It’s not a new idea, but planning and zoning officials in Avon are hoping to adopt a practice designed to save open space while providing for higher-density housing in its village center.

If the program works in Avon, it would mark the first time it has been successfully utilized in Connecticut.

“What we’re considering is a transfer of development rights,” said Steven Kushner, the town planner.

The state several years ago passed a law enabling the concept, although other towns tried it even before the legislation was passed. A transfer of development rights would let developers buy development rights from residents – primarily farmers who may find it difficult to keep the family farm afloat. Most open space and farms in the town are zoned as single-family space.

The developer could then take the right of developing those homes to a different site – planning and zoning officials have identified some open tracts of land in the village center – and could add those rights to the existing rights there, enabling the developer to create more dense housing.

Kushner gave the example of a farm that is zoned for agriculture, but also for single-family houses, on at least 0.8 acres apiece. If a developer bought development rights for 10 acres, that would give them the right to build 12.5 units of housing. The developer could then buy some land near the village center, which also would come with development rights, and add those 12.5 units worth of rights to that site, resulting in denser housing.

The Avon Planning and Zoning Commission will play with the numbers, Kushner said, to make it worthwhile for both the developer and the farmer.

The idea will come with its dissenters and challenges, Kushner said. The construction of higher-density housing in most New England towns garners its share of NIMBYism – the “not in my backyard” mentality – despite the fact that higher-density housing usually means more affordable housing. That’s something most New England towns, including Avon, are sorely lacking.

Kushner emphasized that the apartments and condominiums that could sprout up in Avon’s village center would fit in architecturally, would be buffered from nearby single-family developments and would include a good deal of green space. But they also would fill another need the Planning and Zoning Commission has identified: the revitalization of the village center.

“The idea of the village center is to make it a more vibrant place and a more lively place,” Kushner said.

‘Ideal Situations’

The construction of more housing within walking distance of services like the post office and local restaurants would put more “feet on the street,” as many planners put it. The concept is at the center of many a downtown revitalization. And Avon’s village center is off to a good start: Some people already live there, and an extended-stay hotel within walking distance brings people into the area’s stores and restaurants.

“I think some of those pieces in the village center are already in place,” Kushner said.

There is also some available land there owned by Ensign-Bickford Industries, a company that used to make explosives and had factories in Avon.

The other difficulty with the transfer of development rights is the need to make the process worthwhile to both farmers and developers. Other Connecticut towns that have tried to instate the transfer have run into trouble there.

The concept first came up in the 1960s, according to Jim Gibbons, land-use and natural resource program coordinator with the University of Connecticut’s Cooperative Extension System. In the late 1970s, a group that included Gibbons tried to implement a transfer of development rights in East Windsor.

Group members ran into many problems designating a preservation zone, and after a lot of work designated a zone that would hold the higher-density development.

But when they met with Realtors and people in the community who knew about land values, they hit a wall, Gibbons said. They could not figure out a way to make it work, but it was complicated to figure out a way to make it worthwhile for everyone involved. The group even consulted with some people from a county in Maryland that had successfully adopted the concept, but did not find success.

“I was beginning to think, boy, if we can’t come up with a valueÂ…,” Gibbons said. “Once we got into that nitty-gritty, everyone said they thought it wouldn’t work.”

So East Windsor’s transfer of development rights never got off the ground. Enfield has the concept on the books, Gibbons said, but has never used it.

The members of Avon’s Planning and Zoning Commission are trying to figure out how they might overcome the obstacles that East Windsor found.

To start, it could be difficult to convince some farmers to sell their development rights. Many stand to make a lot of money by just selling the land, including development rights, but selling the rights can leave the land worth quite a bit less. But many farmers also want to continue farming, a prospect that is more difficult than ever in New England, where the economy has not favored family farms for some time.

A state program that buys development rights from farmers has found some success, and Avon officials hope they could, too. The state program also prompted the creation of a database that will make it easier to find those farmers willing to part with development rights.

“The [owners of farms or open space] have to have a stewardship ethic” in order to be willing to sell their property rights, Gibbons said.

If the town can find farmers or property owners who are willing to sell, officials then face the challenge of finding developers who want to build the types of housing the commission envisions, and find a way to make it worth the developers’ while.

“That can be challenging,” Kushner said.

It could mean that, for each unit’s worth of development rights a developer buys, they get to build two units in the new site. But the commission has to find a happy medium – something townspeople will approve of, but something that will draw developers.

The commission is trying to come up with a formula that is equitable and tries to give incentives to farmers and real estate developers alike.

“If, at the end of the day, the real estate developer ends up being revenue-neutral, there’s not much incentive for that company to go through the extra work [of obtaining the development rights from the open space],” Kushner said.

There are also other forms of the idea being floated.

“If the commission is inclined to permit a somewhat higher-density project in the village center Â… one thought is that, instead of that added value really being transferred to the real estate developer or property owner, [to] take a portion of that increased value and use that to subsidize the farmer in the more rural area of the town,” Kushner said.

A transfer of development rights is always a challenging situation, but there have been some changes in real estate since the 1970s, when Gibbons and others tried to make it work in East Windsor, he said. It is more common now to purchase development rights, and to buy land for less than market value.

“It would be interesting,” Gibbons said. “It sort of takes some ideal situations.”

In the end, though, it’s all about preservation.

“If you have those things in place, that’s great. It may be even just one situation, but if you’re able to save one tract of open space, that’s great,” he said.

Kushner echoed that sentiment.

“Even a modest amount of acres that could be preserved is better than no acres that can be preserved,” he said.

The Planning and Zoning Commission is not under any specific timeline for instating the transfer of development rights, Kushner said.