The smart growth movement is making significant headway around the country, concludes Keith Schneider, editor and director of program development for the Michigan Land Use Institute. Although smart growth has fizzled momentarily in Schneider’s home state of Michigan, he takes heart in the progress made in a dozen other states, including Virginia.
The smart growth package – environmental protection, transit investments, urban revitalization, curbing sprawl, collaborative planning, and land conservation – is steadily being embedded in new executive orders, Legislative policy, and new state law across the country.
In the last two years, governors in Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Ohio established new executive-level offices to oversee all or part of their smart growth programs. Governors and Legislatures, on a bi-partisan basis, embraced smart growth to help reduce emissions of global climate change gases in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Utah. Smart growth policy has been embraced as a path to urban redevelopment in Illinois, as a competitive development strategy in Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Ohio, and as a means to improve transportation and curb sprawl in Virginia.
In Virginia, the measures that Schneider found most notable included:
- All [fast-growth] counties will be required to designate specific areas for higher density development, so-called urban development areas, by 2011.
- Inside a UDA, housing densities must reach four units per acre or more.
- Development within UDAs should apply pedestrian-friendly “New Urbanism” design principles.
It’s remarkable, is it not? An out-of-state journalist finds more significance in Virginia’s most momentous land use legislation (like it or hate it, it is momentous) than does Virginia’s own press corps, which has yet to acknowledge that anything significant has transpired. Read Schneider’s full report here.