Environmental Issues: Sustainable Communities

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All Documents in Sustainable Communities Tagged sprawl

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.

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.

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.

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For additional policy documents, see the NRDC Document Bank.