Investment banks and real estate developers aren’t the only ones reeling from the ups and downs of the economy. A dramatic case in point: the National Audubon Society’s 950-acre bird sanctuary on the Chesapeake Bay, which is quite suddenly facing an uncertain future due to its unique financial structure. Society officials say they’re committed to assuring that the spectacular site remains undeveloped, but the troubling bottom line is that they cannot keep the property because the funding needed to maintain it has collapsed.

The land was effectively given to the Society in 1997 by Jean Ellen duPont Shehan, a member of the affluent duPont family. But for Audubon officials, a crucial part of the deal was a promised flow of funds — about $500,000 per year — to maintain the property. Shehan established two trusts providing Audubon the money to manage the sanctuary and maintain its seven houses, several outbuildings, and over 10 miles of roads and trails; the trusts also were also designed to pay the $40,000-a-year property tax bill.

“We took the property from Mrs. Shehan and the family with the understanding that a management endowment would accompany it,” said Henry Tepper, the National Audubon Society’s vice president for Eastern State programs. “It was pretty clear from the onset… that we did not have the means to maintain it,” and without the endowment, “we would have to sell the property.”

The trusts were heavily invested in tech stocks, which took a beating in 2001 and were just barely able to provide the needed cash.

Bruce Stone, Shehan’s attorney, said it became clear in late 2007 that the trusts she had arranged to provide the annual endowment were going broke.

“Audubon is a great organization, but unfortunately we just ran out of money.” Stone said. And so the society began looking for a buyer for the sanctuary, south of St. Michaels on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, in 2008, after being informed of the situation.

The New Jersey-based homebuilder K. Hovnanian Enterprises is under investigation by the Department of Justice for possible violations of the Clean Water Act.

Hovnanian, which has been fighting for almost a decade to construct the Four Seasons development on Kent Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is being investigated for storm water discharge practices at several of its mid-Atlantic development sites, according to a Securities and Exchange report the company filed in June.

The inquiry into Hovnanian, one of the nation’s 10 largest builders, is for storm water runoff from construction activities, which can have a significant impact on water quality. As rain water flows over a construction site, it can pick up pollutants including chemicals, debris, and sediment. Without controls and barriers, the runoff often washes into the nearest waterway where it can harm or kill fish and other wildlife, in addition to causing erosion.

According to the report, the Department of Justice began looking into the company’s storm water discharge practices after a series of inquiries by the Environmental Protection Agency in connection with homebuilding in the agency’s Region 3, which includes Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Hovnanian has developments in each of those states, but its filing mentioned only two EPA notices of violations, both related to projects in Pennsylvania.

“We have no further comment beside what is in the SEC filing,” said Doug Fenichel, a K. Hovnanian spokesman.

While officials from both the EPA and the Justice Department said they do not release information or comment on ongoing investigations, Mark Pollins, director of the EPA’s Water Enforcement Division, said the Justice Department generally becomes involved in the more egregious and complex cases, which are likely to result in larger penalties.

James W. Rouse was an Eastern Shore boy, born and raised in Easton (pop. 14,000), the county seat of rural Talbot County.

Rouse’s hometown sits on the Chesapeake Bay side of Maryland’s Eastern Shore — the chunk of Maryland that, combined with Delaware and a bit of Virginia, droops down from the mainland between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

A lawyer by training, in 1939 Rouse joined a mortgage banking firm which morphed into The Rouse Company, the development company that made him famous for projects that transformed decaying downtowns into “festival marketplaces,” including Baltimore’s Harbor Place, Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and Boston’s Faneuil Hall.

In 1954, Rouse chose his hometown as the site for his first project, a shopping center called Talbottown. He intended this L-shaped brick plaza as a model of “urban infill” —today’s planning jargon for new development that naturally fits into an existing downtown area, easily accessible to pedestrians. (Today, Talbottown — home of a dozen shops, a handful of offices, and the upscale Rustic Inn restaurant — is the only shopping center of its kind in the area.)

From Talbottown, Rouse went on to achieve national prominence. In 1967, he unveiled the city of Columbia in Howard County — a so-called “new town” that had been built from scratch in an attempt to capture the small-town feel of a community like Easton, and today has a population of more than 98,000.

In 1973, Rouse announced plans to develop Wye Island, 2,800 acres of isolated farmland in Queen Anne’s County, about a 30-minute drive from where the Chesapeake Bay Bridge hits the Eastern Shore. Rouse’s idea was considered revolutionary by some. By others, repellent.