nrdc smart growth wiki

(Note to readers and users: The purpose of this wiki is to provide a broad introduction to and summary of NRDC's activities related to smart growth and development, along with timely updates. Smart growth staff should update it whenever there is significant news; readers should consult it whenever you would like a current summary of our work.)

NRDC AND SMART GROWTH

(While there has been more encouraging news in the most recent years as rates of driving have begun to fall and transit usage has begun to increase, the gap between where we are and where we need to be with regard to transportation patterns remains daunting.)

Fortunately, research demonstrates that well-located, walkable, diverse neighborhoods with transportation choices reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deliver an abundance of additional environmental benefits when compared with conventional development. They also save taxpayer money for infrastructure, protect historic resources and the landscape, and in many cases provide economic opportunity for distressed populations.

NRDC has been refining and promoting these solutions for over a decade as one of a small handful of organizations (and the unquestioned national environmental leader among them) that can be said to have invented the national smart growth movement. In part because of our efforts, that movement has grown to include a strong and diverse array of partners in business, government, housing, and the environment and, in spite of immense challenges, we and our partners are starting to see tangible progress: central cities are beginning to grow again after years of decline; the share of new growth claimed by sprawl is declining (see below); and, as noted, driving rates have slowed while public transportation usage is growing. With major fluctuations in fuel prices and a precipitous drop in home values in sprawling locations, the market is now responding. These trends in land use tell us that our solutions are the right ones, and that we must continue and strengthen our efforts to promote them.

NRDC believes that, by expanding our resources, applying our expertise, and continuing to work with the partnerships we have developed, we can cut land consumption per new resident in half, reduce driving per capita by 20 percent, and double the rate of public transportation usage within a decade. All will be essential to meeting goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

NRDC’s sophisticated, multifaceted program of smart growth advocacy features the following components:

II. Innovation in Smart-Growth Markets and Practice (led by our DC office, with support from San Francisco)

Private-sector incentives must be transformed to favor smart growth, not sprawl, so that smart growth becomes easier to build and more commonplace.

LEED for Neighborhood Development: Foremost among our efforts in this category is a major program that NRDC invented and has led that rewards developers who practice smart growth. Administered under the same “LEED” (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) framework that the US Green Building Council uses to certify green buildings, the new system comprises consensus-based leadership standards for environmental performance in locating, planning, and incorporating the latest green technology to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts typically associated with land development. Developers whose plans meet our standards will receive a standard, silver, gold, or platinum certification to support their application as they navigate their way through the development approval process. We also hope that, over time, municipalities and states will use the standards as a template for good zoning practices and for creating favorable incentives of their own for sustainable development. Our partners in this endeavor are the US Green Building Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism. NRDC also consults with our coalition Smart Growth America on the system's progress and key decisions.

LEED-ND status update (December 7, 2009):

Enthusiasm in the development community for LEED-ND has been extraordinary, with 239 developments in cities and suburbs all across the country (examples above) participating in the pilot program. Over 40 of these industry leaders have now been certified and are serving as credentialed smart growth ambassadors across the U.S., as well as in Canada and China (see attachment). We also know that many developers who are not yet applicants in our system are locating and designing projects so that they will qualify when the system transitions from pilot fo full scale in 2010. Municipalities are also using the system, and some have begun to enact regulatory preferences for LEED-ND-certified development.

Behind the scenes, NRDC and our two partners worked to refine the system to reflect what we have been learning in the pilot. As another indication of the interest in the program, we received 5000 public comments in response to a comprehensive update of the certification standards that we published in November 2008, and another 1400 comments in response to a revised draft in Spring 2009. After extensive review of public comments, the final version of LEED-ND was submitted for formal approval from the three partner organizations (NRDC consulted with the Smart Growth America coalition as well as our own board). Registration for new projects is anticipated to open in 2010.

