Choosing Our Community’s Future
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.
Advocacy
Building Resilient States: A Framework for Agencies
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.
The Fiscal Implications of Development Patterns: Overview
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
Measuring the Health Effects of Sprawl
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.
An Action Plan to Protect North Carolina’s Drinking Water Sources
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.”
Enabling Source Water Protection: State of New Hampshire Action Plan
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.
An Action Plan to Protect Maine’s Drinking Water Sources
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.
Building Ohio’s Balanced Growth Initiative: Incentives and State Agency Alignment
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.
Case Studies in Smart Growth Implementation: Anchorage, Alaska
These case studies present Smart Growth America’s key findings and the lessons we’ve learned about smart growth implementation from a four-year technical assistance program funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The cases are meant to help communities that are committed to (or are exploring) smart growth but struggle with implementation. The cases highlight successful … Continued
Smart Growth is Smart Business
The report profiles 17 businesses and business groups that are putting smart growth into action in communities across the nation. It outlines the reasons why these business leaders are supporting smart growth policies and projects, and it puts forth five key smart growth business approaches.