Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town Read online

  “Now we can start,” says Duckworth after the meeting, obviously relieved. The new ordinance is an important legal hurdle, since without it New Daleville could not exist. But the ordinance does not guarantee that the project itself will be approved; that’s the next step. New Daleville is on schedule. Seven months have passed since Duckworth was approached by Dick Dilsheimer. Now Duckworth can give the go-ahead to the consultants to start working on the engineering plans. If all goes well, New Daleville will receive preliminary approval a year from now, and final approval several months after that. It looks as if they will break ground in early 2004, as planned.

  “I feel fairly comfortable about the project. The biggest issues are behind us,” says Duckworth. Although Comitta is concerned that the new ordinance has been publicly linked to the controversial township rezoning, so a lawsuit against Londonderry by a disaffected landowner could tie up the New Daleville ordinance, Duckworth is not worried. “We shouldn’t be affected by anything that irate citizens decide to do legally.”

  His general optimism is buoyed by a recent announcement that, despite rising prices, the annual construction of housing units in the United States is heading toward 2 million, and the national home ownership rate now stands at an all-time high of almost 70 percent.1 Low interest rates are encouraging home buying. Even if interest rates rise, Duckworth believes that demand for housing in Chester County will remain strong because of an undersupply of permitted land. In any case, for the moment Arcadia doesn’t have much financial exposure. “We can walk away now and we’re out a couple of hundred thousand. It’s only after we close on the land, early next year, that it will be different. Then we’ll really be committed,” he says.

  Duckworth plans to use as little of his own money as possible to buy the land. “What I learned from Bob Toll, and at Realen, was how to tie up large investments in land with small amounts of cash,” he says. “You can usually count on prices going up because of pent-up demand. So when it’s time to go to a bank, you can say, ‘Look, this is worth a lot more now than it was before.’ And if I can show the bank that I’ve put in my own equity, and I have a builder lined up, the bank might even lend me a hundred percent of what I need. There’s an old real estate saying: A dollar borrowed is a dollar earned, a dollar paid back is lost forever.”

  *Upzoning generally means upping — or increasing — density, although in the South the sense is reversed and upzoning means upping the restriction, that is, reducing density.

  Part Two

  New Daleville, April 2005

  11

  Drop by Drop

  To a developer, sewage disposal is one of the most complicated and expensive steps in improving raw land. Arcadia has budgeted $1.5 million for the construction of the treatment and disposal facilities, the largest single expense other than the cost of the land itself.

  The Arcadia offices are in a small but imposing granite building at the main crossroads of Wayne, a suburban town on Philadelphia’s Main Line. WAYNE TITLE AND TRUST COMPANY carved across the fascia is a reminder of its original function. From the front door, you can see a collection of shops and restaurants, a hotel, a cinema, and two church spires. The commuter railroad station is around the corner. When the Duckworths want to demonstrate the benefits of a walkable village center to their clients, they don’t have to take them far.

  Arcadia occupies part of the ground floor, three private offices around an open space. A round conference table is piled high with papers. The office, which seemed large enough a few years ago, is overflowing with filing cabinets, presentation boards, and stacks of reports. Jason is looking into leasing the space next door. He’s been working with his father for a little more than a year, and he wants to expand the operation, do more projects, and take on more staff. Joe says that’s fine with him, but he has two conditions: the only person to report to him will be Jason, and any growth in the business has to pay for itself.

  It’s April 2003, six months since Londonderry approved the neotraditional ordinance, and New Daleville seems to be moving ahead smoothly. Today Jason is at his desk, telling me about the engineering drawings. These documents are the most expensive part of the entitlement process. The forty-one sheets describe the layout of the lots, the grading of the streets and lanes, the detailed design of water lines, sewers, utilities, storm water collection, and landscaping. Arcadia has budgeted $150,000 for this work, but it looks as if just the preliminary phase will cost $90,000. The grading has proved more complicated than anticipated, since the site slopes and the rear lanes, which have to be at the correct height to line up with the garages at the backs of the lots, also have to line up with the streets.

  Jason tells me that, the previous evening, he and Dave Della Porta attended a meeting of the Londonderry planning commission to explain the latest version of the plan. The room was packed with more than forty people, and Jason was concerned at the size of the crowd. It turned out that most were there to voice their opposition to an application to build mushroom growing houses in Londonderry. Although Chester County produces 40 percent of all mushrooms grown in the United States, mushroom houses are unpopular with local residents, who objected to the smell of compost, the flies, the spores, chemicals, and pesticides, as well as the truck traffic and the presence of migrant laborers. By the time Jason got up to speak, New Daleville sounded downright benign.

  Jason tells me that he is worried about one thing. Although he filed the engineering plans with the township several weeks ago, he still doesn’t have the final planning approval of the sewage treatment system, or the sewage planning module, to give it its technical title. The township says it will not vote on the preliminary plans without the module. Jason has been stalling, but the truth is that the sewage plan is far from ready.

