Smart Growth Resource: Projects

Smart Growth projects offer a wealth of information on how to create solutions for growth issues. It's not always necessary to come up with new ideas for each development decision; there are literally dozens of projects throughout the United States that can provide perspective and show how other communities have dealt with similar challenges.

The projects listed here draw from a range of possibilities. Each project is ranked on Smart Growth Principles for each reference.

Projects are available online and may also be downloaded and printed as Adobe Acrobat documents.

Through partnerships with The Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Urban Technical Assistance Project at Columbia University and the Office of the Manhattan Borough President, Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC) developed a strategy to expand the housing and commercial options for central Harlem. Over 200 affordable housing units were built with an additional 200 affordable units planned. These include 25 units of transitional housing for homeless families, 68 rental units reserved for formerly homeless families, and 135 rental units to accommodate low- and moderate-income families. The Abyssinian Neighborhood Project created 15,000 square feet of commercial space for five local businesses, which has helped revitalize the central Harlem business corridors.

Like many communities in northern California, Santa Cruz has seen its housing costs increase dramatically. These rising costs mean the city is struggling to retain teachers, police officers, and service workers. To address these challenges, Santa Cruz created an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Development Program. Accessory units create separate residences by converting all or part of a garage or by building new structures on a homeowner’s property.p>

When the U.S. Navy announced in 1993 that it would close the Orlando Naval Training Center, the city of Orlando saw an opportunity to build a vibrant, mixed-use neighborhood that would make the base property once again part of the community. The city's Base Reuse Commission organized to plan the property's future, engaging citizens in hundreds of meetings over two years to help devise and refine a plan to redevelop the base. At visioning workshops, citizens described what they wanted: a variety of housing types, a vibrant main street, public access to lakes, and linkages with existing neighborhoods.

In communities across the country, aging shopping centers are losing business to larger and newer competitors. As these retail centers, known as "greyfields," cease to be viable as shopping malls, they can often provide opportunities for redevelopment that meet other community needs. One good example can be found in Lakewood, Colorado. Facing the decline of its Villa Italia shopping mall, the city worked with citizens, civic groups, and a local developer to transform the property into Belmar-the real, walkable downtown that this Denver inner suburb had lacked.

The Belmont Dairy is a mixed-use, urban infill project in the Portland, Oregon, neighborhood of Sunnyside. Located approximately 1.5 miles southeast of downtown, Belmont Dairy has expanded housing and retail choices for Sunnyside residents, spurred reinvestment, and created a vibrant anchor for a changing neighborhood.

Bethesda Row, located in the central business district of Bethesda, Maryland, illustrates the revitalization of a suburban downtown area into a mixed-use, walkable shopping and restaurant district. It has become so successful it draws people from the surrounding county and Washington D.C.

The Community Preservation Initiative (CPI) is a statewide smart growth program that helps municipal officials and community leaders understand the potential effects of growth. It provides tools and technical assistance to encourage informed and balanced growth decisions and emphasizes education, not regulation.

To the residents of Davidson, North Carolina, located just 20 miles from Charlotte, the essence of their small town is great neighbors and great neighborhoods. This small community is setting the standard for creating healthy and vibrant neighborhoods in a historic setting. The high quality of life is attracting development, which the town accommodates partly by revitalizing its existing buildings. Its new neighborhoods incorporate a variety of lot sizes and housing types, including affordable housing, and neighborhood parks within a five-minute walk.

Since 2000, the Office of Quality Growth (OQG) in the Georgia Department of Community Affairs has helped communities learn about and implement smart growth principles. Its approach includes focusing assistance efforts on the communities that are ready to implement smart growth principles and educating communities about smart growth success stories in Georgia to foster peer-to-peer interaction and support among local officials.

Closure of the Gilbert & Bennett wire mill in 1989 left a 55-acre, contaminated industrial site in Redding's Georgetown section, the primary commercial zone for this town of 8,400 residents. By 2002, the facility that was once a major source of tax revenue had accrued unpaid taxes of over $1 million. To revitalize the area and protect public health, the town partnered with a developer who not only paid the tax lien in full, but also cleaned up the contamination and is redeveloping the site into a mixed-use neighborhood. This partnership has been good for the town and the developer-each benefits from the new homes, businesses, services, and revenue.

The Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) worked closely with community members to rebuild a formerly crime-ridden and dilapidated 120-acre hilltop neighborhood into a mixed-use, mixed-income, and environmentally sensitive community.

When Denver's Elitch Gardens amusement park relocated in 1994, it left behind a 27-acre site just five miles from downtown. On this site, the Denver Urban Renewal Authority (DURA) helped facilitate the vision, design, financing, and economic development of Highlands' Garden Village, an innovative, compact, mixed-use community that has become a model for development throughout the Denver area.

The state of Vermont promotes compact settlements surrounded by rural countryside. The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB) supports this goal by funding affordable housing development in existing population centers and by preserving historic resources, farmland, forests, and public access to recreational lands. The agency pursues affordable housing, land conservation, and historic preservation initiatives under a single unique, synergistic program, which balances priorities.

The Cuyahoga County Treasurer’s Office, under the leadership of County Treasurer Jim Rokakis, created the Housing Enhancement Loan Program (HELP), an innovative program to improve quality of life and keep thousands of families in older Cleveland neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs. HELP encourages property owners in 33 targeted communities to make improvements to their homes, making these communities more competitive with newer, outlying areas. Under HELP, six participating banks make home-improvement loans directly to property owners at three percentage points below market rate. The Treasurer’s Office then purchases certificates of deposit at those banks for a matching amount, accepting a return of three percentage points below market rate. Homeowners can use the loans for maintenance, remodeling, landscaping, or room additions. All homes valued at up to $250,000 are eligible, as are all multi-family rental properties with more than three units. There are no income restrictions.

North Natomas is a fast-growing planned community in Sacramento, California’s capital. In 2001, the city approved a master plan, designed according to smart growth principles, for the Natomas Town Center. Anchoring the community is Inderkum High School, a new two-story building on about 40 acres, a departure from California’s typical single-level buildings on 60-acre sites. It will share facilities with Los Rios Community College and a public library, and its athletics programs will use public park land and a community aquatic center.

The Naval Training Center in San Diego trained members of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Naval Reserve for 70 years. When it closed in 1995, the city took advantage of its historic buildings and its prime location on San Diego Bay to redevelop it as Liberty Station, which restores waterfront access to the public for the first time in 80 years, creates new parks, and establishes creative-arts facilities.

Consistently ranked among the top locations in the country to raise a family or establish a business, the Minneapolis-St. Paul region is experiencing rapid population growth. The metropolitan area is showing signs of growth-related stress: increasing traffic congestion, rising housing prices, and dwindling open space. Instead of trying to limit growth, the Minnesota state legislature passed the Livable Communities Act (LCA) in 1995 to provide the Metropolitan Council with a voluntary, incentive-based approach to help communities grow in a way that addresses many of the region’s issues.

In 1994, the Lowry Air Force Base closed, offering Denver and Aurora, the two communities with jurisdiction over the base's property, a chance to use the former military base to create a new neighborhood. From 1991 to 1993, the communities embarked on an intensive planning process with local residents and businesses. The reuse plan was completed even before the base closed, and this early planning contributed to the successful redevelopment.

For the past several decades, the national trend in school construction has been big buildings on large sites, often on the outskirts of town. Increasingly, however, communities are realizing that taking a school out of a community can have unforeseen repercussions, ranging from lower home values to increased traffic congestion to loss of green space. In response, citizens, parents, and school administrators are calling for schools that fit the needs of individual communities. These people recognize that schools do more than house children for the day. They affect home-buying decisions and traffic patterns. They present opportunities to create neighborhood centers for education and civic life. The Moore Square Museums Magnet Middle School exemplifies this approach to school siting.

Faced with increasing numbers of children who had to be bused to distant schools because schools in their neighborhood had no room, Milwaukee Public Schools decided to take action to not only create more neighborhood schools, but also to restore the communities around them. In 1999, the Wisconsin legislature approved the Neighborhood Schools Initiative. It authorized the Milwaukee school district to borrow up to $170 million to build or renovate neighborhood schools.

Columbia Villa was an isolated and distressed 82-acre public housing site. The Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) partnered with public and private stakeholders to redevelop the site and create New Columbia, a neighborhood built to improve economic opportunity, community livability, and environmental quality for both old and new residents.

