Smart Growth Principles
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Mix Land Uses
Smart growth supports mixed land uses as a critical component of achieving better places to live. By putting residential, commercial and recreational uses in close proximity to one another, alternatives to driving, such as walking or biking, become viable. Mixed land uses also provide a more diverse and sizable population and commercial base for supporting viable public transit. Mixed use can enhance the vitality and perceived security of an area by increasing the number and activity of people on the street. It attracts pedestrians and helps revitalize community life by making streets, public spaces and pedestrian-oriented retail become places where people meet.
Mixed land uses can contribute economic benefits. For example, siting commercial areas close to residential areas can raise property values, helping increase local tax receipts. Meanwhile, businesses recognize the benefits associated with locations that attract more people, increasing economic activity.
In today’s service economy, communities find that by mixing land uses, they make neighborhoods attractive to workers who are considering quality-of-life-criteria as well as salary to determine where they will settle. Smart growth provides a means and a basis for communities to alter existing planning structures that don’t allow mixed land uses.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Take Advantage of Compact Building Design
Smart growth provides a means for communities to incorporate more-compact building design as an alternative to conventional, land-consumptive development. Compact building design suggests that communities be laid out in a way that preserves more open space, and that individual buildings make more efficient use of land and resources. For example, by encouraging buildings to grow vertically rather than horizontally, and by incorporating structured rather than surface parking, communities can reduce the footprint of new construction, and preserve more greenspace. This not only uses land efficiently, but it also protects more open land to absorb and filter rain water, reduce flooding and stormwater drainage needs, and lower the amount of pollution washing into our streams, rivers and lakes.
Compact building design is necessary to support wider transportation choices, and provides cost savings for localities. Communities seeking to encourage transit use to reduce air pollution and congestion recognize that minimum levels of density are required to make public transit networks viable. In addition, local governments find that, on a per-unit basis, it is cheaper to provide and maintain services like water, sewer, electricity, phone service and other utilities in more-compact neighborhoods than in dispersed communities.
Research has shown that well-designed, compact New Urbanist communities that include a variety of house sizes and types command a higher market value on a per-square-foot basis than do those in adjacent conventional suburban developments. Increasing numbers of developments are successfully integrating compact design into community building efforts. This is happening despite current zoning practices that discourage compact design – such as those that require minimum lot sizes, or prohibit multi-family or attached housing – and other barriers, such as negative perceptions of “higher density” development.
Examples:
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Coastal and Waterfront Smart Growth: Element 2
Land Use and Driving: The Role Compact Development Can Play in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Create a Range of Housing Opportunities and Choices
Providing quality housing for people of all income levels is an integral component in any smart growth strategy. Housing is a critical part of the way communities grow, because it constitutes a significant share of new construction and development. More importantly, however, housing availability is also a key factor in determining households’ access to transportation, commuting patterns, access to services and education, and consumption of energy and other natural resources. By using smart growth approaches to create a wider range of housing choices, communities can mitigate the environmental costs of auto-dependent development, use their infrastructure resources more efficiently, ensure a better jobs-housing balance, and generate a strong foundation of support for neighborhood transit stops, commercial centers, and other services.
No single type of housing can serve the varied needs of today’s diverse households. Smart growth represents an opportunity for local communities to increase housing choice not only by modifying land-use patterns on newly developed land, but also by increasing housing supply in existing neighborhoods and on land served by existing infrastructure. Integrating single- and multi-family structures in new housing developments can support a more diverse population and allow more equitable distribution of households of all income levels. The addition of units – through attached housing, accessory units, or conversion to multi-family dwellings – to existing neighborhoods creates opportunities for communities to slowly increase density without radically changing the landscape.
Adding housing can be an economic stimulus for commercial centers that are vibrant during the work day, but suffer from a lack of foot traffic and consumers during evenings or weekends. Most importantly, providing a range of housing choices allows all households to find their niche in a smart growth community – whether it is a garden apartment, a rowhouse, or a traditional single-family home.
