Serenbe Stories

Building A Community From Scratch

October 14, 2019 Serenbe Season 1 Episode 6
Serenbe Stories
Building A Community From Scratch
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Steve Nygren dives into how to actually begin the build process when you're starting from nothing. He knew he had to save his backyard and had worked with his neighbors to go to the state to make the laws work for Chattahoochee Hills, but he didn't yet know he was going to create the Serenbe community. That realization was never a moment, but rather over a gradual course of time.

Questions Answered

How do you build a neighborhood from scratch?

If not you, who? If not now, when?

When did Steve Nygren realize he was actually going to build a neighborhood to save his land?

How did Phill Tabb get involved in Serenbe?

Did Steve get to include everything he wanted to in Serenbe?

Why were granite curbs so difficult to get?

What goes into putting something like power into a new community?

How do we reduce our energy demands so we're not using up our resources?

How does EarthCraft differ from LEED certification?

What is a Gabion bridge?

Why do third-world countries have more environmentally-friendly stormwater routing than the United States?

Where does stormwater go?

People + Organizations Mentioned

Farmers Almanac

Proctor Creek

Robert Marvin

Dr. Phillip Tabb

Southeastern Engineering, Inc

Southface

USA Today

Atlanta BeltLine

Biophilic Leadership Summit

Blue Eyed Daisy Bakeshop

Bosch

Bruce Ferguson

EarthCraft Certification

Chad Epple

Teresa Epple

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 25s):
Steve, welcome back to Serenbe Stories. We're at our next episode. And our episode is going to focus on how to build a neighborhood from scratch. Can't be that hard. Right? One of the conversations we were having is we hear a lot about sort of, I don't know if it was a fateful day or evening when you sat down with Ray C Anderson and he is known for in his book and in his life of how the work that he did was pushing himself through a threshold of saying, "if not you who, and if not now, when" and he asked that same question to you, and you've always told me that was the moment that you decided you had to go do this thing. But the, actually the question really want to ask you is, is that the moment that you decided or was that when you realized you needed to go save the land?

Monica Olsen (2m 13s):
And so the question I want to ask you is when did you realize it wasn't just about saving the 40,000 acres and all this land around you, but you're like, I'm going to build a neighborhood on my land. Like, how did you, when did, that seems like a really big decision. How did that come to you?

Steve Nygren (2m 31s):
Well, when we think about the moment or thinking about 60 seconds and that 60 second moment never happened, but it was over that gradual course of time. And suddenly I realized how far I'd come down, that path of willingness to actually use our own land to develop. So this began, which I've talked about, it was to save my backyard. I started buying it. You know, that's a normal thing where what can I do?

Steve Nygren (3m 11s):
I'm going to buy it, I'm going to control it. And, and that was the first improvement. And so the first aha was I couldn't buy enough to really save us. And, and that's what I was talking to Ray Anderson. And so then he brought these thought-leaders in and, and I felt that that was not doing anything except frustrating me looking back. I can see that was the next moment that that was the moment of my first thought process. That a lot of things are broken and how, I guess my personalities of fixer, you know, it's to, well, why is it broken?

Monica Olsen (4m 2s):
Right?

Steve Nygren (4m 3s):
And so I was frustrated at that time, I realized that started those questions in my mind. And then I think at that point I was thinking, well, I could build, because I think I've talked about the Ryan Gainey piece, that he was wanting to develop a street to show a better way to do this. And because Ryan was such a character, I tried helping him find land at least 10 miles away from me. But then when I felt that the development pressure was there, one of my first thoughts was, well, if I'm going to have houses in my backyard, I'd rather have houses inspired by Ryan Gainey than a tract builder, right?

Steve Nygren (4m 46s):
So there were these little pieces that were, that were landing at various places in my consciousness, and then drew my frustration on all these specialists that I had been introduced to the Rocky Mountain Institute, whether it was water, whether it was, you know, agriculture, that Ray suggested I go visit the Rainey's outside Chicago in Prairie crossing. And of course they in an effort to change and to preserve their family land, they were the first place I'd seen the ratio of develop 30% and save the majority of it.

Steve Nygren (5m 29s):
So that, that was my first piece to that. And that is when I said, we're not thinking large enough, we need to bring the bigger community together. And as I was stepping through that idea of just trying to bring it at this point, I wasn't going to be the leader. And through that process, I realized, well, if I'm saying it's so good, I need to develop my own land to show us an example. And so you can see them moments added up. And, you know, I, I think I remember one of those, those days, in fact, it's, it's captured to a degree with the USA today, story that they did on it, because they had heard about us and, and when the first bulldozer rolled up and they came out and, and I think that was one of my first times that I had realized the moments had, had added up and, oh my God, I was going to really be doing this development.

Steve Nygren (6m 29s):
Although there was another moment. I think the sobering moment when I realized I was going to do this and that I was going to have to borrow money to do it was the dinner I had with the girls one night. And it was, it was realizing that I come through a period of seven years where I was very financially secure because I sold the company. Right. We could do anything we wanted. And I was in that wonderful period. And suddenly the banks were requiring me to put all of that up as collateral. And so I had moved money into accounts for the girls' education.

Steve Nygren (7m 10s):
And at dinner, I talked to them that, that if we were really going to move forward, to be an example of what could happen, that we were going to have to leverage all of our holdings and all of our income from real estate. And I won their blessings. And I remember that was a really big deal to me that in a course, you know, they said, sure, dad, and as they've talked about it now, it's not quite as monumental in their minds. Because dad wants to build houses and you said, okay, okay. But they went along. But for me, that was, that was a sobering moment that we were going to do it.

