Smart Growth
We at Lamar Smith Signature Development are driven by the desire to build better places for Coastal Georgia families to live, work, and play. To understand how that is done, one must become more familiar with “smart growth.”
For decades, the definition of a “better” place to live has been a single-family home in the suburbs. Now, Americans are defining “better” as “smarter.” At Lamar Smith Signature Development, we are creating communities that preserve open space and environmentally-sensitive areas, where we are blessed in abundance along the coast of Georgia.
Smart Growth understands the aspirations of Americans while protecting the environment and quality of life for all. Smart Growth touches on choices that Americans hold close to their hearts:
- where they live-work-play;
- the education of children;
- commute times to work; and
- the economic and job opportunities created by new growth.
It is an idea that addresses the questions of:
- how best to plan for and manage when and where new residential and commercial development, schools, and major highways should be built and located;
- how and where to preserve meaningful open space and protect environmentally-sensitive areas; and
- how to pay for the infrastructure required to serve a growing population?
How well we plan for projected and inevitable increases in households, changing demographics and lifestyles, and an expanding economy will have a major impact on the quality of life in years ahead.
When used properly as a planning tool, Smart Growth can help expand homeownership opportunities and allow Americans to obtain the home and lifestyle of their dreams in new suburban as well as in older suburban and city infill markets.
When used improperly, growth management becomes a tool to stop or slow growth. Such a move would penalize and put at greatest risk those living at the edge of housing affordability - the young, minorities, immigrants, and moderate-income families who are just entering the homeownership market in record numbers.
Residential and commercial growth is fluid – meaning that when it is stopped in one place, it will inevitably occur somewhere else. “No-growth” approaches are, in part, responsible for the leapfrog development patterns of the past. Dwelling on past development patterns does not recognize the fact that public policy and the housing preferences of Americans dictate where future development occurs. The revitalization of older suburban and inner city markets and infill development is good public policy, but even under the best of conditions, infill development will satisfy only a small percentage of a community's demand for new housing.
3 Important Questions
1) How can we use land more efficiently?
There are various development techniques that will allow us to use land more wisely, including cluster development in which homes are grouped on smaller lots. One variation on cluster development, open space development, makes open space the focus of a development project. Open spaces such as parks and greenways and walking areas, along with natural resources and farmland areas, are preserved first, with the leftover areas used for siting homes. Another variation is higher density development, in which more homes are situated on the same amount of land which uses land more efficiently. And a third, Traditional Neighborhood Developments, stress mixed-income housing, pedestrian-friendly streets, and formal open spaces, such as parks, greens, and squares.
2) What are builders and developers doing to preserve trees and other natural amenities on their sites?
At Lamar Smith Signature Development, we assess the land we intend to develop for any environmentally-sensitive areas that might be disturbed and find ways to preserve and protect them. At Marsh Harbour in south Bryan County, Georgia, for example, we created “Live Oak Legacy,” a program to help preserve and replenish the live oaks found naturally along our coastal land. We built the roads in the subdivision around the old live oaks rather than through them. We required homeowners to plant at least two live oaks as part of their landscaping plan. Within 50 years, we believe the area will closely resemble the natural landscape of 100 years ago.
Thanks to partnerships with groups like the National Arbor Day Foundation, builders are planting more young trees and preserving more mature trees than ever before. Most people don’t realize that local regulations require builders to cut down most trees on site and that builders who want to preserve trees have to fight local regulations every step of the way.
Builders are also restoring thousands of acres of wetlands each year. In fact, for every acre of wetlands lost, builders are restoring two acres. Thanks to these efforts, America is gaining – not losing – wetlands.
Communities can assist builders protect the environment by giving them faster approvals for innovations such as:
- providing natural stormwater retention ponds;creating more wetlands banks that allow builders to create refuges for wildlife;
- changing archaic zoning codes that create wider-than-needed streets that cause more land and trees to be disturbed and create more stormwater runoff; and
- giving zoning approval to clustering and other forms of innovative land uses.
3) How can communities preserve open space?
Communities that want to preserve open space should do so through the comprehensive planning process. This way, land to be set aside as well as land targeted for development is identified and all parties know where development can and cannot occur. Such planning eliminates parcel-by-parcel attempts to stop growth in the name of open space preservation.
Open space can also be preserved as part of the sit planning and approval process. Developers can provide on-site open space in their subdivisions or use development techniques such as “cluster development” and “open space subdivisions” that preserve open space and sensitive environmental areas.
