By Steve Wright
Clark Stevens may be one of the least likely candidates to save the American West from sprawled suburbanization, but that’s exactly what he is accomplishing – one ranch at a time.
Somehow, a Michigan-born, Harvard-educated Stevens is perfectly at home with Montana ranchers, fly fishing and watching unspoiled views from dawn till dusk.
Some way, the partner in Los Angeles funky RoTo Architects – known for modernist, “look at me buildings” boisterous even by LA standards – is leading the charge to rebuild streams and restore natural features from Wyoming to Hawaii.
Nearly a decade ago, Stevens launched a second career in conservation development on large parcels of land, primarily in the West. His New West Land Company rights the wrongs of play farms – places where wealthy entertainers and business people from Los Angeles and beyond had built out of place McMansions and re-channeled natural streams.
“These places were being abused by their owners. They were pushing the land, destroying the landscape, practicing overly intensive farming, ruining their creeks and drying up their water,” he said. We saw an opportunity to take these damaged landscapes and fix them.”
Stevens found places where land held by one family for more than a century was sold, chopped up into 10-acre lots and used maybe one weekend a month or less. The urban ranchers had carved up the land in a way that was killing agricultures and damage the surrounding landscape.
“People who were land rich, but cash poor were yielding to the local real estate broker who said `I can break this up into smaller pieces and make you money,’” he said. “But when you lose a fulltime farming family, you start to lose the community critical mass. Haying, farming – that needs a lot of hands. You can’t do that when ranches around you have been turned into weekend getaways.”
Steven’s solution is to preserve the vast majority of ranches with hundreds of acres by building a cluster of houses. The dwellings are sited in a way that the bulk of the natural features are protected and each home has its own private view – all the way to mountains.
“The ideal is you keep the land owner or collection of land owners on the land and organize a land use that optimizes the health of the community,” He explained. “If you harvest lumber, it’s for the long term – not just a short term gain that results in deforestation. If you are farming, you don’t divert a stream for flood irrigation in the spring – which kills the fish and ruins the stream bottom. You keep the stream bottom healthy for good trout fishing.”
On Hawaii’s Big Island, the 24,000-acre Kealakekua Heritage Ranch in Kona was once slated for intense development with 500 houses. But working with Stevens, state officials and a land trust, the ranch-owning Pace Family was able to create a landmark conservation deal that will protect almost all the pristine property.
The result will be development of 200 to 250 private inhabitation compounds in average of 4-acre enclosures, with the balance of a homeowner’s 20-acre deeded lot being leased to the public for a recreational and agricultural common area, according Stevens.
The Kealakekua Heritage Ranch will be the largest single conservation easement transaction in the State of Hawaii's history, involving nearly 9,000 acres, $4 million in federal Forest Legacy funding, and over $12 million value in donation.
Stevens said the final project will have 96 percent protected open space for orchards, pasture, and native forest. The one-of-a-kind conservation development also will feature hundreds of miles of trails remaining from historic logging and current grazing in the forest areas.
Stevens’ grand plans, some encompassing more than 150 square miles, have caught the imagination of several investors, such as Beartooth Capital, which assesses the development potential of properties within the context of their conservation value.
Stevens and Beartooth’s founder and principal Carl Palmer share the vision of conservation-based rural development, often called shared amenity ranches. Once the clustered housing is built, the preserved habitat and agricultural land is protected from any future development by creating perpetual land conservancies with local and national trusts.
The final hurdle, Stevens said, is to educate real estate agents about this new kind of conservation development.
“A project has all the attributes, but it’s hard finding a person who `gets it,’ who can sell an interesting project. “How do you get the MLS (real estate Multiple Listing Service) form to say `you buy five acres, but it comes with a protected and managed 5,000 acres of paradise?”
Wright has written for a living for 25 years, with nearly 5,000 published articles. He lives in historic Little Havana and is very active in Miami’s urban issues. He and his wife of 20 years also are involved in making new and old towns more accessible for people with disabilities.
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