A ‘blueprint’ for future homebuilding in St. Tammany?

On the banks of the Little Bogue Falaya, an unlikely duo — an environmentalist and a property developer — have struck a deal.

The developer bought 141 acres north of Covington and will build 141 homes. But the project’s actual construction footprint will be relatively small: 40 acres will be taken up by two parks, and 60 acres will become the Villere-Lopiccolo Nature Preserve. 

The nature preserve has been donated to Northshore Riverwatch, a St. Tammany environmental advocacy nonprofit, which will maintain the land and leave it completely undeveloped. 

The land preservation deal is unusual, and has occasionally surprised even the executive director of Northshore Riverwatch, Matthew Allen, who is partnering with developer Kenneth Lopiccolo on the project.

“As an environmentalist, I almost felt like a traitor,” Allen said of working alongside a developer. “I would’ve been the first to oppose the project if I thought it was going to be harmful to the river.”

And Allen does often oppose new development in St. Tammany Parish. But he was convinced by Lopiccolo’s plan, even speaking in favor of it before the parish’s Planning and Zoning board.

This won’t be Lopiccolo’s first foray into residential development either. He built out 100 lots in the Alexander Ridge subdivision next door to this new project. Prior to that, he worked on Terre Marie, another neighborhood where he developed 72 lots. And before that that, built out Savannahs Covington, 285 homes off of River Road. 

Indeed, the partnership represents an atypical development approach in St. Tammany Parish, where the strains of residential and commercial development more often result in public meetings with angry residents pleading with elected officials to slow — or even stop — new subdivisions.

Since 1970, St. Tammany’s population has grown more than any other parish in the Louisiana. It’s population more than quadrupled, from about 64,000 to more than 275,000, in the last 50 years.  

The site was once a plantation where exotic tung trees were grown and harvested for their oil, which was widely used as a varnish on military planes and ships during World War II, as well as for machine lubricants and lacquers. The tung trees, now considered an invasive species, still grow on the nature preserve. 

While some other residential developments include larger undisturbed tracts, like Money Hill, many new subdivisions come with much smaller areas of dedicated green space or community pools. Few include the type of undisturbed natural habitat that will remain untouched around Lopiccolo’s development. And it’s the first time any developer has partnered with Allen’s local nonprofit group to do so.

“I can’t stop development,” Allen said, noting that he expects a gradual exodus from low-lying areas of Louisiana, and that the first high ground is in St. Tammany Parish. “It’s only through partnerships like this that we’re going to make things right for everybody.”

Both Allen and Lopiccolo know the northshore’s rivers well.

“I grew up on this little river,” Lopiccolo said. “I can’t tell you how many fish I had to produce for my grandmother every Sunday so that we could have a fish fry.”

“That’s the environment that I grew up in, and that’s the environment that he grew up in,” he added, gesturing toward Allen. 

The developer’s wager

If it works out, Allen and Lopiccolo hope the project becomes a blueprint for the rest of the parish. But its based on a gamble that Lopiccolo is making, and success isn’t guaranteed.

The idea is to charge a premium for the preservation around the subdivision. Lopiccolo thinks that homebuyers will see the value in the untouched, preserved natural land around their homes, as well as a shared park area accessible only to residents in the subdivision, and be willing to pay for it. But for the price Lopiccolo hopes to charge, prospective homebuyers could get a house on a larger lot elsewhere in the parish.

Lopiccolo has listed the biggest homes in the development for between $400,000 and just over $600,000. 

“I’m betting that people will be happy with smaller lots surrounded by this,” Lopiccolo said, indicating the area around the river that won’t be developed. “You’ve got to believe that preservation is more valuable than a golf course lot.”

“We’re going to hopefully prove a case study” with this development, he added. “The small lot is the only tool that leads to this amount of greenspace.”

A community of environmentalists

Lopiccolo also thinks that the homeowners will be willing to pay a continued fee to support the preservation of the land.

The development will be made up of two subdivisions, each of which will have its own homeowner’s association. The larger of the two, an expansion of the Alexander Ridge development that Lopiccolo also developed, will have 136 homes on 55-foot-wide lots that will be 100 feet deep. Each of those homes, Lopiccolo said, will have a “premium view,” either of the lake or of the preserved woodland. The other, Little River Court, will have five homes on two-acre lots that will border one of the parks.

They’re still in the early stages of working out the details, but the idea is that Northshore Riverwatch will provide nature education programming, and access to the preserved land, in exchange for a fee paid through the homeowner’s associations. Allen estimates that the fee might be around $2.50 a month.

“We’re brainstorming right now to see how everybody reacts” to the idea of a fee, Lopiccolo said. But he thinks that his new residents will ultimately want to support Northshore Riverwatch.

The project, all told, is to Allen an example for how conservation can be a cost-saving enterprise, not just for businesses but for local governments, too.

“If we do this right, we’re going to save the taxpayer billions of dollars in the future on mitigating increased flood damages and water quality problems,” Allen said. “I’m just hoping we can do more of this.”