Preliminary analysis shows that a LEED-ND certified development will, on average, reduce carbon emissions 30 percent below average per capita. In best-case situations, CO2 from transportation can be reduced as much as 75 percent. We hope this year to develop further quantitative analysis demonstrating the carbon benefits of LEED-ND development.

Kaid Benfield co-founded LEED-ND and sits on the partners and core committees that oversee the program. Justin Horner is vice chair of the LEED Technical Advisory Group for location and planning standards, which will review and update the system over time. Rachel Sohmer is staff liaison to the implementing structure at the US Green Building Council. Nathan Sandwick is leading the quantitative analysis with our technical consultant, Criterion Planners. NRDC's water program has also provided substantial input to the development of LEED-ND.

Cool Spots: We are also helping refine smart growth planning and investment strategies for municipalities and developers in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, to assist all levels of the land use planning process, we are working with Criterion Planners of Portland, Oregon to construct and apply the Cool Spots GIS-based planning methodolgy, which uses an array of local land use, energy distribution, and transportation data to lead developers and planning agencies to the places within their regions where development is likely to have the lowest carbon footprint. Cool Spots will be of obvious benefit to such potential users as California metro regions implementing carbon-reduction planning pursuant to SB 375 (see below) and is also drawing tremendous interest among participants in the land development process.

Cool Spots status update (July 10, 2009):

NRDC and Criterion have begun working on analyzing greenhouse gas reductions from 10 completed Cool Spots developed around transit stations in metro Portland and the San Francisco Bay Area (5 each). We chose the particular locations because we have an excellent database to build upon from PB Placemaking's very good study on vehicle trip generation from the same locations last year. The original researchers have graciously agreed to give us access to their DOT-funded work, to which we will be adding carbon analysis, building energy analysis, and regional baseline analysis for comparisons. This should be immensely helpful to support our agendas for T4, SB375, LEED-ND, and Moving Cooler.

In addition, we are discussing and researching the potential application of Cool Spots analysis in a range of cities served by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which funds community development efforts as part of a comprehensive effort to green their community investment. We presented the model in a two-part webcast to the LISC constituency in late 2008.

Kaid Benfield and Nathan Sandwick are leading our efforts on Cool Spots.

Linking smart growth to related policies for affordable community development and green stormwater infrastructure: No matter what its effect on emissions and land conservation, smart growth will fail if it is not broadly applied, consistent with related social and environmental goals. To this end we puruse partnerships with affordable community development sponsors that can link NRDC with social equity goals while also creating models that other developers can look to and follow in their own projects. In 2004, for example, we joined with Enterprise Community Partners to help them create Green Communities, a $500 million program of investment in green affordable housing. That program has matured to where NRDC now needs only to play a relatively minor advisory role. We have now begun another promising partnership with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), one of the nation's leading financial sponsors of urban revitalization and community development in distressed areas, and NRDC's water program to demonstrate that local community development corporations can pursue smart, holistically sustainable development in a cost-effective manner.

Linkage status update (July 10, 2009):

Together with LISC, NRDC's water program, the Trust for Public Land, and other collaborators, we have begun developing an ambitious initiative to design and construct model green, mixed-income, mixed-use, transit-accessible, neighborhood-scaled urban redevelopment projects in a number of key locations around the country. One of the key objectives will be to demonstrate that we can integrate low-impact stormwater reduction strategies (sometimes called "green infrastructure, see images above) into dense city neighborhoods. We have begun discussing our ideas with the Ford Foundation and other potential funders. We are also engaged in ongoing discussions with LISC on ways in which we might work together on climate (see above) and city parks. And we are involved in a number of ways with the US Green Building Council to bring affordability, land use and transportation factors more prominently into the LEED rating system for green buildings, while also bringing green building into the discourse around smart growth and transportation.

Rachel Sohmer, Kaid Benfield, and Nathan Sandwick are involved with these efforts.

