With environmental concerns and solutions coming to the forefront, it’s only appropriate we institute a new award, Best Green Business, to not only commend efforts to be part of the solution, but also to encourage businesses to lead the way.
It should come as no big surprise that our first winner in this new category is Codding Enterprises, whose 200-acre mixed-use community, Sonoma Mountain Village in Rohnert Park, is set to become a model of ecologically sound, sustainable living, green building practices and energy efficiency.
Within Sonoma Mountain Village, residents can work, shop, play and live—and it’s all accessible by foot. The community includes office and other commercial space for work, grocery and retail stores, and service businesses for shopping and amenities, a movie theater, restaurants, parks, soccer fields and 1,000 single-family homes and 900 multi-family homes.
Sonoma Mountain Village has been recognized on a local, national and international level as a solution to many of the environmental problems we face as citizens of the world. The development has even been endorsed by One Planet Communities—the first such recognition in North America. “Codding Enterprises and Sonoma Mountain Village embrace the principles developed by the international One Planet Communities program and BioRegional UK,” explains Brad Baker, president and CEO of Codding Enterprises.
“Basically, they evaluate development projects based on the statistic that, if every person in the world lived like the average American, we’d need five and a half planets to support the world’s population. But if everybody lived like the people in these One Planet communities, we’d only need one planet. We’re the first One Planet community in North America and one of only four in the world.”
Sonoma Mountain Village is already fulfilling one of its first goals—to create local jobs for residents—by currently leasing commercial space. It’s already 60 percent occupied with 37 businesses, employing approximately 500 people. Simultaneously, Codding Enterprises is completing the entitlement process with the city of Rohnert Park and expects an administrative draft of the environmental impact report (EIR) sometime this spring. If all goes as planned, Codding Enterprises expects to start building the residential and retail portions of Sonoma Mountain Village by late 2008 or early 2009.
The shift to green business is relatively recent in the long history of Codding Enterprises, which was started by local developer Hugh Codding in the late 1930s. Back then, the firm focused on building homes before eventually moving on to shopping centers; in 1950, it built Santa Rosa’s first community shopping center, Montgomery Village. Today, Codding Enterprises controls more than 3 million square feet of commercial space.
While mixed-use projects might seem like a stretch for a company that primarily focused on shopping centers and strip-malls for more than 50 years, Sonoma Mountain Village is actually a natural evolution of Hugh Codding’s original vision. Over the years, Codding’s success has often been attributed to his ability to recognize what his neighbors wanted and then providing it.
“We think consumers will increasingly demand the features you’ll find in green building,” says Baker. “If you don’t implement green building practices and technology, there’s the potential of your building becoming obsolete much quicker as tenants demand to have these features. As long-term investors, we think we’ll save money on operating costs and our product will be worth more in the future. From a landlord’s standpoint, we like it because we think a lot of the things you do to save energy also saves you money. So we think it’s a good investment.”