Steve Nygren (7m 52s):
And we were going to financially put ourselves on the line. Then I remember when the bulldozers actually showed up to start taking trees down where we had staked these roads that we had walked that, oh my God, this was happening. But Monica, even today, there's many times, especially when we have visitors here and I'm giving a tour and, and I just go down on the streets and I see what was here. And I think how on earth did I ever think we could really do this? Oh my God. So, so I still have those moments that, oh, wow. You know? And then yeah, when I have the stories from a family, how their life has changed, or we have a developer or a policymaker, like, like the biophilic leadership summit, it's just here.

Steve Nygren (8m 43s):
And these were leaders from various. And by being on this land and seeing, I mean that this, this isn't complicated. That I realized what a big deal this is turning out to be. So those moments are constantly happening to me. Oh my God. And it's constantly pushing us to do the next thing to fight, to make sure the next thing happens.

Monica Olsen (9m 5s):
And do more, yeah. So how do you build a neighborhood from scratch? So now we now understand sort of all those little pieces that came together. I mean, what do you do? Do you hire an architect or a land planner or a consultant or whatever, and what do you do? You stake the land and bring some bulldozers in, but somebody had to do some planning. So what's the first step?

Steve Nygren (9m 28s):
First step when we were doing this is okay, who is going to be the land planner? You know, who are all the people you need now? Because we were leading with environmental, the number one and environmental land planner was a man named Robert Marvin.

Monica Olsen (9m 45s):
Robert Marvin. Okay.

Steve Nygren (9m 47s):
And Mr. Marvin lived in South Carolina was known for planning some of the major conservation, such as Brays Island. He did the restoration of the waterfront at Buford. And there were many of these wonderful environmental communities. And so we contacted Mr. Marvin and talked with him, flew down to his home. And I remember him taking us into his home. And we were on the way to the Southern country club to have lunch. And he said, let's stop and pick up my wife.

Steve Nygren (10m 27s):
Cause he had this wonderful Southern draw and we stopped at his house. And I said, well, Mr. Marvin, this is, this is amazing. I thought, boy, you know, cause the back of the house was all glass. It was from the front, it was just a simple little neighborhood house, but you walked in and the whole back had obviously been taken off and it was all glass.

Monica Olsen (10m 48s):
Wow.

Steve Nygren (10m 49s):
And there were stone. And he said, yes, he said, I, I dug the floors all out. And he said, there is 20 inches of, of rock. And then there was slabs of stone on top of that for the floors, with Oriental rugs on it. And then the back was all glass and he was doing, he was explaining all this things, how his energy and that, wow, this was really progressive for the seventies. You know, it was very much what we were doing in the seventies. "When did you do this, Mr. Marvin?" He said, "when I came back from world war II in 1948." And so this, this, this was the incredible person. And so when, when we engaged him, he says, "well, Steve, I'm going to take this on but it's probably the last thing I'll ever do."

Steve Nygren (11m 34s):
He was 80 years old. And as it turned out, it is the last thing he touched. Now, Mr. Marvin and his team would come in and we met every six weeks and we would in the morning have a discipline that we wanted to bring in. So this is the one we brought in people in the arts community talk award. It would be like to have artists and programming, what would that be like? If we were going to include agriculture, what were we going to do with agriculture, with education? And as we were building these various disciplines and expert that would talk to us in the morning and then we would talk about the land and what we're doing and so we went through all the, the surveys.

Steve Nygren (12m 16s):
We did archeological digs. We did all of these things on the land that we were building up to actually landing a plan. And so there was a key meeting that Mr. Marvin and his team were going to finally locate houses on all these maps and where we were going to do it. Now, Mr. And Marvin and I had been having these wonderful professional discussions struggles type of war. Now, now I was this novice developer, but I was responding to the wonderful cluster communities that we've seen throughout Europe. We of course, had already been seduced by the English land laws and, and that English pattern, which is, which is what we had based all of our zoning on.

Steve Nygren (13m 3s):
Right. And so I had this idea, the clustered communities, Mr. Marvin had come from, you know, decades of creating environmental communities, which has really more of a, what I thought of sprawl. You know, it it's houses, you know, along waterfronts, but they're, they're sort of spread out. And it was, it was more, it was a pure preservation really rather than the balanced density and preservation. So we were having these struggles about what I thought should go on the line and how he thought it should be developed. So I knew this first time was going to be one of these really roll up your sleeve and let's move things around kind of things. Well, Mr. Marvin went into the hospital and so his team brought the things, it was at this meeting that we had connected with a sacred geometrist through the Rocky Mountain Institute.

Steve Nygren (13m 51s):
And his name was Phil Tabb. He had also did his doctorate on the English village system and was currently teaching at Washington state. And so he did a complete presentation. It was one of those magical moments when, you know, someone's talking the same language and you know, this is, this is 2002, I guess, maybe one. And he, you know, at that point we had carousels with slides in them,

Monica Olsen (14m 26s):
Very familiar with them, yes.

