The greener the better

After some major disagreements with the inhabitants of Ternat, the YHHI decided to plant new trees in their freshly built neighborhood.

The YHMP talked with the CEO of the YHHI, the owner of said residential area to find out why they decided to do it now, and why the area was built without any greenery in mind.

Martijn, tell us a bit about the new residential area. Why was there such a big demand for something like this?

YHHI build the Dutch Park as fast as possible because of the opening of the branches and companies of Evance. The typical age and the education levels of those IT professionals demanded some extra luxury as currently offered in Ternat. We have those lovely houses of the typical old architecture, but this specific group of people just need some different type of house. They are mostly young people, just starting a family but with a rather high income. So as fast as we could we bought some land from the Ternat Mayor and build luxury houses in two types, the villa and the smaller detached houses.

Why did your company decide to plant more trees afterwards and not during the initial construction?

Now that we are further in time we received feedback from the residents association about the lack of green in the area. And we agreed as trees were less of a priority at the moment. Back then we had some technical difficulties getting the builds ready, so those issues had to be addressed first. But all those have been solved so we now decided it was time to invest in the area again and get those trees there. We offered free trees to the residents to plant in their yards and we planted trees along the roads in the Park. We received such positive responses that we had to order a lot more trees as projected, but we did this with pleasure. Our residents are the number one priority.

Would you say that you'll build future residential areas with more trees in mind?

At this moment there are no plans for building new residential areas. We have an agreement with Shell Home Rentals to build their houses and at this moment there is little demand for luxury houses on the Real Estate market. But if that will happen, I'm sure the architects will keep an eye on nature but will also keep in mind the type of residential buildings. Invest loads of money for social housing is not economical for a company, so we need to find a good compromise on that. But as I said, at this moment there are no plans for new residentials.

We think that bringing nature into cities improves the quality of living drastically.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!