When developers talk about planning for the environment, they talk about a building’s footprint.
Michael McCarthy, director of the Roger C. Hobbs Institute at Chapman University, talks about handprints.
As part of a certificate program at Chapman University that started last month, McCarthy will lead excursions all over the world to see how sustainable projects can make a difference to the environment and be profitable at the same time.
One of his favorite excursion stops is in an aboriginal cave where handprints cover the wall, one on top of the other, “from as far back as time remembers.” It’s in that moment that McCarthy hopes to impart to the students what they touch will leave a mark on the world that the next generation will have to follow.
But the certificate program, which mixes real estate, law and environmental studies, isn’t all touchy-feely.
In fact, its principles come down to making cold hard cash,while making a difference, of course.
The institute’s mantra is “green both ways.”
McCarthy, who is heading up the direction of the first certificate program, said the institute is really a think tank since the reality-based courses can’t be applied toward a degree at Chapman.
Its curriculum is nonexistent.
The academics and business professionals who lead the institute assemble students and community leaders to attack specific problems with nonprofits.
The leaders are considering forging a partnership with a locally based nonprofit that is interested in protecting the ocean. The students would then partner with that organization (since they are still in negotiations McCarthy asked that it not be named) to create a game plan to get area businesses to help fund the cleanup and preservation efforts.
But how is that profitable to businesses?
In this instance, the think tank group would lobby local and state governments on behalf of businesses to get tax credits or incentives for the companies that help protect the ocean through things such as changing their trash removal methods.
And the group would lead an education effort to inform hillside businesses and developments about their effects on the ocean.
“If the ocean gets worse, the businesses get worse and the community gets worse,” McCarthy said. “We have to partner with businesses. And we can’t expect businesses to do something that isn’t profitable.”
McCarthy points to examples of this working in different states and areas of the world.
In Texas, the state was losing 4,000 acres of wetlands a year to development. One developer ended up canceling plans for a hotel project and instead set aside 3,000 acres of wetland in perpetuity, so it could never be built on.
The developer then sold wetland credits to other developers at $40,000 an acre, according to McCarthy.
“The developer couldn’t have told a mallard from a sparrow, but he and his heirs will make $12 million from that investment,” McCarthy said, “and the community will get wetlands in perpetuity that can never be changed. The developer did more for the wetlands in that one project than any government effort.”
And McCarthy wants the students, who are primarily working professionals who take the year-long program one night a week, to learn from these positive examples all over the world. So he is leading four excursions in 2008 and 2009 to Australia, Costa Rica and Panama, Dubai and Abu Dhabi and the islands of the South Pacific and Hawaii. The programs are all two weeks long and revolve around interviews with the community leaders who have successful projects in the area.
“If a person took all four of these programs they would have spent the same number of hours as a typical MBA,” McCarthy said. “And in that time they would have met 20 to 30 of the key community leaders of each of those regions and had more contacts and seen more real solutions than any MBA.”
Building the network of contacts is a key component of the Roger C. Hobbs Institute for Real Estate, Law and Environmental Studies, which was founded in 2005 through a $10 million donation from real estate developer Roger Hobbs.
The institute gives certificate participants a head start on that networking through a partnership with the Urban Land Institute, which leases space in the building.
The institute is cosponsoring the second annual OC Sustainability Conference Nov. 1 with ULI that professionals in the certificate program are required to attend.
McCarthy said the conference gives them a basis for what they need to be competitive as state regulations change developers’ responsibilities for offsetting potential climate change issues.
“Real estate professionals, here and elsewhere, require much more than business and financial acumen,” said Chapman President James Doti, who helped develop the idea for the institute and certificate program. “Responsible real estate development also requires an understanding of ever-more-complex legal and environmental issues, as we see almost every day here in Orange County.”
And McCarthy wants California to have its hands in defining that change as the federal government discusses cap-and-trade regulations and incentive-based programs for protecting the environment in development.
And what better place to start than the Hobbs Institute?
“We are an institute that helps people,not some eight-story edifice that people visit,” McCarthy said. “We want to be the epicenter for people to offer ideas.”