III. State and Local Policy: the California model (led by our San Francisco office)

NRDC advocates state and local smart growth policies that are national leaders, can set precedent and be replicated, and/or can help bring pressure on the federal government to act. The biggest concentration of our activities is in California, our most populous state (and one of our more progressive).

SB 375: After a long campaign of advocacy, California governor Schwarzenegger recently signed one of the decade's most promising policy achievements for smart growth: landmark legislation sponsored by NRDC to reduce global warming emissions through smart regional land use planning and transportation investment. SB375 was supported by, in addition to NRDC, a diverse coalition of interests including California’s League of Cities, Building Industry Association, Association of Counties, and numerous advocates of affordable housing. It was sponsored by state Senator Darrell Steinberg and builds on California’s seminal Global Warming Solutions Act, enacted in 2006.

Under the new law the state’s Air Resources Board will set greenhouse gas reductions targets for vehicles in each of California’s 18 designated metropolitan planning regions. (Cars and light trucks emit 31 percent of the state’s greenhouse gases.) Each MPO will then be required to create a “sustainable communities strategy” that meets the targets by designating growth areas for more efficient housing and commercial development patterns, supplemented by a complementary transportation network. Significantly, the Air Resources Board must certify that the strategy is adequate to meet the targets. Transportation investments must be consistent with each region’s certified sustainable communities strategy, or they will not qualify for funding. But state support will flow to those transportation projects contained in the strategy. California also requires housing plans, and those too must be consistent with the regional sustainability strategies.

Another key element is that individual residential and mixed-use development projects that are consistent with the certified plan will be exempted from certain analytical requirements normally required by the California Environmental Quality Act, since the relevant analysis will have already been performed in the regional planning process. Moreover, a project found to be a “superior sustainable communities project” under strict environmental and land use criteria will receive further CEQA exemptions.

SB 375 status update (July 10, 2009):

The new law was signed on September 30, 2008. NRDC's efforts will now move to monitoring and participating in its implementation to assure that its goals are fully realized. The AB 32 scoping plan (see next section) defers GHG emissions reduction targets to the SB 375 Regional Targets Advisory Committee (appointed by CARB early in 2009), which will make recommendations by September 2009. NRDC's Amanda Eaken is a member of RTAC, and CARB will name final target reductions by September 2010. Looking forward, NRDC will be advocating SB 375 as a model for the next federal transportation bill reauthorization.

AB 32 and smart growth: In 2006, the State of California passed AB 32 – the Global Warming Solutions Act. Supported by NRDC, AB32 requires the California economy to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and directed the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to produce a scoping plan by January 1, 2009, with the plan for how to get there. The scoping plan will undoubtedly serve as a model for other states’ climate action plans, so how land use is addressed in the California plan will have national repercussions. NRDC is working on getting strong smart growth recommendations into the scoping document and securing support on the CARB to get them passed. Once the scoping plan is finalized, we will be committed to the far more difficult and important task of implementing its recommendations.

AB 32 status update (December 29, 2008):

CARB released a draft of the scoping plan in July 2008. Unfortunately, its greatest single deficiency is that the plan fails to include meaningful measures to promote smart land use and efficient transportation. The current placeholder target of 5 MMTS represent only a 4% decrease in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by 2020, although many believe we can do better. The draft reduction targets are so low that business-as-usual sprawl development is likely to continue, albeit with some additional funding for regional planning and rewards for good behavior. It has also omitted critical measures to create a world-class public transportation system that can ease people's commutes while reducing emissions. An analysis published in October by the Universities of Maryland and Utah finds that these measures could, in fact, result in carbon emissions reductions more than six times greater than estimated in the draft. Along with our coalition ClimatePlan, we are working to bring the scoping plan into alignment with these findings.

IV. Federal policy (led by the DC office)

NRDC has long been a leader in federal environmental law and policy. For smart growth, our efforts are concentrated primarily on transportation legislation that has the potential to shape profoundly the rules under which the federal government will either become a partner in our nation’s efforts to grow more sustainably or, instead, continue its historic role as an enabler of sprawl and transportation excess.