  Sewage is not something most people give a lot of thought to; it’s out of sight and out of mind. But to a developer, sewage disposal is one of the most complicated — and expensive — steps in “improving” raw land. Arcadia has budgeted $1.5 million for the construction of the sewage treatment and disposal facilities, the largest single expense other than the cost of the land itself. Planning the system is the responsibility of Jeff Miller. His consulting company, Evans Mill Environmental, is located above a post office in a nondescript roadside commercial building in northern Chester County. Miller is a burly, bearded man in his fifties who has a master’s degree in resource management and environmental engineering and looks as if he spends a lot of time outdoors. Evans Mill deals with wells, environmental remediation, and small-scale wastewater treatment. “We also do endangered species,” Miller tells me as we talk in his cluttered office. “Around here that’s mainly bog turtles, which seem to be everywhere, which is odd considering they’re endangered.”

  Miller explains the arcane subject of suburban sewage treatment. In the absence of a municipal system, residential developers usually build individual septic tanks, which require lots of at least an acre. A development with smaller lots, such as New Daleville, needs a so-called community system, that is, a network of sewer pipes leading to a treatment facility. The usual technique of disposing of treated wastewater is to spray it on the surface in a restricted area and let it sink into the ground. The alternative, which is what Miller is proposing for New Daleville, is called drip irrigation. The treated wastewater is pumped underground through perforated tubes that are placed directly in the soil, in shallow slit trenches, cut by the same sort of machine that lays underground fiberoptic cables. Miller shows me a sample of ordinary-looking plastic pipe, half an inch in diameter, with punched perforations. The key to the system is the design of the perforations, he explains, which are shaped so that, whatever the pressure in the pipe, the water drips into the ground at a constant rate.

  Drip irrigation, which is based on agricultural technology developed in Israel, was introduced to the United States in the late nineteen eighties. It costs more than spray irrigation, but according to Miller, it has several advantages. Spraying creates aeros
ols that can be transported by wind, so the spraying area has to be far from humans. Underground drip fields can be as close as twelve feet to houses, driveways, and streets; moreover, the surface of a drip field can be used as a playing field or a park.

  Miller still hasn’t finished the sewage planning module for New Daleville. The problem is the soil testing. The tests are crucial, since he needs to know the precise permeability of the soil, as well as the depth of the water table, before he can design the system. According to Pennsylvania environmental regulations, the saturated soil below the drip pipe, called a mound, has to be at least four feet above the water table. That means the shallower the water table, the smaller the mound, the smaller the mound, the slower the rate of flow, and the slower the flow rate, the larger the area of the drip field. Permeability is measured by digging a hole to the required depth, placing a plastic pipe in the hole, sealing the space around the outside of the pipe, and measuring the rate at which water poured into the pipe is absorbed. The depth of the water table is ascertained simply by drilling a deep hole and measuring the distance to standing water. Both tests have to be done in the presence of a soil scientist from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, or DEP.

  As soon as the New Daleville ordinance was passed, in October, Miller called the regional office of DEP to make an appointment for carrying out the tests. He was told to call back in January, since the soil scientist was booked solid until the end of November and was on vacation during December. After complaining, Miller finally got an appointment in mid-January. It was a particularly cold winter, and by January the ground was frozen solid. The department requires that tests take place only after the soil has thawed, which did not happen until late March. The water-table test was delayed even longer. Because of a late spring thaw, the drilling rig could not be moved into the muddy field until May. The normal procedure is to drill holes deep into the aquifer, then wait for several weeks until the groundwater level settles to predrilling levels. The holes were drilled, but since it rained all month, they kept filling up with rainwater. It now looks as if the results will not be available before early June, a total delay of six months.

  Miller is not worried. A year ago, when Duckworth first heard about the Wrigley tract, he asked Evans Mill to make a preliminary check of the water-table depth. “We dug seven-foot-deep pits,” Miller says. “We didn’t see any water. Of course, we were coming off a drought, but we weren’t worried. Typically, in this area, you get a deep water table and good permeability. In a bad situation, you might get a shallow water table with good permeability, or vice versa. In either case, you can adjust the rate of flow to compensate.”

  When the results of the soil tests finally arrive, the news is unexpected. “It couldn’t be worse,” says Miller. “What we have is a rare combination of poor permeability and a shallow water table.” To accommodate these conditions, he has to reduce the rate of flow drastically, which means increasing the size of the drip field, from seven and a half to twelve acres. The problem is that there is not enough room to do this. In other words, New Daleville has hit a major snag.

  “We have several options,” says Duckworth, “none of them good.” Miller has suggested he could try to convince DEP to accept a lower figure for household wastewater production, although he acknowledges that this is a long shot. Or he could ask Chester County to allow some of the treated wastewater to be discharged directly into a stream. “Jeff says that stream discharge is environmentally okay, since the wastewater has been subjected to tertiary treatment, which means it’s completely safe. But the policy of the county is to encourage on-site disposal, so this too is a long shot,” Duckworth tells me. Another option is to enlarge the drip field by buying a piece of land from a neighbor. “We might need as much as four or five acres,” he says. “That would not only be expensive, there’s no guarantee we could find a seller.” The least attractive option, from Duckworth’s point of view, is to replan New Daleville with fewer lots. He estimates that he would have to reduce the lots to fewer than a hundred, which means the project would barely break even.

