Green Communities in Minnesota

The state of Minnesota has put together an online resource for home buyers, home owners, investors, and developers who want to explore options for buying, building, or upgrading existing homes and communities to be energy self-sufficient using new technologies and advances in design. The site (www.greencommunitiesonline.org) provides links to grant programs, existing green communities in other states, plans and specifications, and much more.

The Minnesota website takes the user on a virtual tour of the Trolley Square green community in Massachussetts to illustrate the process of going green from first thought to completed reality. The tour walks the user through the whole process, and includes everything anyone could ever want to know about going green on a communal level: from planning to networking to finding contractors to actually implementing and building and selling individual units.

While much has been said recently about which alternative fuel system will power the next line of cars and arguments continue over whether hydrogen is economically viable, whether electric cars have the range or the speed people want, and whether bioldiesel is an option at all; relatively little attention has been given to changing the way people live and altering their need for automobiles at all. Planned green communities start out with the goal of being as self-contained as possible. Often everything needed is planned and included within walking distance of all residential units within the community itself, making an automobile more of a luxury than a necessity.

With cities in the industrial belt becoming blighted with urban properties they can't even give away, the foreign investor who figures out how to create self sustaining islands in such areas could end up on top of the game, and gain the undying gratitude of city planners for years to come.

Investing in urban areas of the U.S. will not be cheap and it is not something that can be done on a small scale without enormous risk. But the potential for green regentrification is definitely there. The technologies exist, the plans exist, the possibilities exist, and the real estate itself is becoming laughably cheap. All that is missing from the equation are investors with vision and deep pockets.

Some forward-thinking U.S. states and cities are beginning to realize this, and are actively courting investors and developers willing to commit the time and energy to designing and rehabbing (or building) sustainable urban communities. Already such communities are becoming 'hot' in certain areas of the country among people who like the suburban lifestyle but have an ecological sensibility. Many of these potential buyers want the family-orientation of the suburbs with the community atmosphere of the city: Essentially, a suburb without the isolation and the requisite piggy SUV.

The good news is, we know how to build those. A few actually have been built, and are doing very, very well. The bad news is, such communities aren't cheap to create, and getting from here to there is not easy. But as the economy deteriorates and urban centers and states become hungrier for an ever smaller pool of funds, a few parts of the country are trying to make it easier.

It's hard to put a finger in the wind and discern a trend in the middle of a hurricane, which is kind of what the U.S. housing market feels like today: the perfect, enormous storm. But the storm will end. When it does, lots of empty buildings will be left standing. The foreign investor who know what to do with them and how to do it, is likely to make a nice chunk of change.