Saving the Earth Without Losing a Buck

By KEVIN BRASS DEC. 25, 2014 for the New York Times

Views of a tree house in the Finca Bellavista development in Costa Rica. Credit Matt Berglund 

PIEDRAS BLANCAS, Costa Rica — When he was growing up in Pennsylvania, Dave Angstadt’s favorite movie was “Swiss Family Robinson,” the story of a family living in a tree house on a deserted island.

Mr. Angstadt, 60, a business consultant and former professional basketball player, was thinking of the plucky Robinson clan recently, when he decided to invest $250,000 to build a 1,500-square-foot tree house in Finca Bellavista, a development in the jungle in southwest Costa Rica.

“Being self-sustainable, living in a tree, fending for yourself, figuring stuff out, always intrigued me,” said Mr. Angstadt, who plans to use the house as a personal retreat for friends and family.

Finca Bellavista, which is more than a mile from the nearest town and accessible only by unpaved roads, is one of several projects in Costa Rica targeting a new generation of buyers looking for an eco-friendly alternative to the second-home developments that line the coast.

While sales of second homes remain sluggish in the wake of the 2008 crash, eco-conscious buyers, primarily from North America, are playing an increasing role in the Costa Rica market, developers and sales agents say. And instead of $1 million beachfront homes, many of these buyers are interested in simpler, inland projects touting sustainable elements and with prices of $250,000 to $400,000. (Prices in Costa Rica are typically quoted in United States dollars.) 

Views of a tree house in the Finca Bellavista development in Costa Rica. Credit Matt Berglund 

“People are more humble,” said Richard Lemire, a developer in Manuel Antonio, a centrally located community on the country’s western shore. “Big homes are not so sexy anymore.”

Buyers in eco-centric projects typically base their purchase decision on a variety of factors, including the location and the investment potential, agents say. And not all of them are solely focused on saving the Earth.

“I wouldn’t say I am an environmentalist,” said Al Molnar, 47, who bought eight acres in a project in 2012.

Mr. Molnar, who owns a sports agency in Canada, spent $260,000 for the land in NatureWalk, a combination agriculture and residential development covering 1,200 acres east of the coastal town of Jacó, Costa Rica. A buyer must agree to allow 85 percent of the land to be used for crops such as vanilla, coffee, teak and pineapple; in return, the buyer receives the bulk of the revenue from the crops and the right to build a home on the remaining land.

Mr. Molnar primarily viewed the purchase as an investment, a way to diversify his portfolio. But he plans to build a home on the property, and he considers the sustainability aspects to be a bonus. “The fact that they weren’t destroying the land to develop it into something else,” he said. “It alleviated a little guilt about how things are being done in the world right now.”

Aware of buyers like Mr. Molnar, the developer of NatureWalk, the Canadian-based PRG Group, changed its marketing strategy. Instead of focusing on the environmental aspects, the developer now emphasizes the potential revenue, catering to what the company president, Tim Alexander, calls “economic environmentalism.”

Since beginning sales in 2011, PRG has sold more than 100 lots, with prices ranging from $55,000 to $100,000 for parcels of a quarter-acre to one and a quarter acres.

“It’s not a decision based on the eco-value,” Mr. Alexander said. “They look for both, but the investment comes first.”

Eco-developments also are benefiting from the growing group of buyers in North America concerned about the state of the world economy, local industry executives say.

Osa Mountain Village Resort, located in the mountains along the southern Pacific coast, is billed as “a sustainable, fully functional, food-producing resort community.” In addition to a secluded setting and enticing swimming pools, the resort offers residents a steady supply of fresh fruits, vegetables and other food items.

The availability of an independent food supply is a key component for many buyers, said the developer, Jim Gale. “Without the food production, we’d have 80 percent less sales,” he said. “The main thing is food security.”

Osa has sold more than 100 properties in the last four years, Mr. Gale said. Sixty of the 150 planned homes have been built, with prices ranging from $69,000 for a rustic 250-square-foot house to $259,000 for a 1,200-square-foot condo with full amenities.

