For those pesky friends and acquaintances who absolutely refuse to accept that UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is coming down through the federal agencies, here is the US Environmental Protection Agency's Smart Growth webpage just full of the strategies and tactics used locally. Remember that the EPA has partnered with HUD and Dept of Transportation to create the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, a grant funder for Smart Growth regional planning. This is right from the EPA's website :
Tools Offered
EPA offers a variety of tools through the Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program. Not every tool is offered in every round. Once EPA has used a tool in several communities, we work to refine it to create a product that any community can use with limited outside assistance. Once a tool "graduates" to this form, it is placed online.
EPA offers a variety of tools through the Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program. Not every tool is offered in every round. Once EPA has used a tool in several communities, we work to refine it to create a product that any community can use with limited outside assistance. Once a tool "graduates" to this form, it is placed online.
- Complete Streets: Teaches communities how to set investment priorities, draft policies, and implement changes to make their streets safe and appealing to all users, including drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit riders.
- Creating a Green Streets Strategy: Helps communities begin to develop strategies for greening their streets by adapting national best practices and case studies to their local context.
- Green Building Toolkit: Assists local governments in identifying policies that support compact development that features sustainably built homes and buildings.
- Land Use Strategies to Protect Water Quality: Helps local governments examine land use approaches to green infrastructure that manage stormwater.
- Neighborhood Planning for Healthy Aging: Explores the role of supportive neighborhood design in creating great places for aging residents.
- Parking Audit: Evaluates local parking policies and offers advice on parking management strategies, drawing from successful strategies in other communities.
- Planning Bikeshare Programs: Provides a framework to explore establishing or expanding a bikeshare program in a community.
- Preferred Growth Areas: Offers a process for communities to review values, opportunities, tools, and constraints to determine the most environmentally beneficial locations for growth.
- Smart Growth Guidelines for Sustainable Design and Development: Helps the community understand the key principles and decisions at the location, site, and building levels that can result in a more sustainable plan or development proposal.
- Supporting Equitable Development: Helps communities evaluate their needs around equitable development and identify strategies to manage neighborhood change and support community goals around housing, culture, and local businesses.
- Sustainable Land Use Code Audit: Evaluates local land use codes, including zoning and subdivision regulations, for opportunities to incorporate community sustainability goals, remove barriers, and create incentives.
- Sustainability Strategies for Small Cities and Rural Areas: Offers a menu of quick fixes that rural and small-town governments can make to their zoning codes and planning documents to protect community character and quality of life. This tool used to be called "Smart Growth Zoning Codes for Small Cities and Rural Areas."
- Using Smart Growth to Produce Fiscal and Economic Health: Helps communities evaluate how to get better economic results from private development and public investments.
- Walking Audit: Guides communities in assessing the pedestrian environment and forming a vision for short- and long-term improvements to sidewalks and streets. This tool, completed in 2012, is now online: Walkability Workbook .
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