NRDC: Documents

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Issues: Smart Growth

All Documents in Smart Growth

LEED for Neighborhood Development New standards created by an NRDC partnership will help guide developers and communities to build greener neighborhoods News: New standards created by an NRDC partnership will help guide developers and communities to build greener neighborhoods.
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.
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, or 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 transportation choices and creating walkable communities can reduce commute times and cut millions of tons of global warming pollution, while improving quality of life.
Location Efficient Mortgages
FAQ: Find out about this new city-friendly lending program and whether you qualify for increased homebuying power.
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 and improve their streets and neighborhoods.
Smart Cities: Solutions for China's Rapid Urbanization
Issue Paper: During the next two decades, the number of Chinese residents migrating from rural to urban areas will be roughly equivalent to the relocation of the entire current population of the United States. As China's own leaders recognize, without careful planning this urban transformation may bring disastrous consequences. Grounded in experiences in both the United States and China, this December 2007 issue paper provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for the implementation of 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
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.
How Smart Growth Solves Sprawl
Photo Album: We all have a pretty good idea of what sprawl looks like -- the endless strip malls, anonymous suburbs, and long lines of traffic. These pages offer a look at the solutions to sprawl, featuring towns and cities across the United States that are choosing smart-growth neighborhoods for their communities.
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. In the seemingly disconnected jumble of subdivisions and empty downtowns, a sense of place seems harder and harder to find. But 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
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.
Unwelcome (Human) Neighbors: Sprawl and Wildlife
Issue Paper: A policy paper detailing how roads and sprawling neighborhoods are replacing pristine wildlife habitats at an alarming pace, putting the survival and reproduction of plants and animals at risk.
Paving Paradise: Sprawl and the Environment
Report: Make no mistake about it: to expand metropolitan areas into the countryside at rates many times faster than population growth, as we have been doing over the past five 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. That anticipated growth of some 130 million people is equivalent to the current population of France and Germany combined. Where will these new citizens live, work, and shop? How important is it that we, as environmentalists who care about sustainability, bring resources to bear on the shape of America's future urban development?
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.