Examples:
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Energy Benefits of Urban Infill, Brownfields, and Sustainable Urban Redevelopment
Information from other sources:
Create Walkable Neighborhoods
Walkable communities that are desirable places to live, work, learn, worship and play are a key component of smart growth. Their desirability comes from two factors. First, goods (such as housing, offices, and retail) and services (such as transportation, schools, libraries) are located within an easy and safe walk. Second, walkable communities make pedestrian activity possible, thus expanding transportation options, and creating a streetscape for a range of users – pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and drivers. To foster walkability, communities must mix land uses and build compactly, as well as ensure safe and inviting pedestrian corridors.
Walkable communities are nothing new. Communities worldwide have created neighborhoods, communities, towns and cities based on pedestrian access. However, within the last fifty years public and private actions have often created obstacles to walkable communities. For example, regulation that prohibits mixed land uses results in longer trips and makes walking a less-viable option. This regulatory bias against mixed-use development is reinforced by private financing policies that consider mixed-use development riskier than single-use development. In addition, communities that are dispersed and largely auto-dependent employ street and development design practices that reduce pedestrian activity.
As the personal and societal benefits of pedestrian-friendly communities are realized – benefits that include lower transportation costs, greater social interaction, improved personal and environmental health, and expanded consumer choice – many are calling upon the public and private sectors to facilitate development of walkable places. Land use and community design play a pivotal role in encouraging pedestrian environments. By building places with multiple destinations within close proximity, where the streets and sidewalks balance multiple forms of transportation, communities have the basic framework for walkability.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Placemaker’s Guide to Transportation: Complete Streets
Information from other sources:
Foster Distinctive, Attractive Communities with a Strong Sense of Place
Smart growth encourages communities to craft a vision and set standards for development that respect community values of architectural beauty and distinctiveness, as well as expand choices in housing and transportation. Smart growth seeks to create interesting, unique communities that reflect the values and cultures of the people who reside there, and foster physical environments that support a more cohesive community fabric. Smart growth promotes development that uses natural and man-made boundaries and landmarks to define neighborhoods, towns, and regions. It encourages the construction and preservation of buildings that are assets to a community over time, not only because of the services provided within, but because of the unique contribution they make to the look and feel of a city.
Guided by a vision of how and where to grow, communities are able to identify and utilize opportunities to make new development conform to their standards of distinctiveness and beauty. Smart growth ensures that the value of infill and greenfield development is determined as much by its accessibility (by car or other means) as its physical orientation to, and relationship with, other buildings and open space. By creating high-quality communities with architectural and natural elements that reflect the interests of all residents, there is a greater likelihood that buildings (and therefore entire neighborhoods) will retain their economic vitality and value over time. This means that the infrastructure and natural resources used to create these areas will provide residents with a distinctive and beautiful place that they can call “home” for generations to come.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
How to Preserve a Historic Building
Information from other sources:
Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty and Critical Environmental Areas
“Open space” refers to natural areas that provide important community space, habitat for plants and animals, and recreational opportunities, as well as farm and ranch land (working lands), places of natural beauty, and critical environmental areas (e.g. wetlands). Open space preservation supports smart growth goals by bolstering local economies, preserving critical environmental areas, improving community quality of life, and guiding new growth into existing communities.
There is growing political will to save the “open spaces” that Americans treasure. In recent elections, voters have overwhelmingly approved ballot measures to fund open space protection efforts. Protection of open space provides many fiscal benefits, including increasing local property value (thereby increasing property tax bases), providing tourism dollars, and preventing local tax increases (due to the savings from avoided construction of new infrastructure). Supplies of high quality open space also ensure that prime farm and ranch lands are available, prevent flood damage, and contribute to clean drinking water.
Open space also provides significant environmental quality and health benefits. Open space protects animal and plant habitat, places of natural beauty, and working lands by removing development pressure and redirecting new growth to existing communities. Additionally, preservation of open space benefits the environment by combating air pollution, attenuating noise, controlling wind, providing erosion control, and moderating temperatures. Open space also protects surface- and ground-water resources by filtering trash, debris, and chemical pollutants before they enter a water system.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Strengthen and Direct Development Towards Existing Communities
Smart growth directs development towards existing communities already served by infrastructure, seeking to utilize the resources that existing neighborhoods offer, and conserve open space and irreplaceable natural resources on the urban fringe. Development in existing neighborhoods also represents an approach to growth that can be more cost-effective, and improves quality of life. By encouraging development in existing communities, communities benefit from a stronger tax base, closer proximity of a range of jobs and services, increased efficiency of already-developed land and infrastructure, reduced development pressure in edge areas (preserving more open space), and, in some cases, strengthening rural communities.
