Fresh Loaf

I didn’t manage to squeeze too much out of do-good developer Charles Brewer in an e-mail exchange this week about his latest smart-growth project — a beach resort in Costa Rica. Except that he’s very focused on it and very excited about it. He wrote:

It is so much fun. We are designing and figuring out how we get our water, electricity, things like that.

Our land is full on great, there is a strong market down there, and in a resort town we are to a pretty large extent freed up from some of the normal constraints on great place making - the work-a-day demands of cars, parking ratios, etc. I feel like we have the opportunity to do something really, really special.

In smart-growth circles, zoning rules and other such regulations often are viewed as environmentally negative handcuffs because they can restrict the planner’s ability to build a village-like project that’s friendlier to pedestrians and that mixes housing, shops and other uses.

The first real-estate project by the MindSpring-founder-turned-green-developer was, of course, Glenwood Park, the niftily planned, granola-crunchy neighborhood in southwest Atlanta. In a September 2006 article in a Costa Rican paper, Brewer said of the Costa Rican development: “Certainly it will be resort-like, tourist town, but a real town non-the-less.”

The article in Beach Times said Brewer led a group of more than 20 investors who spent $27 million on the 1,100-acre property, which it described as “one of the last great undeveloped tracts of titled beach front land” along the Pacific coast.

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Tags: Development, environment.