Some Consider Even Eco-Friendly Housing Invasive
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 9, 2008
ECHO LAKE, Wash. -- The carbon footprint of the big house on 214th Street is no longer a matter of chatty conjecture. Black ash laced with gray defines the perimeter of the $2 million home, "built green" as a showcase in this emerald corner of America that has long set the pace for the environmental movement -- and last week burned to the ground in an arson fire that threw a whole new light on the competition to be greener-than-thou.
"Built green? Nope, BLACK!" read the spray-painted bed sheet firefighters found draped over a fence in the cul-de-sac where two other model homes were also aflame, each 4,000 square feet and dubbed green.
"McMansions and RCDs r not green," the sign said, referring to rural cluster subdivisions, the zoning that preserves open space while allowing more houses. The signature was also an acronym: "ELF" is recognized in the Pacific Northwest as the Earth Liberation Front, a shadowy fringe group that aims to bring the absolutism of animal liberation extremists to the cause of the environment.
Indeed, as investigators waited for the three homes in Snohomish County to cool, a jury downstate was convicting a 32-year-old violinist for serving as a lookout on the day in March 2001 that ELF burned down a horticulture research building at the University of Washington.
Yet no one seems quite sure the latest fire was the work of ELF. Many people in mostly rural Snohomish County are angered by the blitz of new construction moving north from Seattle.
The burned houses had stood unsold for months, having been built on spec by companies calculating on one more Puget Sound millionaire with deep pockets and a "think-green" outlook to emerge from the thousands of people who trooped through the homes in an annual tour known as the Street of Dreams.
"I'm doing one now two blocks from Bill Gates's home," said Jim Jensen, referring to Gates's lakeside estate that occupies 48,000 square feet and is billed as environmentally friendly. Jensen, who lives around the corner from the arson site, had no properties on the street but has built his share of dream homes for Seattle's new rich.
"I think it really all started with the Microsoft people," Jensen said of the boom that is still lifting home prices 10 to 15 percent annually and has filled most of King County.
"So we've made a living off those guys for a few years. And now they're coming out here."
With them come the usual debates over development, with every side claiming the mantle of green, as so much does these days.
It starts with the question of whether only small is beautiful.
"Everything is relative," said Grey Lundberg, who built the Urban Lodge, the house that burned to its foundations. "Some people are really hung up on square footage. Houses are going to get built. Do you want them to be as energy efficient as possible?"
The five homes that made up the 2007 Street of Dreams were half the size of the mansions showcased in previous years. "And it was a conscious effort," Lundberg said, to showcase what the building industry calls "Built Green."
The label -- which Jensen dismissed as "mostly marketing" -- is awarded on a sliding scale, from three stars to five, according to the checklist published by the Master Builders Association. The list is long on recycled materials, energy efficiency and grace notes such as gaps between paving stones so water can be absorbed by the soil.
"I call it basically a scale of light green to dark green. It's not an all-or-nothing thing," said Aaron Adelstein, who studied environmental policy at the universities of Colorado and Montana and now directs the Built Green program for the builders association.
"To folks like me, what we've seen in the last few years is the best case scenario: It's environmentalism becoming mainstream," he said. "It's the Faustian bargain of soccer moms driving up in their SUVs to the supermarket with their cloth shopping bag and buying organic food. Maybe the next decision she'll make is to trade in her SUV and drive a hybrid."
A similar notion of compromise shaped the subdivision where the houses stood. Quinn's Crossing was plotted on planners' maps as a "rural cluster development," an approach that encourages developers to build more homes by snuggling them side by side, and leaving much of the parcel wild. "Environmental excellence!" reads a sign on the lane curving toward the crime scene, where a permanent display lists facts about birds and critters in the "native growth protection area."
Conservancy groups endorse the cluster approach. But in Snohomish County, citizen groups complain that developers dominate a planning process that will bring suburban densities -- an additional 300,000 people in the next 20 years, the state says -- to areas where many people moved for the five-acre lots that clustering strives to avoid. Much of the county is rural in the sense of chain-link fences, hand-lettered "stump grinding" signs and "air mail" letterboxes on poles 15 feet in the air.
"I don't think rural cluster housing on its face is bad thing, but we've just given away too much," said Ellen Hiatt Watson, a resident turned activist.
Yet Watson called the system grudgingly responsive to citizen input, and moderately instructive. "What gets gained from compromise? How much do you learn from the other side? The developers are right: We do need homes," she said.
"The law is powerful," said Laura Hartman, whose neighborhood group challenged Quinn's Landing in court over aquifer issues and got monitoring stations in a settlement.
In a manifesto posted online, ELF declared: "We take inspiration from the Luddites, Levellers, Diggers, the Autonome squatter movement, ALF, the Zapatistas, and the little people -- those mischievous elves of lore. Authorities can't see us because they don't believe in elves. We are practically invisible. We have no command structure, no spokespersons, no office"
And, perhaps, no meaningful support, even in the "sacred" Pacific Northwest.
"The only environmental extremists I know are in prison," said Angela Smith, who runs a Seattle advocacy group that takes in earth, animals, teen rights and prison reform.
"They might have some pretty good ideas, but nobody's ever going to take you seriously if you destroy stuff," said Lana Calton, 25, sharing the vegan lunch buffet on University Avenue in Seattle.
Her matted dreadlocks and lip ring matched those of her companion, Nathan Holverson, 26. He works as a welder, she at Old Navy. They dig through the garbage at the end of their shifts for whatever their co-workers failed to recycle.
"And that maybe makes them feel weird, too, that I'm coming behind them," Calton said. But: "Maybe they'll remember me, maybe 10 years from now: 'Oh, yeah. That's what Lana was talking about.' "
Holverson pulled up a hoodie made of tufted green wool that looked exactly like moss.
"They've got to understand that this kind of [stuff] takes time, and it might not get done," he said, "but you've got to try."
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