The Woodland Engine: A Manifesto for Nature Driven Homes
Written before a single home is built
This is a declaration. It will be updated as we build.
"No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin."
— Seamus Heaney, speaking at the launch of Michael Warren's sculpture Antaeus, Coillte Forest, Co. Wicklow, 1998
I. The Problem We're Not Naming
Ireland has two crises. Everyone knows them. Everyone discusses them separately.
The first: a generation of people locked out of homeownership. Teachers, nurses, engineers in their thirties — people who built their lives here, who contribute every day, who have tried to do everything right — unable to buy a home in the country they love. Not because they haven't worked hard enough. Because the system is broken.
And inside that crisis, a quieter one: the people who don't even make it on to the waiting list. The ones for whom "affordable housing" is a phrase that appears in government documents but not in their lives. Single parents, essential workers, the people doing the work that holds communities together. People for whom the word home has become a source of pain rather than possibility.
The second: a country losing its nature. Less than 2% of Ireland is native woodland. Two percent. The hedgerows, the red squirrels, the curlews, the ancient oak corridors that once defined this land — gone or going, quietly, while we argue about planning permissions and housing targets.
Here is the thing nobody says out loud: we've been solving one problem by accelerating the other.
Every estate built on farmland at the edge of an Irish town is a family homed, but an ecosystem erased. Every planning application submitted is a developer asking permission to convert nature into profit. The planning and development system has been created in a way where housing and nature are competitors, where every hectare of woodland is a hectare of lost revenue, and then we expressed surprise when both crises deepened simultaneously.
The housing crisis won't be solved by building more of the same thing. The biodiversity crisis won't be solved by only protecting what little remains.
What if the solution to both is the same thing?
II. What We Forgot
There is a word in Ireland for the territory a person knows in their bones: the townland. Not the county, not the province — the few square kilometres a family walked for generations, where every field had a name and every name had a story. Patrick Kavanagh wrote that to know fully even one field is a lifetime's experience. He wasn't being modest. He was describing something we have largely lost: the intimacy of belonging to a specific piece of land, and it belonging to you.
For centuries, that intimacy was the texture of Irish life. The land was not backdrop; it was alive, revered, contested, tended, sung about. The bogs, the hedgerows, the coill, the commons were not recreational amenities. They were home in the full sense of the word.
Somewhere in the postwar rush to build a modern economy, what remained of that intimacy was largely forgotten. The countryside became something you drove through on the way to somewhere else. Nature became something managed by agencies, protected by designation, experienced on manicured walking trails, separate from the places people actually live.
We built estates with token same-grass lawns that face each other, and called it community. We planted ornamental trees that provide no habitat and named the roads after them. We installed streetlights that disorient wildlife, laid tarmac over drainage systems that took ten thousand years to develop, and then hired bright folks to write biodiversity action plans to be filed away.
This is not an indictment of anyone in particular. It is a description of a system that made sense by its own logic, and that has run out of road.
The evidence is everywhere. Over 80% of European protected habitats are in poor condition. Ireland consistently misses its target of 8,000 hectares of new native woodland per year, despite strong efforts with high integrity. The EU has now passed the Nature Restoration Regulation — the first continent-wide, binding ecological mandate in history — requiring Member States to restore 20% of all land and sea by 2030.
Restoration is no longer aspirational. It is the law.
And yet: nobody we're aware of in Irish housing has asked what it would look like to build restoration into the model, rather than bolting it on as a planning condition.
III. The Engine
We spent years watching the cleantech industry try to solve the climate crisis by selling guilt and aspiration. As powerful as they are, guilt and aspiration don't scale. What scales is alignment: when the financially rational choice and the human and ecologically responsible choices are the same choice.
So we asked a different question: what if each hectare of native Irish woodland is worth more to a residential development than the homes you could build on it?
Turns out it is, if you measure it holistically.
One hectare of native Irish woodland, thoughtfully established and permanently protected, sequesters carbon over decades, generates measurable biodiversity co-benefits, improves water quality, creates community connection, produces verified environmental credits, and qualifies for government support. That value doesn't disappear after the homes are sold. It compounds, year after year, for a hundred years.