Steve Nygren (14m 28s):
It's amazing. When you think about these things, how far we are in just the time that this started. And about his, his, his third slide was of the, the street and the house who are our dear friend, Alice who lived in Selborne, England. And one of the villages he had studied was Selborne, England which had inspired us. And we had been visiting Alice every years and that whole seven of retirement. And so it was just sort of those magical moments that were going on. So we immediately hit out. And so we had this, this wonderful morning talking about sacred geometry and English villages and what have you, we had lunch. And then the time comes, it felt like the drums were rolling and, and

Steve Nygren (15m 12s):
Mr. Marvin's team sad that he wasn't there, but they had all the paperwork and they rolled it out. Well, the, the, the lead staff person obviously knew it wasn't quite right because the perspiration, but by the time he finished an hour presentation, it wasn't just a little preparation. You could have taken his entire shirt. And, and it was one of those presentations where it was so not right, that there was dead silence. I mean, you know, I had envisioned a time we were gonna roll. It said, well, let's move this here. And this is it. And it was just like, I don't even know what to say. And it was that awkward moment of no questions, no conversations and said, oh, well, let's take a break.

Steve Nygren (16m 0s):
And it's just like, oh my gosh. And so Phil and I walked out into the garden and then on, towards the woods and Phil said, "I know what you want. I can do this."

Monica Olsen (16m 12s):
Interesting.

Steve Nygren (16m 13s):
And this, while I had talked on the phone, this is my first time of really being with Phil that we were together. And so we walked and talked a little bit more. And of course we we came back and regrouped and, and I said, "well, I don't think this is right. Let's, let's pick up someplace else." And of course, to other people, we had various professionals there to other people called me and said, "I know what you want. We can do this." It was so obvious that this wasn't going to go on with Mr. Marvin. But so I had three different people then that were telling me what their help.  And so I called Phil and I said, "Phil, I've, I've thought about it.

Steve Nygren (16m 56s):
And come back, let's, let's have a charrette and let's see what you're talking about." And so we, we planned a time. Phil came back, he and I walked the entire property. And we had a three-day charrette of pulled various people in. And the drawings we made from that charrette, basically what we're building today.

Monica Olsen (17m 17s):
Well, and I was at Phil's house the other day. Cause we're in the process of asking Phil to do, you know, an updated master plan that shows kind of everything rather than the phases. And he showed me some of those maps. So we'll get photos and put those on the website. They're absolutely beautiful. Yes.

Steve Nygren (17m 35s):
And Phil has a beautiful hand. He came basically from academia that had never been thought of as a planner. He was an architect and understand the principles. And so it's been a wonderful relationship as he stepped into being our land planner. And then of course, once you come up with a plan, we had to find a civil engineer.

Monica Olsen (17m 57s):
Okay. So that's the next step.

Steve Nygren (17m 58s):
And interviewed all the civil engineers. And of course I was this wacko restauranteur that had these wildlife ideas. And you could tell, you know, they were rolling their eyes when I was talking about what we were going to do.

Monica Olsen (18m 19s):
And probably once they saw Phil's plan they were like, do you want to just give a visual real quickly? Like Phil's plan is not based on a grid, a traditional grid it's based on sacred geometry, which are these beautiful,

Steve Nygren (18m 36s):
Well, as we came up with this, you know, it, it it's and sacred geometry, we could do a whole session on what's sacred geometry is and do that. And that would be good because, because it's, it's the absolute balance of numbers. When you see some of the great ancient architecture, the pyramids, they did not have engineering schools. This is the, the really, the sacred art of how do things fit together. What's the balance. It also relates to an energy force in the universe. And this may be sounds new age when I hear myself saying that yet you look at the farmer's Almanac.

Steve Nygren (19m 21s):
I talked to any of the old time farmers here, If they're going to drill a well, they get a dividing rod. They understand that there's there's a connection between minerals and, and the earth. So there is an energy field we do not totally understand. If you look at any leaf, any pattern in nature, it's a perfect geometric balance. There's, there's a lot of math involved going on out there. So, so sacred geometry is, is really a more of a mathematical balancing effort. And so as we then sat down, there's no one pattern. It's not like you have a sacred geometry book and you choose the pattern, right?

Steve Nygren (20m 4s):
It's, it's you really open yourself to see and to understand nature and how can you work and develop with nature. And we've come through a period and especially new urbanists, which that's an imposition upon nature. It's really scraping nature without any concern about what's there. And then imposing the built environment on the land. If you're looking at sacred geometry, we're really talking about understanding nature and trying to understand how we could introduce housing and commercial into the pattern.

Steve Nygren (20m 49s):
So, as, as Phil and I walked the, the land for a week before the charrette, we had both been in Italy within the year. And so we were both seduced by the Italian hilltowns. And so, as we talked about the various ridges, he and I were talking about all the Hilltown ideas that we could do. Then when we sat down to the actual charrette with other people and started looking at the actual maps and how we could put streets on the land and talked about a lot of the concepts that we wanted, we realized that the, the Ridge caps were wonderful, but how much better it would be if we kept those as open spaces for everyone, it, it more felt the philosophy that we were trying to bring about an, an open place that connected everyone to nature rather than a few that could afford the very expensive lots that sat on top.

Steve Nygren (21m 56s):
And, and now when I think about it, and I see other places where they've placed the houses on the tallest hill, from the roads, you had these, these uneven teeth that are sticking up through the nature, and you look at Serenbe, whether it's from air or the roads, it's still a forest. And you can clearly see that we have placed our, our, our buildings and our roads in nature and relationship with nature rather than allowing nature to exist around the structures. And that becomes very obvious of, of a tradition for the last several decades of just imposing buildings onto the nature.

