Newtown’s Planning and Zoning Commission has a favorite tool in its journeyman’s kit that is specifically designed to help towns break free of a legacy of residential development that erases entire ecosystems and natural environments, replacing them with a monoculture of suburban sprawl. The commission takes it out and looks at it wistfully once in a while, and wonders why this tool has never been used.

Newtown’s Open Space Conservation Subdivision (OSCS) regulations have been on the books for seven years as an option for developers to save money through clustered higher density construction while preserving more than three times as much open space than the traditional subdivision. The housing developers we have around these days are survivors of a brutal housing market that has made them wary. They have seen too many big new ideas fail. They are less likely to believe that the early bird gets the worm, knowing as they do that it is too often the second mouse that gets the cheese.

Last week, the Planning and Zoning Commission decided to stop wondering and start asking why its OSCS regulations were not attracting any development proposals. The commission convened a session with a small group of realtors to examine the issue on August 11 and scheduled a follow-up session with land engineers and developers for September 20. The realtors expressed various concerns about how homebuyers would react to a new kind of development in town with shorter roads and homes clustered in closer proximity to each other than is customary. “We can’t build something that’s not going to sell,” said one realtor. “It’s sort of unproven… Who’s going to be the first to do it?”

Open space conservation development, however, is proven and drawing homebuyers, particularly in western states, but also in several states on the East Coast. Research in Delaware has shown that not only does the conservation design concept for residential developments preserve natural ecosystems and habitats and facilitate more efficient storm water runoff management, it has dramatically cut the cost of per-lot infrastructure. In one 142-lot subdivision, the per-lot cost dropped from $17,325 for a conventional design to $6,259 for a conservation design, either raising the profit margin for developers, lowering the purchase price for homebuyers, or both. Even here in western Connecticut, developers in the towns of Bethel, Woodbury, and Middlebury have successfully marketed housing in cluster developments, preserving large tracts of open space in the process.

If the Planning and Zoning Commission wants to get some use out of its innovative conservation tool, it might want to review not the content of the OSCS regulations, but how they are implemented. The commission’s chairman, Lilla Dean, observed last month that the complexity of the current application process for conservation subdivisions may be “scaring off” developers. A convoluted bureaucratic process is not very seductive for even the most ardent and enlightened developer. It may be time to take the cheese out of the trap. A little more assurance in the form of a streamlined application and review process may just get things moving in the right direction.