Federal transportation reauthorization: The most important of our efforts is the omnibus transportation legislation that establishes the programs and funding structure for highways, public transit, and all other programs administered by the federal Department of Transportation. The current law expires in 2009 and must be replaced. NRDC believes it is time for a new transportation and infrastructure vision for America that puts the emphasis squarely on environmental performance, and we are playing a leading role in a national coalition (Transportation for America, t4america.org) seeking transportation investments that reduce automobile dependence and associated emissions, provide communities with transportation choices, prioritize repair of crumbling highways before new ones are built, foster substantial improvements in intercity freight and passenger rail service, and support land development that is transit-oriented, walkable, and efficient in its use of land while protecting natural resources and the landscape.

Federal transportation update (March 2, 2009):

Last fall, on October 15, our coalition released Build for America: A Five-Point Plan to Get Our Economy Moving with maximum national media exposure emphasizing the role the transportation policy must play in assuring

international competitiveness, green economic recovery, infrastructure repair, fiscal savings, and reducing financial burdens on citizens. NRDC played a prominent role in the release. On February 26 of this year, the coalition formally launched the campaign platform on Capitol Hill, bringing together leaders in the arenas of transportation, public health, business, and social justice to speak on behalf of much needed transportation reforms. The campaign platform, which is now publicly available at the Transportation For America website, details the coalitions support for establishing accountability in federal transportation policy; modernizing and expanding rail, freight, and transit networks; reducing oil consumption, reducing harmful emissions, and helping Americans save money; encouraging smart growth development patterns; fostering health and safety by investing in transportation alternatives and context-sensitive roadway design; enacting a sustainable and equitable approach to funding.

Deron Lovaas leads our efforts on federal policy.

Related legislation: While the omnibus transportation bill is our main focus, we also help develop and support more targeted pieces of federal legislation that advance the agenda for smart growth and efficient transportation. These will be highlighted in the update section as they occur.

Related legislation update (December 19, 2008):

In July, we added our support to a high-speed rail bill introduced by Sen. John Kerry to create a federal office and dedicated funding in the form of grants, bonds, and tax credits for the development of intercity passenger rail facilities for trains traveling at 150 mph or faster. While it is unlikely to become stand-alone law, it provides a good template for addressing this issue in the larger transportation legislation. In September, we added our support to an initiative introduced by Sen. Tom Carper that would bring smart growth into any federal cap and trade program to reduce greenhouse gases. The Carper bill would allocate a percentage of funds realized from a cap-and-trade auction to rail transit, transit-oriented development, and pedestrian and bicycle safety. This bill, too, is essentially a marker for inclusion in future transportation or climate legislation.

As Congress was working on the stimulus bill, which passed on February 13, NRDC and others advocated that transportation spending must be directed towards projects that advance a more sustainable transportation network in the United States. This strong advocacy effort helped ensure that $8 billion of general funds were availed to support transit investments, including some assurance of operating support for transit agencies trying to maintain existing levels of service. The bill also offered $5 billion in support of high speed intercity rail projects. Such provisions help to create and preserve jobs, and bring greater assurance of lasting economic recovery.

Through a contact with the incoming chief of staff to President-Elect Barack Obama, NRDC is advocating that any financial relief to be provided to the housing and mortgage sectors give preferential treatment to homes that are placed in smart, accessible locations that reduce the need for driving and that feature energy-efficient construction (in both cases providing financial savings for households as well as emissions reductions for the environment).

We also maintain a strong presence for smart growth and transportation efficiency on NRDC's blog site, Switchboard. Kaid Benfield's smart growth blog is updated daily on issues that bring together development, community, and the environment. Kaid also posts his most important entries on several related sites, including Huffington Post, DailyKos, the Sustainable Cities Collective, Rooflines (National Housing Institute), and the Salons of the Congress for the New Urbanism. It is not unusual for his posts to attract hundreds and even thousands of visiotrs. One recent post attracted 6,600 visitors to NRDC's site. Deron Lovaas and Justin Horner are also active NRDC bloggers.