Steve Nygren (22m 42s):
And, you know, most places scrape all the trees and start over and, and we can talk more about how utility companies were trying to force me to do that very thing. So it, it, we, we're just in, in a tradition of how we develop and it, it has not been thoughtful nor have we understood the unintended consequences. And I believe that's starting to come to a head here as we approach 2020, there's just several people starting to realize that we cannot keep doing it in this manner.

Monica Olsen (23m 19s):
Yeah, we need to make a change. So did you immediately stumble upon a civil engineering firm or was that a big search?

Steve Nygren (23m 25s):
No, that it was, it was a large search and we hired an initial company and, and it was a struggle. That engineering company only left us with this for a year. And we started looking again, so you, so you don't always get it right the first time. And it was for various reasons. Then we, we hired Southeast Engineering with Chad Epple, and they're still our civil engineers today.

Monica Olsen (23m 54s):
How many years later?

Steve Nygren (23m 55s):
And so this is some what, 16, 17 years later, they are still there. And, and now they have their office and now they have moved their environmental office here to Serenbe. And, and, and I'm sure a conversation with Chad and, and he could share in his very engineering eyes, what it was like hen, when, when I started talking about what we wanted to do here.

Monica Olsen (24m 18s):
So you got a land planner, you've got a civil engineer. What's next? Architects?

Steve Nygren (24m 26s):
Well, not yet.

Monica Olsen (24m 28s):
No, not yet. Okay.

Steve Nygren (24m 29s):
Well we're working with a civil engineer and so they're doing all the drawings. And then at this point, you're having to interface with the various things like the gas company, the power company. Yeah. AT&T, Comcast, drinking water, the wastewater, All these facets all underneath that. This is all at that point when you figure out what your entire infrastructure is going to be like. This is where we decided I wanted granite curbs. You know, I wanted granite curbs because you just don't see them. So this is in those, those engineering plans of what we were going to build is when all these things happen.

Steve Nygren (25m 16s):
So of course, we're having these exciting meetings and I'm pushing and pulling what we want there. I don't know if we can get that permitted because it's the right way to do it. Well, then I found out how hard sort of those, of course we can are, but I thought and won almost every battle. We had a complete design that we would harvest the rainwater off of every building and where we have the downspouts now that taking into stormwater, we were going to collect that and pump it up to a purifying station.

Steve Nygren (25m 56s):
And we had specified a big water tower that would have had big Serenbe would have sat right over here to the Northeast of us on a, on a hill. And we had identified where three Wells would go to be the backup. And we were going to be our own water, water source. And both EPD and Atlanta because we're in the Atlanta distribution area, they both fought me. And it was one of that, you know, it was, as we were fighting all these battles, it was one that I was going to have to fight on two fronts.

Steve Nygren (26m 34s):
And at that point they required Atlanta to run water line to us. So where if I had been begging for it, they would have probably charged me, but where I had another alternative, I was able to say, that's a hardship they were imposing. And so they negotiated that it would be run at no cost to me.

Monica Olsen (26m 59s):
Oh, that's nice.

Steve Nygren (27m 0s):
So it was one of those. It was one of those, but we own all the infrastructure. And now we are a bulk buyer at a meter at the road rather than individuals. And my hope is one day in the future, we will actually be able to do that. In fact, one of our geothermal wells, I think, would support the entire community, we hit a water vein and just seven miles from us one of the landowners back 20 years ago, when we were doing all of this, he was sure there were mineral rights and oil under all this. And so he brought in an oil rig from Texas to find a test well, and they, they went deeper and deeper and deeper, and they never found oil, but they found a water source that supposedly could supply about 300,000 people.

Monica Olsen (27m 53s):
Unbelievable.

Steve Nygren (27m 54s):
It's a river that they tapped into a river, like exactly where our entire city here could be on that one to start. So stay tuned. Those are all things that could happen in the future.

Monica Olsen (28m 7s):
Tell me real quickly, the granite curb story, because that is one of my favorites. I do recall you wanting the granite curbs going up to this, I dunno, up in downtown Atlanta. And they told you no.

Steve Nygren (28m 21s):
Well, this is again, when, when I was close to just having everything done and I think we'd already started, but I had gone down and I was picking up another level of permits. And, and I'm at Fulton county sit quarters down in downtown Atlanta. And he says, "there's one more thing that we missed. We're not going to be able to give you the permit today." And I said, "well, what could that be?" And he says, "your granite curbs." And I said, "well, what's wrong with granite curbs?" And I, I remember stepping in the winter and I said," look at they're there, they're all over, down here." He said, "well, it's not that there's nothing wrong with them, but no one has put a granite curb in for 30 years. And we do not have a profile on how it should be installed."

Steve Nygren (29m 3s):
And so I can't approve these without a profile. So we had to go back, have our profile on installation, approved by the county public works department as a standard way to install granite curbs. And then once that came down, they could check that box that I could get my permit.

Monica Olsen (29m 26s):
But now we're seeing them everywhere. They're back in style, if you will. But if you hadn't pushed that, it still would be like, well, we just don't do them.

Steve Nygren (29m 36s):
That's correct.

Monica Olsen (29m 36s):
And then most developers just accept that and move on. So Steve, we've talked about infrastructure and for somebody like myself, who just I don't live in that world, I mean, I, I live in a community here, obviously there's infrastructure underground here, you know, talking holistically about it is really interesting. And so we've talked a little bit about wastewater and how you have to get a connection to all these different things and think about that when you're building a community. And one of the parts of infrastructure I wanted to ask you about specifically was power, you know, when you're going to put in power, when a company comes out to put in power, it's not just connecting my house, it's this whole community. So what happens?

