Hundreds of companies across the United States are moving to and investing in walkable downtown locations. As job migration shifts towards cities and as commercial real estate values climb in these places, a vanguard of American companies are building and expanding in walkable downtown neighborhoods. Why are companies choosing these places? What are the competitive … Continued
To effectively address the challenges posed by growth and development, states must put in place programs, policies and structures that allow them to see and respond to the “big picture” of statewide development patterns. State government needs to be structured in ways that foster collaborative policies and investments instead of inhibiting them. Many specific policies … Continued
Choosing Our Community’s Future is designed for citizens who want to make a positive contribution to shaping the growth and development of their neighborhoods, towns and regions.
This document is intended to introduce and integrate land use and transportation issues into states’ conversations about resilience. Disaster preparedness professionals can use it to understand how strategic decisions about land use and transportation can build communities that are more resilient from the ground up.
Every town, city, and county makes decisions about how to grow and what kind of development to build. These decisions shape entire neighborhoods and form the foundation of communities as we know them. These decisions can also have enormous implications for a municipality’s finances. Over the past 40 years research has shown that low-density, unconnected, … Continued
In the first such national study, health researchers found that people who live in counties marked by sprawl-style development tend to weigh more, are more likely to be obese and are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure.
The Enabling Source Water Protection Project for North Carolina was initiated with a workshop in August 2009. Robin Smith, Assistant Secretary, NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, addressed more than 40 national and state leaders in water protection, land conservation and local planning, pointing out that “North Carolina is expected to grow in population by as much as 30 percent by the year 2030.” She then presented a challenge to the group by stating that both water quantity and quality are “vitally important to the future of the state.”
After a year of research and discovery, a national team of conservation, smart growth and drinking water experts identified ten key action strategies that the State of New Hampshire could take to improve efforts to protect the state’s drinking water supplies.
For more than a year, a national project team composed of land use, conservation and water quality experts engaged a diverse group of Maine state agencies, public water systems, and others interested in conserving land to protect water resources in a series of workshops that form the foundation of an action plan to provide guidance regarding steps the state can take to align land use and drinking water programs to better protect drinking water sources.
Our goal in working with staff of the Ohio Lake Erie Commission and the Ohio Water Resources Council was to develop ideas to improve uptake and effectiveness of the Enabling Source Water Protection program, in order to ensure that the program could deliver on its promise of improved water quality – including a cleaner source of drinking water for millions of people in Ohio and parts of several other states and Canadian provinces.