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Green Projects Allay Second Home Buyers' Guilt

Posted by: Nate Berg

21 November 2007 - 9:00am

Developers seek to use the environmental friendliness of their projects to lure second home buyers who may be struggling with the guilt of buying another home and increasing their environmental footprint.

"People wracked with guilt about owning a second home might be an odd market for second-home developers. But that's the target audience for a handful of communities designed to make people feel better about owning a getaway."

"Among the "guilt offsets" builders are touting: Ski resorts in Lake Tahoe and Massachusetts powered by wind, and a Georgia golf community where most land is set aside as a nature preserve. The Red Mountain ski resort in British Columbia, Canada, stresses that many staffers own homes nearby and don't have to commute from afar because they're priced out of the market."

"The merging of expensive-home building with high-minded values can be fraught, as critics home in on perceived examples of 'greenwashing' -- portraying a development as more environmentally friendly than it actually is."

Full Story: To Spur Sales, Developers Tout Political Correctness
Source: The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2007
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All of that only scratches the surface of what's wrong with this study. The idea that complex urban development patterns and human behavior can be meaningfully studied according to one primary criteria — density — is wrong from the start.
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