Steve Nygren (30m 16s):
There is so much, and if you look at the section of Mado, that where you're just converting now from trees to dirt, to rocks and starts, you can start to imagine all that has to happen. So all of your utilities are a key piece, right? And in Georgia, we allow all the utilities to have separate trenches.

Monica Olsen (30m 42s):
That's interesting.

Steve Nygren (30m 43s):
So just imagine the power company wants to come do their trench, and this is presuming you've already moved to get them to go to underground. I'll come back to that, but we absolutely require that we don't want these poles. Gas has always been underground and they have to be a certain number of feet from the power or on the opposite side of the street.

Monica Olsen (31m 7s):
Okay. That makes sense.

Steve Nygren (31m 8s):
And, and then you have your, your, your sewer or wastewater that you have to run down through there, and then you have your drinking water and that all has to be separated. And then you have Comcast, AT&T, whatever your internet service is. So just think about all these trenches that are underground and none of them cooperate with one another. And they all insist on their own equipment coming in to do this work. And it becomes quite challenging in engineering. So before we ever turned the first spade of dirt, this is all engineer through civil engineers to make sure where the lines are, how far they are from each other, where the intersections are.

Steve Nygren (31m 54s):
And if they intersect, how many feet above or below are they? So just imagine this is a, this is an inter connected maze of lines that provide this seamless seemingly seamless functioning of a community or a house. Right? So, so, so that kind of sets the stage of all the different things. So after the civil engineers have all these drawings together, and then we send those to all the utilities that these are mostly all public utilities. Then we have to have a coordinating meeting to make sure that everyone then has to work together.

Steve Nygren (32m 35s):
And, and who's going first, who's in the dirt first because they won't come in at the same time. So this all has to be scheduled time-wise.

Monica Olsen (32m 43s):
And does somebody want to go first? Is that the ideal?

Steve Nygren (32m 45s):
Yeah, no, let me say varies. Everybody wants to be last because then they don't have to, then they're the last, and I don't have to worry about somebody else hitting their lines that they have to come out. So I think it's kind of an agreement that if, if one utility hits another, we're sorry, but you have to fix it because I don't, you know, we don't get involved in that, but they seem to have that worked out amongst themselves. So just the why a lot of people think, well, I'm going to do a better job than anybody else so I'd rather be last. But so this is just the coordination of all this. So of course we had on this first phase, now I am a novice developer and I'm thinking, okay, we've we've done that everybody now has left their meeting and everybody knows what they're going to do.

Steve Nygren (33m 39s):
Well, what we really didn't have on the plans, which, or, or they just didn't force me to was, was the, the elevation. So the power company, for instance, expected me to have it perfectly flat. So the plans they were looking at, they expected it to all be flat because everywhere you go, that's what you see. And I said, no, no, we're not going to grade this natural area. In fact, we're going to leave some of these big trees right here. Well nobody was, you know, that wasn't even brought up at the meeting because that wasn't expected.

Monica Olsen (34m 16s):
Right. So they're like, what's this crazy man out in the woods doing?

Steve Nygren (34m 23s):
So they're ready to start the first trench and they want to know when I'm going to have this all leveled for them? And so they said, well, they couldn't do it unless I leveled 20 feet on each side for all these various trenches of the road. So you'd have to clear 20 feet on each side because they each have to put in their own trench and they each have their own equipment on big wheels that comes through and does that, you know, and, and they're used to going on flat. They can't go at a 90 degree angle, like some of our hills that you see on Selborne. And so "we, we, aren't going to do that."

Steve Nygren (35m 4s):
"Well, we can't put your power lines in," so, "well, who's your supervisor?" And I was used to this, and, you know, you had to go up. And so I kept going up to the supervisor until I, I had the president of the company that agreed to meet me out here, because I knew that he was going to see how important it was to leave these trees. And he, was sure that I was going to understand as a novice developer, that this could not work because all their equipment could only be done in this way. And they had to have a flat surface and maybe they could pull it into 15 feet.

Monica Olsen (35m 45s):
Wow.

Steve Nygren (35m 47s):
Well, of course, what happens if I were to clear 15 feet, then I would have a ridge so then you have to cut down more of the hill to angle it out. And all of a sudden you have to cut down every tree that's out there. There's no savings of any trees. And then no one understands how that's going to affect the stream below that we have saved all the natural, and of course, that would happen there. And so this was a major deal. And I was up against the wall. I had to have power that was shared, and there was nobody else that could put the power in for me, because this is, you don't have any choices here.

Monica Olsen (36m 21s):
Right:

Steve Nygren (36m 23s):
I had remembered that two weeks before there had been some interest in what we were doing here because of the charrette with the Rocky Mountain Institute and a reporter with USA today had come out and taken a picture of the first bulldozer arriving in the trees.

Steve Nygren (36m 46s):
We were on the cover of the second section of USA today. And so I asked him if he had seen that and he hadn't, and I said, well, you might want to look at it. And I said, you realize we've gotten a lot of press, and we're gonna, we're in focus about doing something different here, more environmental. And so I'm going to have to call the press and let them know why we're taking down all these trees.

Monica Olsen (37m 14s):
Oh no. They probably didn't like that.

