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Growing Green [October 6, 2006]: Sustainable
development devotees will be heartened to hear of Governor Rell's
plan to bring it to Connecticut. Rell unveiled a sweeping plan
for an Office of Responsible Growth today at the Windsor Train
Station in Windsor Center.
The new office,
which will be part of the Office of Policy and Management's
Intergovernmental Policy Division, will lead an Interagency
Steering Council, consisting of the Commissioners of the Department
of Economic and Community Development, Department of Environmental
Protection, Department of Agriculture, Department of Transportation
and the Department of Public Health, and Executive Directors of the
Connecticut Housing Finance Authority and the Connecticut
Development Authority, to coordinate planning and development.
Read the details in
Executive Order No. 15.
Related:
Governor's Press Release;
Connecticut Center for Sustainable Development
New from Brookings: Land Use Regs in the Nation's 50 largest
Metropolitan Areas
A new report from
the Brookings Institution gives a comprehensive survey of local
land use regulations in the country's 50 biggest metro areas.
The authors found a wide range of regulatory regimes,
ranging from exclusionary and restrictive to innovative and
accommodating. Unsurprisingly, these produce a variety of
effects on metropolitan growth and density, and on the
opportunities afforded to the residents that live there.
The
Appendix to the report takes a detailed a look at the
governance framework, growth trends, and regulatory environment
in each of the 50 largest metros.
On
Hartford and
New Haven (which is glommed together with Bridgeport,
Stamford, Waterbury and Danbury), the authors say "Metropolitan
Hartford is an intensely exclusionary region, dominated by small
and medium-sized towns that obstruct the construction of
apartments and do little to encourage long term affordability.
The region’s population has grown slowly in recent years but
still sprawls rapidly… Metropolitan New Haven contrasts in
several interesting ways with metropolitan Hartford....
A
companion piece,
Annexation
and the Fiscal Fate of Cities, shows that the
flexibility to annex surrounding land and communities is more
important to a city's bond rating and fiscal health than the
area's poverty rate or median household income. That'll
raise some eyebrows in the land of steady habits.
More
IEDC Case
Studies Connect Smart Growth & Economic Development
A new report from the International Economic Development Council
uses eight different case studies to illustrate the connections
between smart growth development and a community's employment
sector, wealth, and quality of life. From the intro:
“Industry and business
regard livability as an important locational factor...
[L]ocal governments need to identify their quality of life
attributes, build on them and effectively promote them to the
business community. Failing to invest in these attributes can have
negative consequences for a local, state or regional economy."
Download PDF
(50p,
3.2Mb)
Regional Indicators: Telling Stories,
Measuring Trends, Inspiring Action
Borrowing from the old management maxim "if you can't measure it,
you can't manage it," the Alliance for Regional Stewardship opens
its monograph on regional indicators with the question "How do
you know whether your region is making progress if you don't measure
change?"
Regional indicators measure what a region
looks like and report on how things are changing.
The Alliance for Regional Stewardship
released Regional Indicators: Telling Stories, Measuring Trends,
Inspiring Action, a monograph on the indicators that are being used
at the regional level for a variety of purposes.
The publication covers feedback from 21
regions regarding their own experience with regional indicators.
Download PDF (36p, 140kb) (Related: CERC
Benchmarks
report.)
Is Infill Development Just Vertical Sprawl?
(And if it is, then what?) This NYT piece covers the views of
opponents of high density development - that urban infill causes
just as many problems as traditional sprawl.
More
Green Pieces
A recent Governing magazine article highlights ecoregionalism
efforts across the states. Ecoregionalism is about stitching together landscapes and
watersheds to guard against disturbance and species loss, and state
and local leaders are working with conservation groups to promote
it. They're finding that it relies
less on expensive outright acquisitions and more on easements that
bar development and voluntary agreements with private landowners.
More
CNU
Multimedia Toolkit Now Available
The Congress for New Urbanism has put a collection of materials from the 2006 CNU Congress
available online in a toolkit. The Toolkit includes audio and
video from nearly 50 Congress sessions, slideshows, and reports from the correspondents who covered the
Congress for the online Daily NUws.
More
Federal Reserve's Fiscal Impact Tool Provides Metrics for
Development
Looking for tools to project and measure the
success of economic development projects? Lots of policymakers and
community stakeholders are increasingly looking for metrics to
justify spending and investment on economic development. A recent
KnowledgePlex presentation gave an overview of the Federal Reserve's
Fiscal Impact Tool, which is available to the public.
More
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