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By David Crossley
President, Gulf Coast Institute
All over the United States mayors, governors, urban planners, environmentalists, business leaders, and community advocates are exploring a vision of urban/suburban collaboration and regional growth called "Smart Growth."
Smart Growth is a set of principles intended to enhance the sense of place and community, encourage economic efficiency, protect environmental amenities, promote fiscal health, and maximize return on public and private investment.
These objectives are part of a large strategy to improve quality of life in the community. Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl says that, in a global economy, regions with a high quality of life hold the competitive edge in attracting the high paying jobs of the future.
Quality of life includes health, safety, a sense of place and community, educational opportunities, cultural and recreational amenities, and scenic beauty. Growth should enhance all of those aspects of urban life. Smart growth principles touch all activities in an urban region.
As the regional economy expands, it can do so with minimal harm, but the current process is causing the following:
Unhealthy air,
loss of community,
persistent poverty,
difficulties with central city schools,
loss of greenspace,
flight of capital to outlying areas.
The Houston/Gulf Coast region has grown immensely and now suffers from most of these effects. Many area leaders believe a time has come to examine our economy, our community, and our environment as a single subject, and to begin to understand in a global way how growth affects those attributes.
Smart growth is not anti-growth, nor is it the enemy of suburban lifestyles. Smart Growth is about increasing people's choices. It is the enemy of inefficient growth, air pollution, increased traffic congestion, degradation of neighborhoods, higher infrastructure costs, higher taxes, and damage to environmentally sensitive areas.
Mobility and land use are the systems that govern the economy and quality of life in a region. What kind of development takes place and where are the factors that make development either a community asset or a liability.
In addition to where and how things are built, smart growth focuses on how people move around, so transportation and land use are tightly linked.
The Smart Growth Initiative in the Houston region is facilitated by the Gulf Coast Institute.
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