Steve Nygren(37m 16s):
Two weeks later, they figured out how they could put the lines in. And it turns out that there was one team that could do what we needed to do and boring.

Steve Nygren (37m 29s):
And it was a little more expensive, but they have, I don't know how many teams that are used to doing the old trenching and then many more that do the pole on lines. Right? So this was just a specialty almost to do it this environmental way, but they did figure out how to do it, but I didn't even know that was an option or what the issues were. So we had to go to extremes where, oh my goodness. And so I won most of the battles because I was just absolute. Now, drinking water was another issue. That's the one battle I lost because we had an entire plan to, you know, all of our houses were going to have stormwater drains like you do.

Steve Nygren (38m 17s):
So every roof we were specifying, what kind of roof materials every house could be in. They're not, you know, it's, it's what we have here is we didn't, we couldn't have asphalt and we weren't going to allow asphalt anyhow. And so there were all these hard surfaces, natural products would be your roofs, and you would collect all the rain water and the downspouts like we have, but rather than going to stormwater, it would be collected. It would be in a system that took us back to a treatment center. And then we had a water tower planned on the hill over here. And we were going to treat all of our storm water for drinking water. And we had three well locations identified as backup.

Steve Nygren (39m 0s):
And so in the tower we would have, I think it was three days, 72 hours of, of water supply at anytime for the entire community in this system. APD decided that that was too small of a system for them to approve. And Atlanta did not want it because we were in their distribution system. And so this was taking potential future customers away from them.

Monica Olsen (39m 25s):
Right, so it was economic.

Steve Nygren (39m 27s):
It was an economic issue. So it was a, a issue of, of both monitoring and economics from two different agencies that were both blocking me on this. So it, it was one I had to give up on. It's still a heartache that we did because we would have had really a great drinking system. And when we think of, of Georgia and the water wars and the concerns about water supplies, yet our rules don't allow us to do things more responsible in conservation and what we're doing. So that, that was one of the disappointments there.

Monica Olsen (40m 4s):
It's interesting. Now I know that there's a lot of alternative energy here. We don't really call it that we just call it energy, geothermal and solar, but most of the country probably thinks of it as an alternative. Tell me why you chose to put those in and how they're used.

Steve Nygren (40m 21s):
So that's a great subject, Monica, and it covers several things. One is, is alternative energy is a great buzzword. What we should be talking about in the nation is reducing our demand. That's the first line of questioning. How do we reduce the demand so that we're not using the resources that we are? And you're your first line in that is certification only because it is a checklist on what we need to do to build better buildings that require less energy. Okay. LEED has done a great job of educating corporate America on these principles and the economics of it.

Steve Nygren (41m 2s):
Now, now, remember when we started the first LEED building and I've been certified, right? This was a fairly, an unknown concept that was just being developed. But here, here in Georgia, south face had developed the EarthCraft program. And so they were actually certifying houses at that point. So as we educated ourselves on that, we decided that that every house here should be certified. And this way we were putting a third party to require all of our builders, the built here to build under these sustainable practices.

Monica Olsen (41m 36s):
And can you tell me a little bit, I mean, we'll point people to south face on the website, but tell me a little bit about what that means. Cause I know LEED has specific things they do, but like how does that Earth Craft work?

Steve Nygren (41m 47s):
It's a very similar to LEED in the fact that there's a checklist of things and they've changed the program through the years of how you, what you have to do to meet it. But it's it, you know, you, you, you begin with what your, your vapor barrier areas, you know, what's between the earth or where your building and your, and your foundation, what kind of insulation, well, how secure walls and the installation, what, what are your windows? What's your air quality and exchange of air? And it's all these things to really the shell of the building. Now, if that is built tight and correctly, you reduce your energy demand by 30 to 35%.

Monica Olsen (42m 29s):
That's incredible.

Steve Nygren (42m 30s):
So that's a, that's a big issue. So I felt okay, that's, you know, we're doing more than the average person. If we do that, then as I was becoming a student of all these issues, I was intrigued with geothermal in the energy. But what I was really interested in the fact that it was silent compared to all the air compressors we had

Monica Olsen (42m 50s):
From a noise pollution standpoint.

Steve Nygren (42m 52s):
Well, as you, as you know, at the Daisy courtyard was what we were dealing with then. And, and you've got 12 units to an acre. So that's a very dense and there's there, there's surrounded around a courtyard. And then there's the street on the side of one group and the woods on the other. And they literally had no back door. And even if I were put air compressors on everybody's roofs, imagine that courtyard with 12 buildings, with the air compressors, there would be this constant grind. And you know, many people when they open their windows in the spring and fall, rather than hearing birds, you hear all this noise.

Steve Nygren (43m 34s):
And so I was becoming very aware of, of how noise pollution really affects us and where we are. And of course, I've lived in quiet nature long enough that I was very conscious about this noise that we have just become used to in the city. So my first interest in geothermal was the lack of noise, but then that reduces your HVA costs energy needs by 50% generally, which is another third of your overall power bill. So if you build a certified and if you put geothermal in, you've reduced your demand by 65, maybe 70%.

Steve Nygren (44m 19s):
So at that point, it's a good time to talk about solar and wind or what other, then you could talk about alternative energy because you only need a third of whatever it is. And then the exciting subject that I'm looking forward to having in the future is then storage, because then we're not dependent upon the grid, which is one of the most vulnerable things we have that not many people are talking about. So that's opening the door to a lot of subjects. Now, six years ago, we were starting to be noticed by people in the energy field. And Bosch was looking for somewhere in the United States to build a model home, to demonstrate how their various products could come together.

