Olsen (24m 2s): And give me an example.

Steve Nygren (24m 3s): So for an example, where the hill restaurant and the office building is that entire hill was required to be cut down basically to where it was a very gentle slope. So that the road next to it would be very gentle. We got a variance to make that 14%. And if you actually checked it it's more than that. But I realized that if we were to cut the hill down, it was going to take away all the trees and the natural habitat and the underbrush that would cause incredible runoff to the stream below us.

Monica Olsen (24m 49s): Yeah. There's a beautiful stream down that hill.

Steve Nygren (24m 51s): Yeah. So if we were to cut the hill to that proper grade, we'd have to grade all these trees. Many of them that are still standing now today at 40 and 50 feet. They would have all been taken away. Right.

Monica Olsen (25m 2s): Oh that's interesting. But you don't think about it as, as a general consumer you don't think about that. You're like, oh, okay, great change. The grade never deal. But

Steve Nygren (25m 9s): Even the consequence departments that look at the grades on roads and how roads have to be built, don't look at what it does to the forest station or to the streets. And so this is where I realized the silos in regulation that we're not understanding the cause and effect of what they were requiring. You know, it makes logical sense what they want to do for one thing, but then they're not looking at all, all the other things. So this is my aha. No, no wonder we have places that look like they do. And no wonder we have some of the problems we have because I was at a position at that point.

Steve Nygren (25m 50s): I, I, you know, I owned all the land free and clear, and while I had this loan, I had resources that if the bank called the whole loan, I was going to be okay.

Monica Olsen (26m 2s): Right.

Steve Nygren (26m 2s): So I could fight. And if I was told they were going to close me down for two, two months, or if it's going to take me an extra three months to get a permit, I was willing to take that time where most developers already have the interest clock ticking on the land, on the planning and all those things. So while I had a bank loan, I hadn't drawn down a dollar yet because I hadn't the first bulldozer hadn't started. So I was debt-free at the point that I was at this threshold of do I, do I delay the project to get this worked out? And I decided to delay so that we could work these things out.

Monica Olsen (26m 46s): It's one example. And I know that the wastewater treatment system is another example. And I don't know if you want to like, get into that.

Steve Nygren (26m 54s): Happy to. I mean, there's a series of things. So the wastewater treatment was another one of those boxes I had to check before I could really roll because you had to show, you know, how you were going to do your wastewater at the, at our very first charrette that the Rocky Mountain Institute facilitated, John Todd, who's a famous person, anyone in an engineering dealing with water would, it would know the name. And, and he's the creator of the living machine, which really looks at a lot of the issues on how to really handle our waste versus moving it through these huge pipes, through our developed areas, into these chemically induced plans that then discharge treated fluent with,

Monica Olsen (27m 45s): Otherwise known as sewage.

Steve Nygren (27m 46s): Sewage. Yeah. Yes, yes. And so John Todd came back then and connected us with Michael Ogden from New Mexico. And they did a lot of these treatment plans out west, where people are really concerned on water and how you reuse it and minimize and third world countries. And so they came and designed our wastewater treatment plan. It was the first of its kind in the Southeast that is, is permitted federally because it's, it's, it's actually a complete wastewater system. And so we had to deal with EPD and populated their, their libraries to really explain this.

Steve Nygren (28m 29s): And then finally, I'd gotten news that the permit was ready. And when I picked up the permit and started looking at it, I saw there the big stamp that it required a chain link fence, which was not on our drawings. And I came back in and said, "whoa, chain link, fence, why?" And he said, "well, it's a wastewater treatment plant, all wastewater treatment plants have to have it." And I said, "okay, but there's nothing, there's no standing water, there's no chemicals, why, why would we want to prevent somebody from coming into this area?" And they just looked at me like, "yeah, yeah. Well, it's a wastewater treatment." You're just talking, you know, circling language. So we had to go back up and get that requirement removed.

