Smart growth provides a means for communities to incorporate more compact building design as an alternative to conventional, land consumptive development. Compact building design suggests that communities be designed in a way which permits more open space to preserved, and that buildings can be constructed which make more efficient use of land and resources. By encouraging buildings to grow vertically rather than horizontally, and by incorporating structured rather than surface parking, for example, communities can reduce the footprint of new construction, and preserve more greenspace. Not only is this approach more efficient by requiring less land for construction. It also provides and protects more open, undeveloped land that would exist otherwise to absorb and filter rain water, reduce flooding and stormwater drainage needs, and lower the amount of pollution washing into our streams, rivers and lakes.
Compact building design is necessary to support wider transportation choices, and provides cost savings for localities. Communities seeking to encourage transit use to reduce air pollution and congestion recognize that minimum levels of density are required to make public transit networks viable. Local governments find that on a per-unit basis, it is cheaper to provide and maintain services like water, sewer, electricity, phone service and other utilities in more compact neighborhoods than in dispersed communities.
Research based on these developments has shown, for example, that well-designed, compact New Urbanist communities that include a variety of house sizes and types command a higher market value on a per square foot basis than do those in adjacent conventional suburban developments. Perhaps this is why increasing numbers of the development industry have been able to successfully integrate compact design into community building efforts. This despite current zoning practices – such as those that require minimum lot sizes, or prohibit multi-family or attached housing – and other barriers - community perceptions of “higher density” development, often preclude compact design.