Steve Nygren (45m 8s):
And the governor of Georgia called their office called and want me to come talk to Bosch that they were looking for that. And, and they thought Serenbe would be a great place as they were talking about various things in Georgia. Well, that led to Bosch deciding to choose Georgia or and Serenbe as the location for this house. We built that house under our EarthCraft certification, geothermal from Bosch was put in and it's a 2300 square foot house. It had reduced the energy demand by the 70%. And so when they analyzed the solar panels, the roof was plenty large to, to handle that, which is your first thing.

Steve Nygren (45m 53s):
And the cost was third of what it would normally be because we'd reduce the demand. So we didn't need so much. And so they built that house and we took 18,000 people, I believe through it in an open house, a period of time. And it was a great model for us. And I just felt that this was just so wonderful that everyone would want to do geothermal and solar. Bosch was so pleased with the fact that Serenbe was a foundation that they could see a lot of the bigger pictures that they then chose to open their experience center here. And for five years, they brought executives from around the world for seminars and to understand what their various divisions could do together to build structures, but to understand a lot of the other areas like water and agriculture, things that they weren't involved with.

Steve Nygren (46m 44s):
So they, they saw the bigger picture. But the disappointment to me was that with his great example, you could stand and watch the meter run backwards. People still chose to put granite countertops in versus geothermal. And I realize that people will not necessarily make those decisions for just money, because we really don't think about the cashflow, or we don't really believe that it's going to be a savings, right? And so we eventually formed our own geothermal utility, and now that is required. So now you have to have certified buildings and you have to have geothermal as your source of, for your HVAC systems.

Steve Nygren (47m 32s):
So we're, we're, we're moving forward. We have net zero houses, but you know, my dream in the future is that we can actually have a net zero community with storage capacity. And I think that's all going to be available. The technology's there it's, it's getting more affordable. And I think we'll see a real change in that area.

Monica Olsen (47m 52s):
Yeah. I look forward to that. Another thing that always fascinated me, I live down in Grange and down in Grange, we have two gabion bridges and most people don't know what that is. I didn't know what that was before I moved here. But because of the shape of the community, which it's based on sort of an omega or a horseshoe into that curvature, when you go across stream bed, you're going to build a bridge Ridge to Ridge. You can't, you had challenges building a bridge, right? Like you, couldn't just something that a car could go over, not just a foot path. Tell me about a gabion bridge. Tell me why you built them.

Steve Nygren (48m 29s):
It's just the entire thing. So we're bringing a lot of different disciplines to our land planning. So Phil Tabb, who is our land planner, of course, laid this out with the sacred geometry principles and all of our communities are perfect omegas. And so when the engineers wanted to straighten out a section of the road, of course, he said, "oh no, you can't do that. See that perfect omega." So the engineers weren't used to having that kind of a discipline. So then it came back. Okay, well, if we have to keep it curved, we either, we have two choices.

Steve Nygren (49m 9s):
You put in a big concrete bridge and curve it top of a straight piece of concrete, so to speak. So it wouldn't all be road. It would be pieces on each side, on the two sides, you know, then it wouldn't, it wouldn't quite follow. Or what standardly and what was in the engineer practice is let's just tear down 70 feet of trees on each side and it would be an earthen embankment, a lovely, just like the, and that's what you see all over. Yes. You see that everywhere. That's the most economic way you put, you put a big culvert pipe in the stream, so the water flows through and then you pile dirt on and you have to embankment so it'll support the rope. That's across America. That's what you're used to seeing.

Monica Olsen (49m 55s):
And no trees.

Steve Nygren (49m 57s):
No trees. So then it costs a fortune to plant trees. So that in 20 or 30 years, it doesn't look like this bear scrape pile of dirt. Well, of course I wasn't gonna allow that to happen. So everybody goes back to the research table and yes, there are these gabion bridges, and these are gabion and I mean, systems, and these are really- think of, of large cages filled with rocks is the best way to envision it. And then these all tie together and they're all engineered so this holds up for you, it isn't like things rust out and all, and, and you still have the pipe, but then also if you have a storm event, water can actually flow through them.

Steve Nygren (50m 38s):
So it was really environmentally. And, and then because they're natural grasses and things grow up on the sides is there as they're stacked. And so in Grange where you mentioned, which was our first, we have two, these at Serenbe, we were able to save trees within five feet of the road.

Monica Olsen (51m 0s):
It's a beautiful bridge.

Steve Nygren (51m 2s):
And you, when you're on it, now, you don't even think about it because you're, you're intimately in the woods, in this section where you're crossing the stream and you look down and you see the beautiful stream. And of course now upstream what 200 feet we have a pedestrian bridge is just beautiful. And in the spring you see all of the native azaleas and the various shades of pink that are 20 to 30 feet tall. And it's just, it's just one of those special places where we're nature was not disturbed. Yet you have high density. That's where we have an apartment building 28 units right there.

Steve Nygren (51m 44s):
We have the dense Swan Ridge, but in between is this stream valley that has not been touched. And that includes the gabion bridge that you looked down on. And that was all loud. And just imagine how different.

