Environmental Issues: Sustainable Communities

Sustainable Communities Main Page

All Documents in Sustainable Communities

LEED for Neighborhood Development
NRDC's Citizen's Guide to LEED for Neighborhood Development helps you know when it's green
Overview

A Citizen's Guide to LEED for Neighborhood Development is a hands-on introduction that NRDC developed for local environmental groups, smart growth organizations, neighborhood residents and just about anyone interested in making our communities better and greener.

Affordable Green Housing
The Green Communities Initiative will build thousands of affordable, environmentally friendly homes across the country.
Overview

The Green Communities Initiative, a project of NRDC and Enterprise Community Partners, will build thousands of affordable, environmentally friendly homes across the country.

Metropolitan Land Use & Transportation Planning
Solutions for Sustainability
Overview

Metropolitan regions have become increasingly important as they continue to guide our land use and transportation, in addition to our economy.

Sustainable Neighborhoods
Solutions for Sustainability
Overview

One of the most important models of sustainable growth is the neighborhood, where increments of development actually occur and where most people connect with their cities, their environments, and each other on an everyday basis.

Sustainable Practices on Key Urban Issues
Solutions for Sustainability
Overview

Specific issues like water quality and sustainable food are a challenge in all cities.  NRDC is creating models to solve a selected set of key urban challenges that can be applied to other cities nationwide.

Sustainability Achievements of the 2011 NCAA Final Four in Houston, Texas
Overview

In an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, the producers of the NCAA Final Four have integrated ecologically intelligent practices into the event’s planning and production. The paper products and other supplies we have bought and the facilities and services we are relying on have all been selected with a sensitivity towards reducing the threats we all face from global warming, deforestation, toxic wastes, and hazardous chemicals in our water and food. This year the NCAA teamed up with LG Electronics USA, Waste Management, Reliant Park, the City of Houston, George R. Brown Convention Center, and the Natural Resources Defense Council to launch the long journey they need to take to reduce their collective ecological footprint. This document explores their achievements.

Get document in pdf.

Getting Back on Track
Climate Change and State Transportation Policy
Report

With a comprehensive climate bill stalled at the federal level, many are turning to the states to make progress toward reducing carbon emissions. In Getting Back on Track, NRDC examines what states are doing to curb emissions caused by transportation, compares state transportation policy as it affects greenhouse gas emissions, and compares performance across the states.

Solar Electric Energy for Your Stadium or Arena
A Guide to Understanding the Opportunities of On-Site Photovoltaic Solar Power Generation
Report

Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, and Major League Soccer recently distributed this solar development guide produced on their behalf by NRDC and Bonneville Environmental Foundation outlining the work necessary for each stadium to add on-site solar power generation to its energy mix.

Communities Tackle Global Warming
A Guide to California’s Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act (SB 375)
Issue Paper

California's Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act, SB 375, is the nation's first legislation to link transportation and land use planning with global warming. SB 375 is an important step toward a cleaner, healthier, and more prosperous California. Locating housing closer to jobs and transit choices and creating walkable communities can reduce commute times, cut millions of tons of global warming pollution, and improve quality of life.

Picturing Smart Growth
Visions for Sustainable Communities Across America
Guide

Cities and towns across the country are embracing smart growth as a better solution to meet the needs of their growing populations. Smart growth principles accommodate growth and development while saving open space, revitalizing neighborhoods and helping cool the planet. See visions created through photo-editing software for how 70 communities across the country could apply smart growth principles to improve their streets and neighborhoods.

Smart Cities
Solutions for China's Rapid Urbanization
Issue Paper

The number of Chinese residents migrating from rural to urban areas in the next two decades will be roughly equivalent to the relocation of the population of the United States, a transformation that may bring disastrous consequences without careful planning. This December 2007 issue paper provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for smart growth strategies that promote more efficient use of land, services, and resources.

Close to Home: Smart Growth Helps Solve Global Warming
Smart community planning can cut down drive times and reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions.
News

Smart community planning can cut down drive times and reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions.

If You Build It, They Will Come
Americans Want Smart Growth Alternatives to Conventional Transportation
Fact Sheet

Smart growth land-use strategies, also known as location-efficient development or “new urbanism,” can save Americans saving thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs, improve quality of life, and provide significant benefits for the environment. Get document in pdf.

Environmental Characteristics of Smart Growth Neighborhoods
Case Studies in Sacramento and Nashville
Issue Paper

These studies, published in October 2000 and February 2003 for NRDC in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, suggest that the environmental benefits of smart growth are real and can be measured.

Solving Sprawl
Models of Smart Growth in Communities Across America
Report

Sprawl is taking a grave toll on our environment and the way we live, giving us mind-numbing traffic, ugly strip development, fragmented communities, and loss of open space. This November 2001 book from NRDC, Solving Sprawl, offers an inspiring contrast to these grim trends. Through 35 real-world stories, the book illustrates how people in cities, suburbs, and rural areas have found profitable, community-oriented alternatives to sprawl.

Solving Sprawl: An Overview
Across America, communities are finding ways to ensure that the growth they get is the growth they want.
News

Sprawl -- the blighted landscape of cookie-cutter suburbs, strip malls, and far too many highways that has spread across so much of America -- is a hot topic. But all across America, communities are finding alternative ways to grow and prosper that beat back sprawl, save landscapes and improve quality of life. A new book from NRDC, Solving Sprawl, tells this heartening story.

Developments and Dollars
An Introduction to Fiscal Impact Analysis in Land Use Planning
Report

This guide provides citizens, planners, local officials and others concerned with sprawling development and growth issues with tools they need to examine the likely impacts of development proposals on local taxes and municipal budgets. It also offers advice on accounting practices sometimes used to make development appear more attractive to local governments than it really is.

Paving Paradise
Sprawl and the Environment
Report

Expanding metropolitan areas into the countryside at rates many times faster than population growth, as we have been doing for decades, is not good for the environment. Whether we can improve the pattern in the coming decades will be critical because, in the first half of the 21st century, the U.S. population is expected to grow by half.

Another Cost of Sprawl
The Effects of Land Use on Wastewater Utility Costs
Report

A 1998 NRDC study that adds to the growing body of literature demonstrating that low-density sprawl development is costly, inefficient, and inequitable.