Building Our City | Rosewood Hills development to feature unseen green

Multicolored homes are sprouting up at the old Hendley Homes site on Rosewood Drive as the long-awaited redevelopment begins.

But it’s the color you can’t see that sets the new Rosewood Hills community apart.

The city of Columbia is going green with the first Midlands neighborhood slated to meet the nation’s strictest environmental standards.

The Columbia Housing Authority is hoping to prove that “green” doesn’t have to equal expensive. Going green doesn’t always mean solar panels on the roof and windmills.

The city is spending about $1,000 extra per house on features, including low-flow plumbing fixtures and high-efficiency windows.

Besides reducing the impact on the environment, the features will help homeowners lower electric and water bills.

The development replaces a nearly 50-year-old, dilapidated public housing complex demolished in 2001. The 60 homes will cost from $120,000 to $200,000-plus and range from 1,500 to 2,400 square feet.

Half the homes will be available to anyone. The project also will include some subsidized rental homes, homes targeted at those 65 and older, commercial development and green space.

“We all kind of have this perception that it’s a real expensive thing to do,” said Julia Prater, who is overseeing the development for the Columbia Housing Authority. “(But) it’s not just high-end communities that can go green; we can all do it.”

Prater said developers are hoping the project will help educate builders and developers that building in an environmentally sensitive way can be affordable as the green building movement catches on in the Midlands.

Building the homes has been a learning curve for The Mungo Cos., the project’s builder, said chief of operations Steven Mungo.

Mungo is one of a handful of Midlands builders venturing into green building through a variety of certification programs.

Rosewood Hills is being certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green-building program.

More commonly known as LEED, the program is run by the U.S. Green Building Council, a nonprofit whose members include builders, universities and government agencies .

Certification is based on points assigned to a home’s green features..

Points are not just awarded for extra insulation and energy-efficient appliances.

Building green also is about reducing the amount of waste put in a landfill and the amount of time residents’ cars are on the road.

The Rosewood Hills project is looking to qualify because:

• It is on a redeveloped site, which means no clear-cutting was done.

• A bus station is located across the street.

• The development is within walking distance of stores, schools, churches and other amenities.

Among the qualities that make the 19 homes already built in the neighborhood green are installing filters to improve indoor-air quality and using building products manufactured within a 500-mile radius to cut down on transportation.

Future homes in the development could include more options, such as dual-flush toilets and front-loading washing machines, both of which cut down on water use.

Even the landscaping will contribute to the green designation. The builder will use Bermuda grass and native plants that don’t require much watering and will use drip irrigation.

Claude St. Hilaire, the LEED provider for South Carolina who will certify all the houses in Rosewood Hills, said he has worked with a growing number of S.C. developers in the past year who want to build green.

“Within the next 10 years, if a builder is not building green, then he won’t be building houses, period,” St. Hilaire said. “Our biggest challenge, really, is education and awareness.”

Reach Rupon at (803) 771-8308.