Residential Developers' Perception of Ecological Alternatives for Exurban and Suburban Development

Residential real estate development on the urban fringe affects patterns of forest andagricultural land, terrestrial and aquatic habitats, water quality, and biogeochemicalcycling. Because ecological design can support ecosystem services, we investigatedwhether real estate developers accurately anticipate the market for homes in ecologicallydesigned subdivisions and whether they are likely to employ ecological design in theirown firms. We conducted twenty (20) one-on-one ethnographic interviews with leadingsingle-family residential developers in southeast Michigan and compared their responseswith preferences of 494 homebuyers who participated in a 2005 image-based web survey(Nassauer et al., 2009). We measured how developers perceive homebuyers’ preferencesand how their perceptions compare with homebuyers’ actual preferences. To understandwhat affects developers’ adoption of ecological design, we also investigated what visibleneighborhood landscape characteristics influence developers’ perceptions of profitabilityand their stated likelihood to develop a project, as well as interactions among thesevariables and perceived homebuyer preferences. Results suggest that developersunderstand homebuyers’ relative preferences for different types of subdivision designs,including their preferences for different forms of ecological design over conventionaldesigns. However, developers’ perceptions of the profitability of ecological designs, andtheir expressed likelihood to adopt ecological design in their own firms is not stronglyrelated to their perceptions of homebuyer preferences, especially for developers in themiddle-to-lower priced market segments.