In 2011, Dan Lutz, a chiropractor in Minnesota, paid about $125,000 in a pre-construction deal for a 1,300-square-foot apartment. He said he made the purchase because he was concerned that the United States was on an “unsustainable trajectory.”

“As far as I’m concerned, it just made sense to have a piece of real estate where you do have a guaranteed abundance of food, you have guaranteed abundance of water,” said Mr. Lutz, 44. “We had just went through a big recession, it was kind of scary. I thought I better have a Plan B.” For now, he uses the house on vacations, and loans it to family and friends.

In Finca Bellavista, the tree house development, the developers have sold 54 of the 96 available plots, totaling 100 acres, since 2006. Lots average about two acres and are typically priced from $40,000 to $80,000, depending on the location and accessibility.

Buyers purchase the land and the right to build a house in selected trees. At this point, 12 tree houses have been built, connected to the rest of the project by narrow trails, rope ladders and zip lines. Although amenities are few, there is a fiber optic connection to the base camp, as the developers call the headquarters, for owners who are not quite ready to completely discard civilization.

Mr. Angstadt’s custom-designed tree house will have a flushing toilet and a solar-heated hot water shower, in addition to a wide deck and extra high ceilings to accommodate his 6-foot-8 frame.

“I appreciate a good hot shower and I appreciate a flushed toilet,” said Mr. Angstadt, who hopes to start construction on his tree house in early 2015. “But I’m also quite happy out there getting muddy and washing off in the river.”

Read the full story in the New York Times HERE

(No) Drill, Baby, Drill

by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN / The New York Times
Published: April 11, 2009

Sailing down Costa Rica’s Tempisque River on an eco-tour, I watched a crocodile devour a brown bass with one gulp. It took only a few seconds. The croc’s head emerged from the muddy waters near the bank with the footlong fish writhing in its jaws. He crunched it a couple of times with razor-sharp teeth and then, with just the slightest flip of his snout, swallowed the fish whole. Never saw that before.

These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system.

More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done: It put energy, environment, mines and water all under one minister.

“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodríguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.

But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodríguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long-run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”

As a result, Costa Rica hugely invested in hydro-electric power, wind and geo-thermal, and today it gets more than 95 percent of its energy from these renewables. In 1985, it was 50 percent hydro, 50 percent oil. More interesting, Costa Rica discovered its own oil five years ago but decided to ban drilling — so as not to pollute its politics or environment! What country bans oil drilling?

Rodríguez also helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for. Right now, most countries fail to account for the “externalities” of various economic activities. So when a factory, farmer or power plant pollutes the air or the river, destroys a wetland, depletes a fish stock or silts a river — making the water no longer usable — that cost is never added to your electric bill or to the price of your shoes.

Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because the forests maintained the watersheds and kept the rivers free of silt — and that benefited dam owners, fishermen, farmers and eco-tour companies downstream. The forests also absorbed carbon.

To pay for these environmental services, in 1997 Costa Rica imposed a tax on carbon emissions — 3.5 percent of the market value of fossil fuels — which goes into a national forest fund to pay indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them. And the country imposed a water tax whereby major water users — hydro-electric dams, farmers and drinking water providers — had to pay villagers upstream to keep their rivers pristine. “We now have 7,000 beneficiaries of water and carbon taxes,” said Rodríguez. “It has become a major source of income for poor people. It has also enabled Costa Rica to actually reverse deforestation. We now have twice the amount of forest as 20 years ago.”

As we debate a new energy future, we need to remember that nature provides this incredible range of economic services — from carbon-fixation to water filtration to natural beauty for tourism. If government policies don’t recognize those services and pay the people who sustain nature’s ability to provide them, things go haywire. We end up impoverishing both nature and people. Worse, we start racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.

To see the orginal article by THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (three time Pulitizer prize winner) just click here