Steve Nygren (29m 12s): And at the time we were working with Reed Hildebrand, the, the architects out of Boston. And so I gave them all the engineering documents from Michael Ogden and asked them to make it beautiful. And they said, well, if you're trying to make a statement, let's put the, a boardwalk right over the treatment center. And so that's why you see the wastewater treatment center here with a boardwalk over the treatment cells. And it's beautiful. And most people do not realize that it's our wastewater treatment plant. And in fact, it's prom season and you'll see prom kids lined up on it.

Steve Nygren (29m 52s): You see many wedding pictures lined up on the boardwalk and the trees. Family pictures are taken for Christmas cards. And so  one of our most photographed areas is our wastewater treatment center.

Monica Olsen (30m 4s): And I love that. I absolutely love that. Great.

Steve Nygren (30m 7s): And one of our more expensive homes faces the wastewater treatment center. And so that, that's a good example. I think of the things that we tend to fence off and hide. If we really embrace a more responsible way, development is not something we should be hiding. And in fact, here, we made it beautiful. So that it's, it's a real asset in many ways.

Monica Olsen (30m 36s): So it seemed like there were a lot of laws and restrictions, you know, all along the way that you had to sort of muddle through if that's the right word and the wastewater treatment system, I don't think was any, was different. So tell me a little bit about sort of the challenges you ran into when you're developing that.

Steve Nygren (30m 55s): I was amazed at the roadblocks that I faced. And I learned anyone in the field, whether it was architects, whether it's engineers were generally beaten down on what they couldn't do. And it really removes a lot of the inspiration of creativity because it's just an automatic, oh, we can't do that. Right. And our streetlights were one of those things, as we were looking at all the books and possible streetlights, we could decide, they tended to all look the same that I had seen in one place or another. So I said, "well, why don't we do our own?" And of course the first response, "oh, you can't do that. " And so I use my, my, my usual "well will show me the language so that I understand it."

Steve Nygren (31m 38s): Many times I wanted to know the language so I could figure out who I had to go to change the law. Because we'd been doing that as well. Well, it turns out there really wasn't a law that said I couldn't do it. We just had to go through various certifications that things had had to be done. Right. And so with that is when we commissioned the artist, Robert Rausch to do our street lights. And those first street lights were a cast in the local Foundry, right over the, on the state line. And so we have these wonderful streetlights inspired from artists that really speak to what we're doing here.

Monica Olsen (32m 13s): Well and each neighborhood it has its own street lamp. And I know that in the newest neighborhood Mado has a really modern, fabulous one. So in order to, and again, we can throw these photos onto the website, so you can see, but that one, so, so now that you knew that there are there just like five things that you have to do in order to follow the rules?

Steve Nygren (32m 34s): It's not that bad. And you just have to, you know, there, there are certain things. And also we we've done that. Now we have this unique streetlights that's made it special. And there's so many things like that I think that, that, that create more average places than we need because we don't ask why right? Today, I'm I find time for any university that wants to bring a class here because they need to stay inspired. And, and they need to go into the working world and not be beat down by the rules of my generation.

Steve Nygren (33m 15s): But to, to keep an open mind as they move into the industry because I think we can agree what we have doesn't necessarily work where we're a sicker, more depressed, more resource consuming period of time than we've ever had. And so I'm hoping that the, the young people or people of any age really can step out of this rut. We might think we're in a groove of development. And I think it's a rut, and it's a rut that's taking down us down to a non-sustainable economic or health place.

Monica Olsen (33m 52s): I agree. Well, it's probably a great place to sort of wrap it up for this episode. Really interesting. And we'll throw a pictures up and links on the website to get a little bit more in the weeds. Cause we talk a lot about very detailed things. Next episode, we're going to talk about what does it take to build it? So thank you again for your time. Steve, we'll talk again next week.

Steve Nygren (34m 17s): Thank you, Monica. Looking forward to the next conversation.

Monica Olsen (34m 20s): Thank you for listening to Serenbe Stories. New episodes are available on Mondays. You can subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts. For more details visit our website, serenbestories.com.