PCSD Recommendations: Sustainable Communities ('96)
COMMUNITY-DRIVEN STRATEGIC PLANNING
COLLABORATIVE REGIONAL PLANNING
BUILDING DESIGN AND REHABILITATION
COMMUNITY DESIGN
COMMUNITY GROWTH MANAGEMENT
CREATION OF STRONG, DIVERSIFIED LOCAL ECONOMIES
TRAINING AND LIFELONG LEARNING
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
REDEVELOPMENT OF BROWNFIELD SITES
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 1
COMMUNITY-DRIVEN STRATEGIC PLANNING
Create a community-driven, strategic planning process that brings people together to identity, key issues, develop a vision, set goals and benchmarks, and determine actions to improve their community.
ACTION 1. All levels of government and the private sector should build multi-sector decision-making capacity at the local level. They can do so by providing information and financial and technical assistance to communities that wish to engage in a collaborative, communitywide process to integrate economic prosperity, environmental health, and opportunity in their decisions and actions.ACTION 2. All levels of government should ensure substantial opportunity for public participation in all phases of planning and decision-making to allow those affected to have a voice in the outcome. Specific steps include creating and expanding methods for public participation in legislation, ordinances, and community advisory boards. Special steps should be taken to ensure that historically underrepresented groups are involved.
ACTION 3. All levels of government, especially local government, should identify barriers to greater citizen involvement in decision-making -- such as lack of child care or transportation -- and develop strategies to overcome them. Employers should give employees flexibility and incentives to increase the time they and their families can devote to community activities.
ACTION 4. Community-based coalitions can create educational media campaigns to encourage citizen participation in government, disseminate high-quality information on community issues, and promote public discussions that identify solutions to problems. Coalitions should be as broad as possible, including industry and business, schools, newspapers, television and radio stations, community groups, environmental organizations, labor, and local government.
ACTION 5. Federal and state agencies should help local communities that wish to use profiles of potential environmental risks as a tool to identify and set priorities for solving environmental problems. The agencies should provide information on and facilitate access to communities that have successfully used this tool.
ACTION 6. Community-based coalitions can work together to draft an economic development strategy to fill basic needs and take advantage of new trends as part of the strategic planning process. Coalitions should include businesses, employees, unions, chambers of commerce, environmental organizations, local government, and residents.
ACTION 7. Community-based coalitions can develop and carry out programs to increase voter registration and participation, working with national voter registration projects where possible.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 2
COLLABORATIVE REGIONAL PLANNING
Encourage communities in a region to work together to deal with issues that transcend jurisdictional and other boundaries.
ACTION 1. States, counties, and communities should cooperate to create a system of regional accounts that measures the costs and benefits of local land use, development, and economic trends on a region's economy, environment, distribution of benefits, and quality of life. States and regions can consider the use of collaborative benchmarking, such as those used in Oregon and Minnesota, to look at a broad range of social, environmental, and economic measures. The federal government should work with state and local governments to ensure that federal statistical resources are available and used appropriately to support state and local governments in measuring benefits and costs.
ACTION 2. Federal and state governments should encourage cooperation among communities by providing incentives for regional collaboration on issues, such as transportation, affordable housing, economic development, air and water quality, and land use, that transcend political jurisdictions. In encouraging such cooperation, they should look to the example of the federal Empowerment Zone/Enterprise Community Program, which required communities to draft funding proposals using a collaborative strategic planning process. [2] This kind of cooperation should be encouraged among communities within a region to advance common objectives. Federal and state agencies responsible for environmental protection, economic development, land use, and transportation policies should work with one or more geographic areas to establish planning and development activities. These agencies should create incentives to encourage regional planning and development, such as waivers of state matches for transportation planning funds and more favorable federal and state tax treatment for site cleanup costs.
ACTION 3. Local and county governments can pool resources from local property taxes to increase equity in public services, improve the quality of education, break the exacerbating regional mismatch between social needs and tax resources, reduce local fiscal incentives for sprawl, and end competition for the tax base within a metropolitan area. Local and county actions to accomplish this should receive federal and state incentives.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 3
BUILDING DESIGN AND REHABILITATION
Design and rehabilitate buildings to use energy and natural resources efficiently, enhance public health and the environment, preserve historic and natural settings, and contribute to a sense of community identity.
