Growing Greener: Putting Conservation Into Local Plans and Ordinances: Putting Conservation into Local Plans & Ordinances - Softcover

Arendt, Randall G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559637420 ISBN 13: 9781559637428

Verlag: ISLAND PR, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Growing Greener is an illustrated workbook that presents a new look at designing subdivisions while preserving green space and creating open space networks. Randall Arendt explains how to design residential developments that maximize land conservation without reducing overall building density, thus avoiding the political and legal problems often associated with "down-zoning."

The author offers a three-pronged strategy for shaping growth around a community's special natural and cultural features, demonstrating ways of establishing or modifying the municipal comprehensive plan, zoning ordinance, and subdivision ordinance to include a strong conservation focus. Open space protection becomes the central organizing principle for new residential development, and the open space that is protected is laid out to form an interconnected system of protected lands running across a community.

The book offers:

• detailed information on how to conduct a community resource inventory
• a four-step approach to designing conservation subdivisions
• extensive model language for comprehensive plans, subdivision ordinances, and zoning ordinances
• illustrated design principles for hamlets, villages, and traditional small town neighborhoods

In addition, Growing Greener includes eleven case studies of actual conservation developments in nine states, and two exercises suitable for group participation. Case studies include: Ringfield, Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania; The Fields of St. Croix, City of Lake Elmo, Minnesota; Prairie Crossing, Grayslake, Illinois; The Meadows at Dolly Gordon Brook, York, Maine; Farmcolony, Standsville, Virginia; The Ranch at Roaring Fork, Carbondale, Colorado; and others.

Growing Greener builds upon and expands the basic ideas presented in Arendt's earlier work Conservation Design for Subdivisions, broadening the scope to include more detailed sections on the comprehensive planning process and information on how zoning ordinances can be updated to incorporate the concept of conservation design. It is the first practical publication to explain in detail how resource-conserving development techniques can be put into practice by municipal officials, residential developers, and site designers, and it offers a simple and straightforward approach to balancing opportunities for developers and conservationists.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Randall Arendt is a land-use planner, site designer, author, lecturer, and an advocate of "conservation planning". He received his B.A. degree from Wesleyan University (magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) and his M.Phil. degree in Urban Design and Regional Planning from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where he was a St. Andrew's Scholar. He was formerly vice president for conservation planning for the Natural Lands Trust and is now president of Greener Prospects, a land use consulting firm in Narragansett, Rhode Island. He is the author of Growing Greener Ordinance Language (Natural Lands Trust, 2001), and Conservation Design for Subdivisions (Island Press, 2001).
 

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Growing Greener

Putting Conservation Into Local Plans and Ordinances

By Randall G. Arendt

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1999 Natural Lands Trust
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55963-742-8

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Page, 
FOREWORD: - THE GROWING GREENER PROGRAM, 
PREFACE: - DESIGNING LAND DEVELOPMENT FROM A BIRD'S PERSPECTIVE (AMONG OTHERS), 
INTRODUCTION: - HOW THIS BOOK CAN HELP YOU, 
Chapter 1 - Context, 
Chapter 2 - How Your Community Can Choose Its Own Future, 
Chapter 3 - Comprehensive Plan Update, 
Chapter 4 - Conservation Zoning Techniques, 
Chapter 5 - Conservation Subdivisions: Application Documents, Design Process, and Conservation Land Design Standards, 
Chapter 6 - Benefits of Conservation Planning and Design, 
Chapter 7 - Examples of Subdivisions with Substantial Conservation Areas, 
Design Exercise I - Community-Wide Map of Potential Conservation Lands, 
Design Exercise 2 - Laying Out a Conservation Subdivision, 
Appendix I - Frequently Asked Questions About Conservation Subdivision Design, 
Appendix 2 - Model Comprehensive Plan Language, 
Appendix 3 - Model Ordinance Language for Conservation Subdivisions, 
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING, 
About the Author, 
INDEX, 
Island Press Board of Directors, 

CHAPTER 1

Context

Growth and Development Trends

Although the techniques in this book were originally devised to deal with growth problems experienced by communities in Pennsylvania, they are applicable in most other parts of the country as well. Zoning laws throughout the United States are based on the same original source: the Zoning Enabling Act passed by Congress in 1926, proposed by Herbert Hoover during his tenure as commerce secretary in the Coolidge administration.

