Smart Growth Bytes

Smart-Growth Bytes are excerpts from the Smart-Growth News, a service of the Smart Growth Network, www.smartgrowth.org. Reference links to main site addresses are provided at the end of each headline summary. Direct links to individual articles are not feasible because most articles are moved to newspaper archives within seven days of publication. Many newspapers offer subscription services for archive retrieval, or offer free searches of their archives.

CALIFORNIA
Southern California "Compass" Growth Plan Concentrates New Growth in Urban Areas, Along Transit Corridors
With its six-county region's population likely to grow from 17 million to 23 million by 2030, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) asserts in the just-issued long-term "Compass" plan that the best way to absorb that growth without destructive traffic and pollution increases is to concentrate development in urban areas and along transportation corridors.
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4169&state=5

CONNECTICUT
Shelton Building Reuse Plan Would Add Housing for Low- to Medium-Income Households
A 100-year-old former factory building near the Housatonic River in Shelton may gain new life as a 110-unit condominium for people in low to medium income brackets, with developer-architect John Guedes' attorney Raymond Rizio telling the city's Planning and Zoning Commission this $12-million "adaptive reuse of an old industrial building that no longer functions for industrial purposes" can become "the cornerstone of the redevelopment of downtown."
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4170&state=7

MASSACHUSETTS
Vision 2020 Report Describes Sprawl Crisis in Southeast Massachusetts
"Sprawl is reaching epidemic proportions in Southeastern Massachusetts," warned state Democratic Senator Marc R. Pacheco at a Statehouse press conference, unveiling the regional Vision 2020 planning alliance's report that shows only three of the 46 self-audited towns "growing smart," another 19 just initiating "smart growth" policies, and the rest doing little to really change the old development patterns, with six others simply ignoring the survey.
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4171&state=22

Framingham Needs Smart Growth, Improved Streetscapes to Build Pedestrian Traffic
Although Framingham, some 18 miles southwest of central Boston, doesn't give its residents much opportunity "to walk more and drive less," it can do so in the future by planning now for pedestrian needs, writes former journalist and town planning and zoning official Sharon Machlis Gartenberg in a MetroWest Daily News guest column, stressing, "There's no quick solution to the choked roads that suburban sprawl has created; but there is a solution for the long term: 'smart growth'."
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4172&state=22

MICHIGAN
Detroit Region Moves to Improve and Rebuild City from Within
After five decades of building highways and suburban cul-de-sacs and losing the urban middle class to the increasingly expensive but also increasingly clogged and troubled outer areas, writes Michigan Land Use Institute deputy director and journalist Keith Schneider, many people in Detroit and its suburbs "have looked hard at this uncivilized civilization" and moved in their own ways to bring the city back, among them Corktown Citizens District Council administrator, engineer and writer Kelli Kavanaugh.
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4173&state=23

NEW JERSEY
Environmental, Social Action Groups Want Gov. McGreevey to Veto "Fast-Track" Permit Bill
Always supportive of his strong anti-sprawl stance, leaders of more than 25 environmental, social justice and civil rights groups from across the state parted company with Democratic Governor James E. McGreevey on the recently passed Permit Streamlining in Smart Growth Areas bill, telling him in a letter "(t)he bill will severely weaken environmental protections in the state, accelerate sprawl and add more pollution into areas that are already suffering the effects of too much pollution," and launching a major campaign against its implementation with a call for his veto.
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4174&state=31

NORTH CAROLINA
Increased Transit Use Part of Plan Adding Smart Growth Features to New Carrboro High School
It took almost a year, but Orange County Commissioners and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools have finally harmonized legal documents that increase the $27.8 million outlay on a third high school in Carrboro by $1.9 million specifically for smart-growth features now and another $300,000 likely later, with city schools Superintendent Neil Pedersen relieved that the commissioners "are recognizing our intent to design a smart-growth school."
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4175&state=34

PENNSYLVANIA
York County S.G. Coalition Seeks More Affordable Housing, Points to Sprawl Building as Source of Increased Home Costs
The Eastern York County Smart Growth Coalition "has always supported responsible planning for housing growth" -- but growth which ensures sufficient affordable housing for all income groups besides those that want large homes on rural fringes -- and any contrary claim "is just pure nonsense," writes coalition member Warren Evans in the York Daily Record, in response to an op-ed piece by Realtors Association of York and Adams Counties lobbyist Steve Snell, who implied that smart growth organizations are "threatening the ability of working families to own a home."
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4176&state=39

WASHINGTON STATE
Vacant Waterfront Brownfield Will Become Public Sculpture Park
Eagerly awaited since 1999, the redevelopment of an 8.5-acre vacant Unocal fuel terminal on Belltown waterfront north of downtown Seattle into the Olympic Sculpture Park has just started, with Washington Ecology Department spokesman Larry Altose applauding the Seattle Art Museum for turning heavily polluted land "literally into a work of art."
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4177&state=48

WISCONSIN
Smart Growth Plan a Top Priority for New Price County Chairman
Few things are more important for ushering in better development patterns than willingness across the government spectrum -- an axiom well illustrated by the Price County Board that cancelled work on a comprehensive "smart growth" plan under former leadership but is ready to resume it under a new one, and by Fifield's planning committee that alone continued review of town ordinances until its chairman resigned two months ago but also is eager to proceed.
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4178&state=50

WYOMING
Broad Alliance Seeks Smart Growth, Protection for Wyoming's Coalbed Methane Sites
Worried about the coalbed methane (CBM) exploitation impact in the Powder River Basin in northeast Wyoming and the possibility of similar development in the even methane-richer southwest state quadrant, its two United Steel Workers of America (USWA) local unions -- Trona workers and avid spare-time hunters -- formed the Blue-Green Alliance with the Labor Institute, the Public health Institute, the Friends of the Red Desert and the Powder River Basin Resource Council (PRBRC), calling in their joint statement for smart growth, protection of some areas, and use of advanced technology to limit environmental impact.
http://www.smartgrowth.org/news/article.asp?art=4179&state=51