ACTION 1. Federal, state, and local governments should work with builders, architects, developers, contractors, materials producers, manufacturers, community groups, and others to develop and enhance design tools that can be used to improve the efficiency and livability of buildings. These include models for building codes; zoning ordinances; and permit approval processes for residential and commercial buildings, public infrastructure, and landscapes. Model building codes should consider energy efficiency; durability; use of nontoxic materials; indoor air quality; use of recycled and recyclable materials; use of native plants that can reduce the need for fertilizers, pesticides, and water for landscaping; and use of designs that promote human interaction.
ACTION 2. These groups should disseminate these design tools, making the information easily accessible to local decision-makers in interested communities which can use the model codes as a starting point, adapting them to reflect local conditions and values.
ACTION 3. Groups in communities that have made historic preservation a priority can inventory and prioritize historic properties and identify financing to rehabilitate these buildings. Local governments can enact ordinances to preserve historic buildings and remove incentives that encourage demolishing them. They can create incentives for rehabilitating and adapting historic buildings for new uses, where appropriate.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 4
COMMUNITY DESIGN
Design new communities and improve existing ones to use land efficiently, promote mixed-use and mixed-income development, retain public open space, and provide diverse transportation options.
ACTION 1. Local jurisdiction should structure or revise local zoning regulations and permit approved processes to encourage development located along transit corridors, near a range of transit alternatives, and in rehabilitated brownfield sites, where appropriate. Where there is demand for it, zoning should allow mixed-use development siting including residences, businesses, recreational facilities, and households with a variety of incomes within close proximity.
ACTION 2. Federal and state governments and the private sector should offer the assistance of multidisciplinary design teams to local jurisdictions that want help with sustainable community design. These design teams should include leading experts in a broad range of fields, including architecture, transportation, land use, energy efficiency, development, and engineering. Design teams should work with state and local governments and community residents with related experience to design, develop, and make accessible to communities alternatives to sprawl development, models for regional cooperation, and sustainable building practices.
ACTION 3. The federal government should work with lenders to expand research on location-efficient mortgages. Such a mortgage would increase the borrowing power of potential homebuyers in high-density locations with easy access to mass transportation. A borrower would quality for a larger loan based on expected higher disposable income from a reduction in or absence of automobile payments, insurance, and maintenance.
ACTION 4. Federal and state governments -- in consultation with local government, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations -- should support local planning that integrates economic development, land use, and social equity concerns and engages significant public participation through existing planning grants. These principles, which were integrated in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, should be reaffirmed during the act's reauthorization and expanded as requirements for federal and state funding and tax incentives for economic development, housing, transportation, and environmental programs. [6]
ACTION 5. The federal government should give communities credit toward attainment of national ambient air quality standards under the Clean Air Act when they use community design to lower traffic by adopting zoning codes, building codes, and other changes that encourage more efficient land use patterns to reduce pollution from motor vehicles and energy use.
ACTION 6. All levels of government should work with community groups and the private sector to ensure that no segment of society bears a disproportionate share of environmental risks in a community. Collaborative partnerships could periodically conduct evaluations to ensure that desirable transportation and infrastructure investments -- such as those in roads, buildings, and water projects -- do not disproportionately deliver greater benefits to wealthier, more politically active communities and disproportionately fewer benefits to poorer, less politically active communities or communities of color.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 5
COMMUNITY GROWTH MANAGEMENT
Manage the geographical growth of existing communities and siting of new ones to decrease sprawl, conserve open space, respect nature's carrying capacity, and provide protection from natural hazards.
ACTION 1. States and communities should evaluate the costs of infrastructure in greenfield or relatively undeveloped areas to examine subsidies and correct market incentives in the financing of capital costs of infrastructure, such as sewers and utilities, for development of land bordering metropolitan areas.
ACTION 2. All levels of government and nongovernmental organizations can conserve open space through acquisition of land and/or development rights. For example, public water departments can budget to acquire land necessary to protect public water supplies. Private land trusts can expand their acquisition of wetlands or other valuable open space.
ACTION 3. Local governments and counties can create community partnerships to develop regional open space networks and urban growth boundaries as part of a regional framework to discourage sprawl development that threatens a region's environmental carrying capacity.
ACTION 4. Local governments and counties can work together to use community impact analyses and other information on the environmental carrying capacity of a region as the foundation for land use planning and development decisions.
ACTION 5. All levels of government should identify and eliminate governmental incentives, such as subsidized floodplain insurance and subsidized utilities, that encourage development in areas vulnerable to natural hazards.