Even though the scale and rate of development vary among the different regions of the country, a fairly constant and relatively unchanging aspect of this growth is its pattern as it sits upon the land, consuming important natural resources and converting them into bland, unproductive suburban lawns, streets, and parking lots. That pattern is one of geographically dispersed growth, typically occurring in a sporadic, haphazard fashion.

Whatever the rate of growth may be in a particular state, county, or locality, of far greater significance is its physical manifestation in the explosive increase in land consumption relative to population growth.

For example, in the 30-year period from 1960 to 1990, the population in Pennsylvania's ten largest metropolitan regions grew by 12 percent while its developed land area mushroomed by 80 percent. In other words, the amount of resource land taken for urban and suburban development grew six to seven times faster than population. Unfortunately, this trend is not unusual. Similar but less extreme trends have been reported in many other parts of the country. In Florida, for example, developed land grew twice as fast (by 80 percent) as did total population (38 percent) between 1974 and 1984. The experience was even worse in four metropolitan-area counties around Puget Sound, where total acreage of developed land grew two and one-half times faster than population growth (87 percent versus 36 percent). The habit of zoning for ever-lower densities in new development is a sad but common phenomenon, one that afflicts nearly every state in the union.

The situation in Pennsylvania has been strikingly illustrated by a simple graph produced for the report of the Governor's 21st Century Environmental Commission (see Fig. 1-1).

Recognizing the huge societal and economic costs imposed by the land-consumptive results of implementing outdated local land-use policies, the Governor's Environmental Commission has identified sprawl as the commonwealth's most basic underlying problem. Yesterday's techniques for coping with the challenge are insufficient to the task. For example, while 115,000 acres of farmland were protected through expensive buy-back programs from 1982 to 1992, Pennsylvania lost more than one million acres of cropland and pastureland during that same time period. Significantly, the American Farmland Trust has ranked south-central and southeastern Pennsylvania as the nation's second most threatened agricultural area. Although traditional buy-back programs should continue and be expanded, they must be supplemented with more creative approaches that are capable of conserving more land than can possibly be saved through the expenditure of tax dollars. Among the key recommendations of the Governor's Commission is that local governments must begin to implement more innovative land-use practices, with conservation subdivision design specifically mentioned in its final report.

Similar stances and actions—some considerably stronger—have been adopted by other states around the country, including Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont, Florida, and Hawaii, and the Growing Greener approach could be used to good effect in all these states and in most others as well. The exception to this rule of general applicability is Oregon, whose strict Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) program limits suburban land consumption far more effectively. However, even in such situations the illustrated design guidelines for hamlets, villages, and traditional small-town neighborhoods contained in Appendix 3 could be of significant value to planners, site designers, and local officials, where new development within the UGBs would otherwise tend to be simply a denser version of the standard cookie-cutter design.

The accelerating loss of critical resource lands to inefficient low-density sprawl development will almost certainly lead to greater conflicts among resource users. While environmentalists work to preserve woodland habitats and farmland preservationists seek to protect productive fields and orchards, developers must find sites for new subdivisions. Many of these new developments will be served by central sewage treatment facilities that discharge into nearby waterways. Downstream, fishermen will suffer from declining or diseased catches. Individuals may feel that their actions have only insignificant impacts on the environmental resources of their region, but every part of the natural system is related. The cumulative effects of these individual actions can be profound, especially over the longer term, and sound planning will be essential to conserve and protect your community's natural and cultural heritage.

In this regard, the remarks of Representative Tayloe Murphy of the Virginia State Legislature on the problems of the Chesapeake Bay are relevant—if only as one example of actions that produce indirect, cumulative impacts beyond those imagined by the people most directly and immediately involved:

Every individual and seemingly isolated action has consequences. Most activities that affect the bay and other public resources are of little apparent consequence in themselves : a subdivision here, a road there, a filled wetland, a new field cleared from a forest—but as they are added together, they have the effect of an avalanche that starts with a few pebbles rolling down a hillside.... There are simply too many of us doing too many things in the bay's vicinity to continue with the notion that our individual actions make no difference.

Our Natural and Cultural Heritage

Every state embodies a wide expanse of ecosystems that endow it with a rich natural heritage. These areas provide habitat for wildlife, protection for rare plant and animal...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ISLAND PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1559637420
• ISBN 13: 9781559637428
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 261
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar