Happy Nice Mall

When online travel giant Expedia Group opened its $900 million Seattle headquarters in 2019, the 40-acre waterfront campus showcased countless possibilities: a bike path, a soccer field, and a beach filled with driftwood logs to sit amidst the sounds of the surf.

It also has well-cured impurities.

Landscape architects from Surfacedesign in San Francisco focused on extensive habitat restoration for the project, which was at one point a former industrial estate in Elliott Bay with two piers filled with garbage. This meant soil replacement at a depth of meters to facilitate the seeding of native plants, grasses and coastal meadows.

The revision required months of work, a soil scientist to help establish a microbiome and nine distinct soil profiles, and the use of “compost tea blends”, a type of organic liquid fertilizer that restores soil nutrients without chemical fertilizers.

Josh Khanna, director of real estate services at Expedia, said the idea was to avoid a “manicured, mulched look.” The new headquarters is nothing more than a “small corporate concrete bunker.”

“Suddenly there has been a big shift for customers who are hungry for a big vision,” said James A. Lord, co-founder of Surfacedesign. “They intuitively know that there is more to be done, that it is a transition from being just a convenience.”

Developers have long used open spaces and nature as outlets for their projects, such as planned communities that focus on golf courses, developments built in and around nature reserves, and a new trend known as farmland integrating subdivisions with working farms.

Increasingly, developers are not only aiming to protect nature, but also promoting their role in restoring it. This shift addresses changing attitudes towards connecting with nature, perceptions of being a sustainable corporate citizen, and the paradox of seeing real estate as a tool for restoration.

“People no longer have to use the word ‘sustainability’ because it is expected,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy group. “People expect some level of performance from their landscape. There is power in a place waiting to be unlocked.”

Prominent projects in the works include visions of restoring or recreating natural habitats. For example, the River Ring, a pair of high-rise apartments on the Brooklyn waterfront designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group and James Corner Field Operations, will contain tide pools and salt marshes that provide a place to forage for black-crowned night herons and snowy egrets.

Across the city in the Rockaways, Arverne East will include 35 acres of restored waterfront and nature preserve in a long abandoned parking lot. A developer in Utah has proposed dredging a lake to create a chain of 34 islands with a total of 18,000 acres, including some reserved for an animal habitat.

Matt Norris, director of the Building Healthy Places Initiative at the Urban Land Institute, said a number of trends are making these projects more valuable. For residents, the health benefits of accessing the outdoors are particularly evident during the pandemic. For developers, offices and homes next to parks can add up to 20 percent more value, and the added green space can help projects gain community support and even unlock zoning incentives.

Bonnie Campbell, principal of Two Trees, the Brooklyn developer behind the project, said the park and swamp in the River Ring is a bid to create a “worldwide, desirable place” that helps in a contentious approval and authorization process. . New York has invested extensive resources over the past decade to provide public access to the East River.

But creating a tidal swamp where you can touch the water has immeasurable benefits, he said.

“Something we heard over and over again when we reached out to neighbors and stakeholders was the value of getting back to nature, feeling like you were somewhere other than New York City, and connected to the water,” he said. .

For cities, restored nature helps increase fair access to parks, something they cannot tackle as aggressively as they would like without special support. Coastal parks help make coasts less susceptible to rising water and storm surges.

“The more of this, the better for restoring habitat, because we still have a long way to go in terms of protecting habitat and managing stormwater,” said Sean Dixon, executive director of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance, a Seattle nonprofit conservation organization. “I see a lot of developments with splashing parcels doing this on the docks.”

But evaluating restoration efforts that focus on a system as complex as nature can be difficult, said Bethanie Walder, executive director of the Society for Ecological Restoration, a global nonprofit alliance.

The tool the organization uses to measure recovery efforts, ecological rescue wheelFactors with a broad scope of benefits, including animal population recovery and resilience, work in holistic, general terms, but without measurable features.

“Not everything is greenwashing and not everything is restoration,” he said. “We have to think about it separately. We have to figure out how to live with nature, not destroy nature.”

Restored or abandoned commercial or industrial sites, such as the Arverne East project in Rockaways, seek to sue for developments with an ecological mission. The 116-acre oceanfront site is being developed by L+M Development Partners, Bluestone Organization and Triangle Equities and will include 1,650 apartments, townhouses and bungalows; commercial; and solar and geothermal power generation.

The development team, made up of certified arborists, gardeners and ecologists, as well as the Natural Resources Group of the New York Department of Parks and Recreation, meticulously evaluated and replanted the site. Originally a rebellious herb bush that had to be explored with a machete in hand, the new sanctuary will soon bloom with native trees and other plants.

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say this place is wild,” said Laura Starr, the project’s chief landscape designer and director of Starr Whitehouse. “But the idea of ​​conservation is that it’s there to protect natural habitats or flora and fauna.”

Developers may not be able to measure exactly how these new landscapes benefit the wider environment, but they will quickly realize how costly such green bona fide projects are in terms of maintenance. Many are required by law to include nature-based features in projects and maintain it as if they were managing a city park. However, part of the long-term value of more restorative projects that often go beyond the requirements is lower maintenance costs: Native plants in a more natural environment require less costly maintenance, while more resilient landscapes are subject to less long-term degradation.

The developers at the River Ring, for example, believe that more natural shorelines filled with plants and natural beaches rather than concrete curtains will better withstand water and wave damage.

“Instead of this man-made curtain infrastructure that we have to constantly maintain, we hope to create a riparian edge that supports itself with ecology,” said Ms. Campbell of Two Trees.

The same change is expected on the Expedia campus. As perennials and beehives slowly settle, the environment will begin to stabilize and much of the campus will become self-sustaining, if not self-sustaining.

“This doesn’t mean that life will unfold as fast as you want and in the way you expect it to,” said Mr. Dixon of the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance. “For places that have been industrially robbed for 100 years, that’s hard to pinpoint. But there is tremendous value for these large facilities that are redeveloping properties to grow or go home and provide community amenities like this.”