The formula is simple: ten net-zero homes, per one hectare of permanent native woodland.
Not just a patch of trees squeezed awkwardly onto the corner of a site, too small to be ecologically meaningful. A real Woodland Bank — a properly sized, contiguous, professionally managed native woodland, held in perpetuity by a stewardship trust, legally protected against development for the lifetime of every home it serves. Separate from the residential site, deliberately located, ecologically designed.
Every home is permanently linked to this Woodland Bank through a binding legal covenant. The homeowners have access rights, a named section of the woodland, seasonal community programming, and documented ecological outcomes tied to their property. They pay a stewardship fee — less than most people spend on streaming subscriptions — and the woodland funds itself, indefinitely.
The woodland generates carbon credits. Biodiversity credits. Water quality co-benefits. Government grants. Energy infrastructure revenue. These income streams are not speculation — they're already being traded in established markets. And here's what makes them structurally important: they're permanent. The woodland earns every year. That income can be directed back into the model — to fund community infrastructure, to lower home prices for future developments, to create genuine affordability.
Every homeowner also benefits directly. The homes are designed to near-zero energy costs. The energy infrastructure — solar, battery storage, heat pump — is built into the model, not sold as an upgrade. The stewardship fee is less than what most households spend on a family dinner night out. The net annual saving, compared to a standard new build, runs to thousands of euros. Affordability isn't just about the purchase price. It's also about the cost of the life lived inside the home.
This is the 10:1 Model. Ten homes from each single hectare. Not a trade-off. An integration. And, as it matures — a path toward homes that become more and more affordable.
IV. Why We Came Here
We're transparent about who we are, because it matters.
We are US citizens, seeking to become Irish citizens. We built careers in California and Los Angeles — at the intersection of clean energy, housing, and ecosystem restoration. For more than a decade, Neal co-founded and led the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, helping more than five hundred companies raise over a billion dollars. We worked in the places where climate policy, technology, and capital meet.
But the real origin of this company is not a career or a strategic insight. It's a waiting list.
Before any of that, Esther was a single mother trying to find an affordable home for herself and her child. She applied for every scheme she could find — every programme, every subsidy, every waiting list that promised a way into a home that was stable, safe, and hers. She never got in. Not because she didn't qualify. Not because she didn't try. Because the system is designed in a way that makes crises visible and then asks people to wait indefinitely. All the while, the gap between need and availability quietly grows wider.
That experience became something stubborn: a refusal to accept that this is simply how things have to be. NeighbourWood Communities exists, in part, because Esther remembers what it felt like to need a home and be told to keep waiting.
We're building what we wish had existed then. And we're building it so that it can exist for everyone.
Then, Ireland found us, or we found Ireland. Or both.
A country with a housing crisis severe enough to hollow out a generation. A country with some of Europe's most ambitious climate legislation and some of Europe's most depleted natural ecosystems. A place with an extraordinary cultural relationship with land — with a mythology, a literature, a whole way of being in the world — built around that relationship. And we saw something that didn't exist yet: a model that could honour all of it at once.
So we chose Ireland as the place where this idea is most needed and, we believe, most possible.
We applied for an Irish visa. We committed our personal savings. We'll purchase a home in our own pilot development at full market price, pay the same stewardship fees as every other resident, and raise our kids in the community we're building. We're doing this because we believe in it.
We write this in February 2026, from Santiago de Compostela, where we are waiting for our visa approval before we can permanently relocate. We have no homes built yet. No woodland planted. No pilot completed. We have a model, a plan, a legal structure, a team of advisors, a conviction, and a personal promise in the form of capital.
We are sharing this because we think transparency is the foundation everything else has to be built on. We are newcomers. We are not Irish. We do not presume to tell Ireland what it needs. We are bringing a model we believe in and asking if Ireland wants to help us build it.
V. What We're Building
In County Wicklow, on a site within reach of Dublin, we are building the first NeighbourWood Community pilot: five net-zero homes linked to a permanent native Woodland Bank. The homes will be certified to the highest energy performance standard available, BER A1, Passivhaus specification. The woodland will be established with native Irish species: oak, hazel, birch, hawthorn, holly, the trees that belonged here long before all of us.
