Why Sustainability Matters
Karina and I recently attended a presentation by the consultant responsible for updating the Urban Development Plan for the Todos Santos area, which includes Cerritos. He opened his presentation by stating that he had seen development in the area that concerned him due to its unsustainability. I expected to see a picture of the half-built seven-story condo project on Cerritos Beach, but instead, it was a long dirt road with a few single-family homes scattered on either side. He explained that from an Urban Planner's perspective, this is highly unsustainable and impossible for the municipality to support. While this is a typical urban planning point of view in the US, particularly in cities, I was surprised to hear it espoused in semi-rural Baja Mexico.
But the logic is difficult to contradict. Density allows the concentration of resources in a way that single-family homes simply cannot.
Like many affluent areas, homeowners here expect to have a wide array of amenities available to them. Everyone wants a pool, hot tub, a place for yoga or working out and an outdoor space for large gatherings with family and friends. Wanting these amenities is not a problem per se; we want them too, but when you multiply these features across many homes, the resource usage adds up since every house now has them. Sharing-based communities can be significantly less resource intensive, and pooling monetary resources affords the ability to include sustainability features that are cost-prohibitive for individual homeowners.
As we plan the Contigo Cerritos community, we know that we have an opportunity and a responsibility because, for us, sustainability is not an afterthought; we built it into our design. We understand that our beloved Baja landscape is, in fact, quite delicate. The first thing you notice is that water is a scarce resource here. When we moved here, we assumed that the large aquifer that supplies the farmland in Pescadero was sufficient to supply water for human consumption. This is true for now but will not be the case once all the lots already sold in the area are built out. To ensure that we are not a drain on this most precious resource, we will build and operate our own water desalination treatment plant to produce up to 28,000 liters of drinkable water per day, more than enough to meet our community's needs.
Like everyone else in the Cerritos / Pescadero area, we will treat our wastewater on-site. We have selected a treatment plant of the same design used by municipalities throughout the US. The outputs of this system are water clean enough to safely water plants or reintroduce to the ocean and dry, soil-like material that we are working with local regenerative farmers to utilize in their composting program. We plan to create full-circle utilization of these materials!
The longer we live here, we realize that the power grid is not always as reliable as we might expect. We are installing as much solar generation as possible to ensure sufficient power for our critical infrastructure (water pumps, desalination, wastewater treatment). Any excess capacity will be used for shared infrastructure like the pool and gym, thus reducing HOA costs and allowing individual homeowners to charge their own backup power systems.
If this sounds like we are spending much time and money on sustainability, it is true! Because in the end, a sustainable approach utilizing high-quality systems and shared communal amenities is the way to minimize our impact and create a genuinely sustainable community in this magical place we all love!