For years, my company developed neighborhoods in a non-green fashion. One of the things that we did that now seems abhorrent to me is stripping off the top layer of soil. We had some poor justification about the driveways and sidewalks. What we were doing is stripping of the best layer of fertile soil, sometimes, beautiful tilled earth from old farms.

The effect was that new home owners had issues with their lawns not growing, weeds, difficult gardening and generally bad experiences with their land. I have talked to a owner of one of our old homes recently and she said that it took 4 years to recover the lawn and be able to stop using chemicals to treat the soil and grass.

We have recently started to develop new techniques in which we do not strip the soil and do more directed cutting away to form roads, driveways and sidewalks. It takes more work, but we are creating better properties. New homeowners are amazed at the beauty of the lawns on these properties and the lack of weeds. I think eventually most developers will be forced to go this way because it just looks so much nicer.

I think it would be wonderful if developers not only did this but allowed people to construct truly custom homes. I understand the economies of limiting plans and details so that contractors are only building the same thing over and over again, but if you listen to everyone, they really don't like have cookie cutter houses.

But I digress. I love that you are thinking about making the neighborhood a better place again.

Would this increase the cost of the home more than just the obvious benefit to appearances of the property? I know why most developers clear the land. Its for ease of construction. If you make construction more difficult, don't you also add cost to each home?

There would be some minor increases in the cost of each home, but that extra cost to the developer is spread across all the homes in the complex. Building green and developing green aren't severe increases in cost for a whole house and when done from the beginning and in a whole system perspective, the payback for the homeowners is short and well worth it.

Having built many tract homes myself, I have to say that while grading the land makes development so much easier, it does produce some of the ugliest lawns and landscapes after about a year.

I truly do hate those year or so old tract home yards and from what I understand it takes so much chemical fertilizer and herbicides to bring them back that you run the risk of contaminating the aquifer