The Woodland Bank will be owned by a stewardship trust, a Company Limited by Guarantee with an irrevocable asset lock, which means it can never be sold, developed, or dissolved for private gain. The woodland will be permanently protected, in law, for as long as the homes it serves exist.
Every homeowner will have access to a section of the woodland they name. There will be guided seasonal walks, wildlife surveys, and community planting days. Children will know the names of the trees near their home. Families will watch the woodland mature over years and decades. This is not an amenity. It is a relationship between people and place that has been designed into the legal and financial structure from the beginning.
The carbon sequestered by the woodland will be independently verified and documented. Biodiversity outcomes will be measured. The environmental value will be real, audited, and publicly reported — not just a claim on a brochure.
We will live there too. In the fourth house on the left, or wherever the lot falls. If it doesn't work for the people living there, it doesn't work. That's the only test that matters.
VI. The Scale of What's Possible
The pilot is five homes. The model promises much more.
If Ireland built one NeighbourWood development per county per year — a modest ambition by any measure — twenty-six developments. At thirty units each, 780 homes annually. At the 10:1 ratio, 78 hectares of new native Irish woodland every year, permanently protected, ecologically managed, and financially self-sustaining.
Ireland's annual woodland target is 8,000 hectares. NeighbourWood alone will not reach that. But it's a model that could be replicated by every developer in the country, in Ireland, in the UK, across Europe, wherever the housing and biodiversity crises converge. The EU is 9.6 million homes short. More than 80% of its habitats are degraded. Those two numbers describe the same opportunity.
We intend to export this model. Not as a product to be sold, but as a standard to be adopted: a licensable operating system for how human communities can be built inside nature rather than in spite of it. The UK's mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain requirement, which came into law in February 2024, means there are already legal obligations that the 10:1 Model is perfectly positioned to fulfil.
And at scale, something else becomes possible. The woodland's income compounds. As each Woodland Bank matures, as carbon markets deepen, as biodiversity credits become standard infrastructure rather than niche instruments, the financial abundance in the model grows. That abundance is the mechanism for affordability. Not subsidy. Not charity. Not a planning condition extracted by a council. A model that grows its way toward homes that more people can afford, because the land is doing work that the market currently ignores.
The economics work at every scale. The woodland is not a cost. It is the asset that makes everything else financially viable. Including, eventually, homes for the people the market has decided it cannot serve.
VII. An Invitation
We're writing this because we needed to say clearly, before the first whip is in the ground, what we believe and why. Not to ask you for money, and not to ask you to buy a home. To invite you to help us shape NeighbourWood into something Ireland can be proud of.
We believe that the housing crisis and the biodiversity crisis are the same crisis — it's a crisis of how we imagine the relationship between human communities and the natural world. We believe that this relationship can be repaired, that it can be made sustainable and permanent. Of all places, Ireland has both the ecological need and the cultural memory to lead the way.
We are not idealists who have never built anything. We have spent decades at the intersection of business, climate, and community — watching ideas succeed and fail, watching capital flow toward and away from things that matter. We know what it takes to make a model work in the real world. We know the difference between a beautiful vision and a viable system. We believe this is both.
- If you're a family wondering whether there's a different way to own a home, one that gives you a genuine relationship with the living world: we want to hear from you.
- If you're a council or housing body wondering whether housing and ecological restoration can be delivered together: we want to talk.
- If you're an investor who believes the best returns in the next decade will come from models that solve real problems permanently: we want to build together.
- If you're a journalist, policy maker, developer, ecologist, builder, or planner who has felt the frustration of a system that optimises for the wrong things: let's build the model that proves it doesn't have to be.
The first NeighbourWood Community will be built in Ireland. The founders will live in it. And we will prove, house by house and tree by tree, that this is not a compromise.
It is what home can be.
Neal & Esther Anderson
Co-Founders, NeighbourWood Communities · February 2026
neighbourwood.ie · hello@neighbourwood.ie
© NeighbourWood Communities Ltd. 2026
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