Backyard greenery

WRENTHAM -- The 150 acres of prime hardwood forest here that overlooks agricultural fields and pastures is the kind of pastoral scenery in Massachusetts that all too often falls to the development of the next copycat subdivision.

But this little treasure of nature will both be preserved as open space and be used to market a somewhat different type of subdivision under construction nearby, in a deal Wrentham and the developer struck that is being replicated in many towns in Massachusetts.

The builder of The Preserve at Oak Hill received special town permission to closely space 62 new large homes on lots that are significantly smaller than standard Wrentham zoning allows. Meantime, the company will donate the undeveloped land, worth roughly $2 million, to the town, a move the builder said gives Oak Hill a selling advantage over traditional subdivisions.

"We believe people would rather have smaller lots with a lot of open space around, rather than a 2-acre lot you have to maintain," Oak Hill developer Howard Bailey said recently, standing on a freshly paved road as workers framed a new home. "Every house in this development will have access to the open space. You can open your backdoor and enjoy it."

Cluster developments, long pushed by environmentalists and smart-growth advocates, are finally catching on with builders who previously did not want the aggravation of pursuing special permits, and with once-wary municipal officials who feared too-dense developments.

Mashpee, for example, eliminated minimum lot sizes altogether from its zoning rules in October and made cluster design the default development option; builders now will need special permits for conventional subdivisions. One review of some 256 Massachusetts communities determined that a third of them had approved a cluster development since 2003.

"It's the best way for us to get land. The money to buy it is simply not there," said Darryl Luce, Wrentham's conservation agent .

Also known as open space subdivisions, cluster developments are Wrentham's main source of conservation land , and slowly the sometimes small, disparate lots are combining with town forests and parks into a larger ribbon of green, he said.

"We've had people complain that an open-space development would look crowded, but with the trees and the open space it doesn't look crowded," Luce said.

When Beverly Stickles and her husband first noticed the listing for the house they bought last year in the Assabet Estates cluster subdivision in Westborough, they dismissed it out of hand because the lot size seemed too small: around 15,000 square feet, or slightly larger than the surface area of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

"But we drove by on accident while looking for another listing and said, 'This looks really nice,' " she said .

The cluster design for the 18-house Assabet Estates cut lot sizes 70 percent from the standard 50,000 square feet in that part of Westborough, while nearly three-quarters of the overall parcel was preserved as open space.

As she played in the driveway with her two young children, Stickles pointed out a strip of woods behind her small backyard and a buffer of tall grass around a scenic pond across the street. A walking trail rings the pond.

"We really like it, and how much yard do you want to have to pay to maintain anyway?" she said. "We've never noticed that we only have .34 acres of lawn."

While her neighbor's property is just a few feet away, it's not like Stickles and other residents of cluster developments are living on top of each other. Most cluster subdivision plans in Massachusetts merely reduce lot sizes from really big to normal size -- still far bigger than postage stamp lots more common in older cities or in California, for example.

In Wrentham, lot sizes at Oak Hill are 30,000 square feet, 65 percent smaller than the standard 87,000-square-foot lot in that part of town. The houses will be marketed from $600,000 to $650,000.

Eventually, wider acceptance of cluster development may increase the housing supply to the point where home prices in Massachusetts come down, said affordable housing advocate Aaron Gornstein, executive director of Citizens' Housing and Planning Association.

Yet despite their growing popularity, Massachusetts communities could do more to convince both developers and neighbors alike that cluster development plans are in their interest , said Mark Racicot, manager of government services for the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, a regional planning group. Developers are still wary of special permitting, he said; neighbors usually give such developments more scrutiny.

In Hopkinton, however, the town worked with developer Ronald Roux, owner of Hallmark Properties, which had consolidated a roughly 100-acre parcel that previously had been approved for 43 house lots. The town granted Roux a special permit for a cluster plan resulting in 34 homes, which he dubbed Old North Mill. The change increased the amount of open space on the site from 32 acres to 52 acres, all of which was deeded to the Hopkinton Area Land Trust. A small parking lot was added for public access to the preserved forest.

"Generally, it works better for us financially or it works the same. And the customers are fine with the smaller lots," said Roux, who noted that the town has put aside roughly 900 acres of protected open space through clustered neighborhoods.

Planners in surrounding communities have since sought Roux's advice on how to convince other developers to rethink conventional subdivision projects.

"Some of the cluster development bylaws are just really tedious. They make you do a conventional plan too, just to show the comparison," Roux said.

A number of towns have gotten the message and are rewriting their old cluster zoning bylaws to torpedo potential objections from developers.

Perhaps the most ambitious is Mashpee, which, in addition to making cluster development the new norm, now requires developers to have at least 50 percent of the site preserved as open space in order to qualify, up from 35 percent. Mashpee's new rules also mandate builders provide at least one affordable unit for every 10 lots in a subdivision. In exchange, builders are allowed an additional market-rate home above the number initially approved by the Planning Board, said town planner F. Thomas Fudda.

"It's good for the town in the sense that it protects sensitive environmental areas, and it's good for the developer because you have a lot less infrastructure cost for roads for the same number of lots because they aren't as spread out," he said.

Fudda bemoaned how long it's taken cluster development to gain widespread acceptance; he recalled giving a speech more than 20 years ago at Wheaton College encouraging open space development.

"It seemed to make so much common sense for the town and for the developer," Fudda said. "But it hasn't caught on everywhere. There's resistance to it because towns think of it as denser development. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but there's still this fear of density."