Hillside Lifestyle Adds Views, Value, Expense

There is a theme to the American dream:
A house on a hill.
A room with a view.
Movin’ on up.
Few symbols of success are more powerful than a spacious home cut into a hillside. One look can convey both the means of the owner and the skill of the builder.
Especially in Fayetteville, where corners cut on cornerstones can mean the difference between a trouble-free home or one slip, sliding away.
More than 90 percent of the land in Fayetteville, be it hillside or watershed, is characterized by a soft, expansive clay soil three feet to five feet thick above a layer of firm shale. The ever-shifting, moisture-sensitive clay can play havoc with the foundation of the home it supports in the form of minor nuisances like cracked drywall and major headaches requiring expensive repairs.
Ward Davis, the developer behind the proposed Ruskin Heights project off Mission Boulevard in Fayetteville, said an engineered foundation can cost 50 percent to 100 percent more and the price will quickly move past $10,000 depending on the home size and slope/soil conditions.
“It’s one of the costs of living on a hillside,” Davis said. “Owners need to be dealing with that on the front end. Most are skittish about that, and they should be. The soil is bad everywhere.”
Fayetteville mayor Dan Coody took some flak last April when he vetoed provisions in the hillside ordinance passed by the city council requiring anyone building in the hillside overlay district to take a geotechnical survey before building.
Coody contends the provision was illogical considering nearly all of Fayetteville rests on unstable soil, and the city already has stricter building codes for foundations than anywhere else in the state.
In 1998, Fayetteville passed an ordinance requiring a minimum 12-inch wide foundation in addition to steel reinforcement.
More common standards are for eight inches wide without reinforcing, said Fayetteville building safety director Steve Cattaneo.
He added that the foundations built under the tougher code have less than a 3 percent failure rate.
Brian Teague, CEO of Community by Design LLC of Fayetteville, and his company are the engineers of Ruskin Heights and he said the pilot project for his firm was designed to minimize hillside impact.
Ruskin Heights will require anyone buying lots within the development to have an engineered foundation.
The standard foundation is a continuous footing around three feet deep, Teague said, but a “pier and beam” system will be the most sound.
The systems are about two feet deep with piers dug into the shale every 10 feet.
With an eye toward creating smaller “footprints” for homes, Ruskin Heights will have narrower lot sizes and its street plan calls for roads either perpendicular or parallel to the contours of the hillside.
This kind of plan creates lots with similar soil type so builders can limit the number of adaptations they’ll need to make.
Ruskin Heights will have narrower roads and smaller right-of-way and utility easements because water, sewer and utility lines will run below the streets.
Curb and gutter systems and proper road grading will direct water flow away from the homes. Contrast that with the rest of Mt. Sequoyah where most of the existing streets were constructed without curbs or gutters and only ditches to direct water flow.
“We’ll fix most of the problems knowing what they’ve dealt with,” Teague said.