A few interesting press releases have come across my desk recently, but one that keeps coming back to the top of the pile is about a community just twenty-two miles from the White House in St. Charles, Maryland.

This planned community already encompasses thirteen-thousand housing units, five-million square feet of commercial space, and nine schools within approximately nine thousand acres. Future plans include the development of an additional four-thousand acres of residential and commercial space. So what makes this development so special?  A community-wide focus on renewable resources, water conservation, and technological advances hopes to bring St. Charles to the forefront of green living.

Developer American Communities Property Trust has ambitious goals for this community, including the reduction of energy consumption across the board by fifty-percent, greater utilization of clean natural gas, and the generation of twenty-five percent of its power from renewable resources such as solar, biomass and geothermal resources. It also has plans to work with existing homes and businesses to develop a retrofit plan that will bring existing buildings into the standards set for the project no later than 2020.

One of the most exciting parts of this project is the implementation of technology to manage and connect the buildings and the people in them so that energy use and information can be monitored and controlled in real time. Developers plan to capture data from all buildings across the city, create public and private system partnerships to help with traffic patterns, public safety, education and planning, work with major employers in the area to enable the necessary systems to promote telecommuting and remote workplaces, and also will provide community wifi and a local community social network. These are ambitious plans, but a green, connected, forward-thinking city would make an excellent role model for others to follow.

Realinvest20.com will be watching this promising development and hopes to bring you more with the developers and residents in the months to come. For more on St. Charles, visit the project website at www.stcharlesmd.com.

Written by :

Troy Hicks

 

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