The ease of greenfield development remains an obstacle to encouraging more development in existing neighborhoods. Development on the fringe remains attractive to developers for its ease of access and construction, lower land costs, and potential for developers to assemble larger parcels. Zoning requirements in fringe areas are often less burdensome, as there are few existing building types that new construction must complement, and a relative absence of residents who may object to the inconvenience or disruption caused by new construction.
Nevertheless, developers and communities are recognizing the opportunities presented by infill development, as suggested not only by demographic shifts, but also a growing awareness of the fiscal, environmental, and social costs of urban fringe development. Journals that track real estate trends routinely cite the investment appeal of the “24-hour city” for empty nesters, young professionals, and others, and developers are beginning to respond.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices
Providing people with more choices in housing, shopping, communities, and transportation is a key aim of smart growth. Communities are seeking a wider range of transportation options in an effort to improve beleaguered current systems. Traffic congestion is worsening across the country. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, the amount of delay endured by the average commuter in 2010 was 34 hours, up from 14 hours in 1982.
In response, communities are beginning to implement new approaches to transportation planning, such as better coordinating land use and transportation; increasing the availability of high-quality transit service; creating redundancy, resiliency and connectivity within their road networks; and ensuring connectivity between pedestrian, bike, transit, and road facilities. In short, they are coupling a multi-modal approach to transportation with supportive development patterns, to create a variety of transportation options.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Make Development Decisions Predictable, Fair and Cost Effective
For a community to be successful in implementing smart growth, the concept must be embraced by the private sector. Only private capital markets can supply the large amounts of money needed to meet the growing demand for smart growth developments. If investors, bankers, developers, builders and others do not earn a profit, few smart growth projects will be built. Fortunately, government can help make smart growth more profitable for private investors and developers. Since the development industry is highly regulated, the value of property and the desirability of a place are affected by government investment in infrastructure and government regulation. Governments that make the right infrastructure and regulatory decisions will support fair, predictable and cost-effective smart growth.
Despite regulatory and financial barriers, developers have created successful examples of smart growth. In many cases, doing so has required them to spend time and money getting variances to the codes. Expediting the approval process is especially helpful to developers, for whom “time is money.” The longer it takes to get approvals, the longer the developer’s capital remains tied up in land and not earning income. For smart growth to flourish, state and local governments need to make development decisions about smart growth more timely, cost-effective, and predictable for developers. By creating a supportive environment for development of innovative, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use projects, government can provide smart growth leadership for the private sector.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
Encourage Community and Stakeholder Collaboration in Development Decisions
Growth can create great places to live, work and play—if it responds to a community’s own sense of how and where it wants to grow. Communities have different needs and will emphasize some smart growth principles over others: those with robust economic growth may need to improve housing choices; others that have suffered from disinvestment may emphasize infill development; newer communities with separated uses may be looking for the sense of place provided by mixed-use town centers; and still others with poor air quality may seek relief by offering transportation choices. The common thread, however, is that the needs of every community and the programs to address them are best defined by the people who live and work there.
Citizen participation can be time-consuming, frustrating and expensive. On the other hand, encouraging community and stakeholder collaboration can lead to creative, speedy resolution of development issues and greater community understanding of the importance of good planning and investment. Smart Growth plans and policies developed without strong citizen involvement will lack staying power. Involving the community early and often in the planning process vastly improves public support for smart growth and often leads to innovative strategies that fit the unique needs of a particular community.
Key actions in encouraging collaboration include developing an inclusionary process and a common understanding among diverse stakeholders, using effective and appropriate communication techniques, and working with local authorities.
More information from Smart Growth Network partners:
The Smart Growth Program at The National Association of Realtors
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