Tell NJ Municipalities to Support Smart Growth Strategies!

Please Support Smart Growth Strategies for your Town!

As a resident of your municipality, I urge you to please support smart growth strategies for affordable housing development. If we begin to rebuild our existing neighborhoods and regional infrastructure around properly tailored Smart Growth design, instead of continuing to build new sprawling development, we can save vast amounts of land. We can also dramatically cut our climate emissions while creating more convenient and equitable neighborhoods and regions. In addition to better environmental and social outcomes this strategy can also better serve the economic needs of our society. Choosing smart growth over sprawl is one of the most powerful decisions cities and other local governments can make to reduce climate emissions and air pollution, conserve local habitats, and improve the health of their communities. To mitigate the primary drivers of climate change and prepare for the impacts: Development should be dense, inclusive, and located within or connected to existing communities and neighborhoods. New development should be designed to make neighborhoods walkable, and neighborhoods in the city and metropolitan contexts should be linked together by convenient high quality transit prioritized in regional, state and national transportation expenditure plans. Development areas served by public transportation, shared transportation, public infrastructure (wastewater, water, roads, etc.) should be zoned for dense/multi-family/mixed use development in order to reduce emissions and waste. New areas should not be zoned for exclusively single family housing only. Land use zoning regulations and public infrastructure investments that favor lower density, automobile dependent development are problematic for reasons including: increasing vehicle miles traveled, degraded air and water quality, and destruction of open space, farmland and critical habitat, and proven negative impacts on human health. Concentrating economic opportunities, new homes, services, and amenities in existing communities protects and mitigates against sprawl, reduces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, while creating livable communities. Development should allow a mix of uses (housing, commercial, retail, schools and amenities) sufficiently close to each other, and at sufficient densities, to support walkability. Development should be located near existing transit or built so that it can support future mass transit options, whether in an urban, suburban or rural context. Development should be allowed at the highest densities within walking and bicycling distance of transit stations. Regulations and public incentives should expand housing choices in neighborhoods that offer access to educational and economic opportunity, particularly for residents who, because of race, ethnicity, and/or income, have historically been marginalized and displaced in land use decisions. In rural settings, the goal of infill is to establish a village/town and country pattern, with development that is sufficiently compact to be walkable and entirely consolidated within villages while sparing the countryside. We can create the kind of density that was common in small towns and villages 100 years ago in a highly livable and economically attractive form. We ask you to pursue smart growth strategies for our town. It’s critical that we build smarter so we can meet our affordable housing goals without sacrificing the environment.