  Although Duckworth has not yet bought the land, he is not ready to abandon the project. “We’ve already invested time and money, so we would definitely prefer to develop the land,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out how to make it work.” He is philosophical. “It’s nobody’s fault. There’s a higher risk working with new technologies. But there’s no doubt that this is a major setback, especially since the New Daleville project has had the simplest entitlement process I’ve seen in years. This is typical. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” Duckworth cultivates an upbeat image, but I can see that he’s disappointed.

  Miller suggests another possible solution. He thinks that the strip of land — about ten acres — the township insisted be left as a buffer next to Charlotte Wrigley’s farm, on the other side of the site, might be large enough for a drip field, depending on the permeability of the soil and the height of the water table. He applies for a permit to drill half a dozen new test holes in that area. A few weeks later, the results of the new soil tests come in. It turns out that, while the ground in the new location is of similarly slow permeability, the water table is deeper — forty-six feet instead of thirty. The extra depth allows Miller to increase the flow rate.

  There is one problem. Because of the geometry of how the underground pipes are laid, Miller needs about twelve acres for the new field, which means widening the strip of land. Bob Heuser will have to modify his plan. After examining several alternatives, he finds a way to provide more space without sacrificing a single lot. He does this by moving one street and creating a small cul-de-sac. The new plan not only has more premium lots backing onto green space but actually reduces the amount of roadway. The planner has saved the day.

  With this final change, Heuser’s work on New Daleville is finished. During the last eighteen months, he has produced a variety of drawings. The early conceptual plans were drawn at a small scale (one inch equals one hundred feet), but the final plan, which he called a “pre-engineered site plan,” is drawn at a large scale (one inch equals fifty feet) and shows houses and garages as well as details such as sidewalks and curb cuts. “This drawing can be scanned by the engineers and used as a base plan for their technical studies,” he explains. “I make it very accurate to make sure that the engineers do engineering, not planning.” With all the changes, his fee has grown to about $20,000. Although Heuser is in many ways the creator of New Daleville, this is probably among the smallest of all the consultants’ fees.

  Jason, who is assuming more and more responsibility for the project, is relieved by the outcome. “I wasn’t sure that we would have a solution,” he says. It’s now August, and he intends to submit a revised preliminary plan to the planning commission in early September. “I’ve learned a lot more about soil and geology than I expected to,” he adds ruefully. Before the sewage planning module can be sent to DEP for final approval, it has to be reviewed by the county. Once the county comments come back, a public notice of the sewage plan will be posted for thirty days, which will give interested citizens a chance to review the plan at the township offices.

  The revisions to the plan are received well by the township. The planning commissioners had originally requested the buffer areas on the north and west site boundaries, so they are pleased that these are now slightly wider. They like the location of the treatment plant, which has been moved to a low part of the site, behind the woods, and is less visible than before. They also appreciate the fact that the sewage disposal field is no longer beneath the park. Most of the public discussion at the meeting centers on how the park will be used. Tom Comitta’s office has prepared a plan for a ten-acre neighborhood park, including a soccer field, tennis courts, a volleyball area, a children’s playground, and a small garden pavilion. These facilities share the parking lot of the New Daleville village center. But there is no agreement among the planning commission members about exactly what sort of re
creation space is needed. Should it be baseball or soccer? Should they do something now or wait until they have a comprehensive recreation plan for the entire township? Some of the commissioners think that elaborate recreational facilities are unnecessary. They played pickup ball in mown fields as children, why does everything have to be organized? Times have changed, another of the commissioners points out, our kids expect equipment and a proper field, and in any case there are legal liabilities to consider. Underlying the discussion is the question of money — Comitta estimates that the park will cost almost a million dollars. The commission hopes the developer will pay for it.

  Arcadia has no intention of covering the entire cost of a park. “We’ll pay anything within reason, if it means that the approval process will go faster,” says Jason. “The problem is that the township doesn’t seem to know what it wants. There is already a soccer field next to the Londonderry Township building, but they still haven’t bought the goalposts. So we’re a bit skeptical. Playing fields or farm fields are both okay with us. We would just like to get a clear answer from them soon.”

  A year has gone by since the New Daleville ordinance was approved. Because of the problems with sewage treatment, the project is now more than nine months behind schedule, and Arcadia still doesn’t have preliminary approval for its plans. In the meantime, from Jason’s point of view, the meetings with the township have not been beneficial. Between Comitta’s office and the planning commission, he is getting too much advice. The village center has gone through several modifications, because the township keeps changing the details of the playing field and also can’t decide if it really wants a site for a new township building. At the end of every meeting, Jason has a checklist of changes and additions. These are incorporated into the plan, but at the next meeting new issues emerge: the need for hedgerows, the size of street trees, the illumination levels of street lighting, and the surface of the walking trails. It seems as if it will never end.