Beyond the communications media, NRDC was one of the founders and remains one of the leaders of Smart Growth America, a coalition that has brought together 100 environmental, housing, social-justice and preservation organizations from around the country to work together on advocacy, communications, research, and capacity-building efforts, including LEED-ND and federal legislation. We also play a leading role in the Transportation For America coalition, mentioned above. In California, NRDC is a founder of ClimatePlan, the state's only organization of environmental, open space, development and environmental justice organizations committed exclusively to the land use-climate connection. ClimatePlan’s ability to leverage the policy specializations of its members in land use regulation, conservation, and regional planning with the depth of NRDC’s policy expertise and political clout has clearly strengthened the advocacy agenda of the proponents of smart growth.

In addition to coalition work, NRDC has written and sponsored several of the leading research and policy publications on environmentally sustainable land use and transportation, and we frequently agree to peer-review the reports of others. Recently we have been active in helping to articulate and advance the data needs, modeling tools, and planning approaches that support accurate and comprehensive greenhouse gas emissions inventories, and effective local and regional GHG reduction plans. And we reach out to a community of influential professionals by serving on multiple boards and committees of such prestigious organizations as the American Institute of Architects, the Congress for the New Urbanism, the American Planning Association, the National Academies of Science and, of course, multiple environmental networks and coalitions.

Finally, NRDC knows there is a strong business case to be made for smart growth. For many employers, finding affordable housing for their employees, reducing their own transportation and service costs, and maintaining strong, livable commutes are paramount concerns. Smart growth strategies also save local agencies billions of dollars in unnecessary infrastructure costs, making more funds available to provide amenities and create attractive places to live and do business. Developers looking to meet the growing demand for infill, mixed-use, walkable communities are directly served by NRDC’s efforts to direct more funding to mass transit and expedite environmental review for infill development.

We engage the business community nationally in a variety of ways, such as with architects and developers in LEED-ND, and with the National Association of Realtors and Urban Land Institute in the Smart Growth Network. In addition, our California smart growth staff has undertaken an initiative with Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), an organization of businesspeople founded by NRDC, to further our smart growth efforts. Our close relationship with E2 provides unique venues to make the case for smart growth and provides important access to decision makers and parties not usually open to the perspective of environmental organizations, such as the California Chamber of Commerce. These relationships have been instrumental in aiding the adoption of important initiatives such as SB 375.

Strengthening constituencies updates:

Picturing Smart Growrth - Visions for Sustainable Communities Across America is now online! (November 26, 2009)

Kaid Benfield appears in a podcast on NRDC's OnEarth site, discussing "What makes an eco-town green."

Kaid's most recent publications include an essay in "Perspectives on Future Opportunities for Philanthropy," published in Spring 2009 by the Funders Network for Smart Growth and distributed to 2000 philanthropists across the country. He also has a chapter ("Round round get around: reducing transportation burdens in the green community") in the forthcoming catalogue/book accompanying the National Building Museum's Green Community exhibit, which is on display until October 2009. (April15, 2009)

In Spring 2009, Kaid was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the North Carolina Society of Landscape Architects and also was a guest lecturer at the University of Cincinnati's Sustainable Urban Environments speaker series, and a panelist at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. Kaid also served on the jury for the 2009 edition of EPA's annual National Awards for Smart Growth Achievement, and has accepted an invitation to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Indiana Society of Landscape Architects in the fall of 2009. (July 10, 2009)

For information, contact:

Rachel Sohmer

Natural Resources Defense Council

1200 New York Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20005

rsohmer@nrdc.org

202-289-6868

www.nrdc.org/smartgrowth