Monica Olsen (51m 58s):
I know, that's my walk to work right now. I get to walk across it every day. So that sort of leads into a little bit more about stormwater. Like we talked about trying to capture it, but the way you handle it, you started talking about, you know, when you look on either side of that bridge and anywhere, really, as you're walking along the roads, there's streams on either sides. Like the creeks are still there, and I can see them rushing by in fact, I, I took a picture, a video the other day, again, maybe we'll find it and put it on the website. That's just what you see from your sidewalk. So tell me how, why. I mean, it's such a different way to walk through a community.

Steve Nygren (52m 32s):
So once we realized we weren't, we're not going to be able to capture the storm water for our drinking water source. How do we deal with, with storm water? I had seen all these chain link, muddy pawns that we see throughout development areas. And one of the experts at the time who had written a book, Bruce Ferguson, at the University of Georgia. And so Bruce consulted with us on how we should do our stormwater, but said, you know, most of this is done in third world countries because regulations are difficult in the United States to take it the extreme.

Steve Nygren (53m 14s):
There are various levels, but of course I wanted to go the most environmental, the most radical, which seemed the most simple, nothing radical to me. And so what we have is you see, in, in the first community and throughout Serenbe, the idea is to get the water off of our roads, which is where it's polluted, you know, and houses, but everywhere where stormwater's running, you want to detain it in natural nature as much as possible. I, and so we get off as frequently as we can, and then into retention swell. So it's retention, swells, and that is, is the key way. And so in Selborne, and when you walk down that center path, you don't even notice until you really look, and there's the swells bioretention swells, and there's some pipes that run through them at different angles so that the water seeps out.

Steve Nygren (54m 10s):
And then it, it naturally slowly seeps slowly through the earth and all the plant matter that's there. So that by the time the streams they're there, they're primarily cleaned. The old system for decades has been to put this in hard pipes. It was just a focus on getting stormwater off your property and moving it. But there was no thought about where you were moving it to, so constantly it was constantly moving right, move it to a retention pond if necessary. So, or you're collecting it from attention retention, ponds from the, the disturbed area or the hill. And then it goes in a hard pipe somewhere.

Steve Nygren (54m 53s):
Well, that's somewhere is eventually a tributary. And if you put stormwater in a hard pipe, it never has an opportunity to cleanse itself and it builds up speed. So that by the time it eventually comes out in a tributary is built up so much speed that it's going to do incredible damage. This is why the tributaries in most of our urban areas aren't thought about because they're such a mess, everyone's turned their back to them. So we don't even know where they are, or they've just been covered up until they hit a river and then do the pollution of the river. So we constantly have been moving that problem of discharge away, away, away from where we actually live and out of sight.

Steve Nygren (55m 40s):
This is why Atlanta now spending millions to clean up Proctor Creek because of this kind of thing. And because these are forgotten areas through time, people have tended to dump their used tires, their used batteries. And so they really become more and more of a dump site in our urban areas. It's very sad the way we've allowed this to happen. And so I was just adamant that we were going to do by retention, swells throughout the community. And so if you walk through the center of Selborne, you don't realize it until you pointed out. If you're in crossroads, you see how all the stormwater's daylighted right along the streets and by the sidewalks and those bioretention areas, cause there's a bit of a hill there.

Steve Nygren (56m 25s):
So you know, our rocks and it's all wild flowers and some of the most beautiful areas of Serenbe, especially in spring. It's just incredible in Grange where you were talking about, we've put a path right next to the bioretention and we have blueberries and figs and apple trees,

Monica Olsen (56m 44s):
And that's right by the school.

Steve Nygren (56m 46s):
And it goes right by the school. And that's a good example of, of how any urban city could really bring nature into every neighborhood is if we just thought about how the rain drops that falls on any house finds its way to the local tributary and to the local river. And imagine if those were Greenways, we would have this vein system of green through our urban areas. And it would, it would totally change how we, how we thought, how we felt. And I think it's one of the easiest things we could do because infrastructure in many of our cities, older cities is, is breaking down. And we're having to look at what we're going to do.

Steve Nygren (57m 29s):
But 18 years ago, Monica, I was way out on the limb, right? They weren't going to permit me to do this. In fact, they didn't permit me. I had to go ahead and do it. At least they had the wisdom not to cite me or shut me down. And I found out it took five or six years to actually change regulations. Once everyone agreed it needed to be done. So many manuals, so many training, and you get some of the things that frustrates me as I look, which is the passion I realized we had to do all of this.

Monica Olsen (57m 58s):
Right, well now you have an example here that you can show other people that it works and that people will live.

Steve Nygren (58m 3s):
That's right. Yeah. That's right. And so there are many examples now on a stormwater around, around the country.

Monica Olsen (58m 9s):
Oh, that's great. Well, thank you so much, Steve. Next time we're going to talk about more, what we call placemaking, well you, I should say you call placemaking, but I'm really, that's the next step and how to build a neighborhood now that you get all the infrastructure in. We'll talk more about, a little bit more about the beauty, if you will.

Steve Nygren (58m 30s):
Good looking forward to it.

Monica Olsen (58m 32s):
Thank you. Thank you for listening to Sarah Murray stories, new episodes are available on Mondays. You can subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts. For more details visit our website, serenbestories.com

First Step: Land Planning
Step Two: Finding a Civil Engineer
Step Three: Infrastructure
Why We Have Granite Curbs
Unintended Consequences of Utility Installation
Drinking Water from the Sky
Reducing Energy Demand: Earthcraft, Geothermal, Solar
What is a Gabion Bridge?
Daylighting Stormwater