A popular town in the Los Angeles region, the city of Pasadena wanted to maintain its unique sense of place and give its residents choices in where they live and how they get around. Through its Central District Specific Plan, adopted in November 2004, the city is encouraging housing in the downtown, near transit, and above stores. Design guidelines ensure that new development fits with community character.

Arlington’s smart growth planning approach places dense, mixed-use, infill development at five Metro stations—known as the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor—and tapers it down to residential neighborhoods. The result, as of 2004: Over 21 million square feet of office, retail, and commercial space; more than 3,000 hotel rooms; and almost 25,000 residences, creating vibrant “urban villages” where people live, shop, work, and play using transit, pedestrian walkways, bicycles, or cars.

More than 5,000 community members, elected officials, and business leaders shaped the future of the Sacramento region through a series of workshops, regional conferences, web-based dialogue, and surveys. The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) initiated this two-year process—the Sacramento Region Blueprint: Transportation/Land Use Study—to examine current land use and future growth patterns and to plan where and how the region should grow.

The San Juan Pueblo, just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been inhabited for over 700 years. In 2000, San Juan Pueblo tribal members initiated a community planning process to articulate and implement a long-term vision for the pueblo. At community design meetings, the elders recalled, “There was always an eye on you as a child and everyone felt they could count on their neighbor.”

To give communities incentives to build more housing near rail stations, the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County created a Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Incentive Program. It uses transportation funds to spur construction of needed housing and creates environmental benefits by giving people the option of commuting and running errands by rail. This program directly links land use with efficient use of the existing transportation system.

The Southside neighborhood, a 10-acre revitalization project, is one of Greensboro, North Carolina’s first significant mixed-use, infill projects. The city’s Department of Housing and Community Development developed a Traditional Neighborhood District Ordinance to assist Southside’s redevelopment. The revitalization, just one-and-a-half blocks from Greensboro’s historic main street, transformed a blighted area into a thriving, attractive district. The community capitalized on a rich stock of historic buildings and public spaces to restore this downtown neighborhood.

When Denver's Stapleton International Airport closed in 1995, the city saw an opportunity to use the land to create a great new neighborhood. Over six years, starting before the airport even closed, citizens, the business community, and the city and county worked on a development plan that committed to environmental and economic sustainability and social equity. The plan would generate economic development, enhance existing neighborhoods and businesses, protect environmental quality and open space, and offer high-quality, attractive homes to people with a range of incomes. The plan also encourages education, from preschool to "lifelong learning" for adults, and balanced transportation options, including walking, bicycling, public transportation, and driving. In 1999, the city selected Forest City Stapleton, Inc. as the master developer, and construction began in 2001.

The redevelopment of Stapleton Airport is one of the nation's largest and most ambitious infill projects, converting Denver's old airport complex into 4,700 acres of homes, offices, shops, schools, and parks. Over six years, a grassroots effort of more than 100 public meetings gathered community input on reusing the site, creating a vision of "a network of urban villages, employment centers, and significant open spaces, all linked by a commitment to the protection of natural resources and the development of human resources." The master plan emphasizes environmentally sound development, walkable neighborhoods, and lifelong learning. It rests on the principles of economic opportunity, environmental responsibility, and social equity. Stapleton will include a wide variety of housing choices, most of which will be less than a 10-minute walk from shops, schools, offices, and parks.

Re-using former military bases and addressing the lack of decent and affordable military housing are concerns for many cities and the Armed Forces. At the San Diego Naval Training Center, the Department of the Navy addressed these issues with a development that serves as a welcome addition to the nearby Point Loma community.

The Wellington Neighborhood provides affordable and market-rate housing on a site that was once dredge-mined. The project recycles land, houses working families, and provides free transit to the nearby downtown. It helps the region avoid “mountain sprawl” by creating an attractive, compact neighborhood, a design that has fostered a strong sense of community in a short time.

Langley, Washington, is a small town on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound, an hour away from downtown Seattle and Everett by road and ferry. The town is home to about 1,000 people and retains a village character despite being under moderate development pressure.

In recent decades, the town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, a coastal community on Cape Cod, has experienced tremendous growth. Hyannis, one of the town's seven villages, saw growth at its edges characterized by low-density residential subdivisions and strip retail, while its downtown was plagued with vacant storefronts and disinvestment. This pattern strained local infrastructure and impacted the town's fragile natural resources and historic character.