ACTION 6. The federal government should redirect federal policies that encourage low-density sprawl to foster investment in existing communities. It should encourage shifts in transportation spending toward transit, highway maintenance and repair, and expansion of transit options rather than new highway or beltway construction.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 6
CREATION OF STRONG, DIVERSIFIED LOCAL ECONOMIES
Apply economic development strategies that create diversified local economies built on unique local advantages to tap expanding markets and technological innovation.
ACTION 1. As part of a broader community-driven strategic plan, a community can conduct an inventory and assessment of its economic, natural, and human resources to identify its unique comparative advantages and strategic niche in the larger regional economy.
ACTION 2. State and federal governments should promote labor force development when they fund physical infrastructure projects for transportation, public housing, and sewer and water systems within a community by hiring locally and providing skills training for workers.
ACTION 3. Federal, state, and local governments should assist low-income workers through programs to improve access to education and training and tax and development strategies targeted at the creation of jobs in new markets integrating economic and environmental goals.
ACTION 4. Federal and state governments should review and where appropriate, strengthen labor standards by ensuring an adequate minimum wage and proper health and safety standards and by encouraging greater flexibility in work hours to allow more time for community participation and/or parenting.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 7
TRAINING AND LIFELONG LEARNING
Expand and coordinate public and private training programs to enable all people to improve their skills to match future job requirements in communities on a continuing basis.
ACTION 1. Businesses, unions, schools, students, and local government within a community should develop and integrate training programs to ensure that workers -- especially those who need it most -- have the necessary skills to take advantage of current and future economic development opportunities. They should work together to integrate current programs and acquire funding from the private sector, schools, and government to fill identified gaps. Training programs that should be integrated and potentially expanded include school-to-work arrangements, apprenticeships, community service, summer employment, and job corps opportunities.
ACTION 2. Federal and state governments should help those who want to pursue further education and lifelong learning by providing individuals with tax deductions for tuition, assistance with financing, or other incentives.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 8
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Capitalize upon economic development opportunities from businesses and industries that target environmental technologies, recycling, and pollution prevention to create jobs.
ACTION 1. Federal and state agencies should work with the private sector to create a one-stop shop for financial and technical assistance to small businesses that would identify cost-effective investments in resource efficiency and financing and help make pollution prevention standard practice. The federal government should work with lenders to develop ways to validate the outcomes of investments in resource efficiency to address their concerns and so improve access to capital.
ACTION 2. Federal and state agencies should assist communities that want to create eco-industrial parks that cluster businesses in the same area to create new models of industrial efficiency, cooperation, and environmental responsibility. Assistance should include making relevant information available, allowing flexibility in permitting and other regulator areas while ensuring that environmental goals are met or exceeded, and enacting mixed-use zoning that allows for eco-industrial parks that have low or no emissions.
ACTION 3. Local communities can adopt programs to reuse materials and collect and recycle secondary materials diverted from what some call the urban mine - the municipal solid waste stream. Such programs minimize wastes, prevent pollution, provide opportunities for new businesses and industries such as recycling-related manufacturing, generate jobs and revenue from recycling collection and processing, create high-skill industrial jobs and sizeable sales revenues from manufacture of recycled products, and conserve landfill space. The federal government should work with state and local governments to establish related guidelines and model programs and create incentives to promote secondary materials use and recycling-related manufacturing.
ACTION 4. The public, private, and nonprofit sectors should work together to identify innovative opportunities to target some of the economic benefits from more efficient use of resources and greater regulatory flexibility in terms of creating jobs, opportunity, and social equity in communities.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION 9
REDEVELOPMENT OF BROWNFIELD SITES
Revitalize brownflelds -- which are contaminated, abandoned, or underused land -- by making them more attractive for redevelopment by providing regulatory flexibility, reducing process barriers, and assessing greenfleld development to reflect necessary infrastructure costs.
ACTION 1. All levels of government should work in partnership with community residents, environmental organizations, community development corporations, industry, and businesses to redevelop or stabilize brownfield sites by eliminating barriers and creating incentives for environmental cleanup and by reorienting existing state and federal economic development funding and programs to include these sites.
ACTION 2. Federal and state agencies should encourage investment in brownfield redevelopment by using the polluter pays principle, assuring prospective purchasers and lenders that they will not be held liable for cleanup in cases in which they did not contribute to contamination.
ACTION 3. The federal government should work with states, counties, and communities to develop tools that compare, on a site-specific basis, the local economic and environmental costs of developing a greenfield versus redeveloping a brownfield site.