Communities in Louisiana are increasingly concerned that current development patterns — dominated by “sprawl” — are no longer in the interest of our cities, existing suburbs, small towns, rural communities, or wilderness areas. The Smart Growth movement advances innovative growth strategies focused on restoring vitality to center cities and older suburbs.

Smart Growth leaders believe in growth – yet they reject dominant growth patterns because they are too costly: the economic costs of abandoning infrastructure in the city only to rebuild it further out, the loss of working forests and prime agricultural land through uncontrolled rural development, and the time and money lost to traffic congestion and car dependence represent significant burdens for our communities.

Whether you live in a northern parish or a coastal city, the ten principles of Smart Growth can help your community grow more prosperously. The Toolkit User Guide offers a brief introduction to the ten Smart Growth principles and directs readers to additional Smart Growth resources that may be useful, including those particularly tailored to coastal areas.

Smart Growth Resources for Louisiana Communities

If you are new to Smart Growth and would like help applying its principles to your community, you’re in luck! The Center for Planning Excellence (CPEX) provides services that assist communities with initiating and creating Smart Growth plans at the neighborhood, community, town, city or parish-wide scale. CPEX initiated the Louisiana Community Planning Program in the fall of 2006 after receiving a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Smart Growth grant, secured by Senator Mary Landrieu. The program’s mission is to build local capacity in community planning throughout Louisiana using Smart Growth best practices.

While the general principles of Smart Growth are helpful throughout Louisiana, new Smart Growth principles and strategies have been specifically developed to meet the unique challenges of coastal areas along the Gulf of Mexico. The Coastal Services Center led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offers some specific community design alternatives for coastal areas that reflect Smart Growth principles.

Ten Principles of Smart Growth

The Smart Growth movement offers ten development principles to cultivate long-term, sustainability for our communities. Whenever possible, these principles should be considered together as a unified whole, not as a checklist of individual goals. The Toolkit is written so as to maximize the ten Smart Growth principles identified below.

1. Create a Range of Housing Opportunities and Choices
Providing quality housing for people of all income levels is an integral component in any smart growth strategy. Growing families, single adults, young couples, senior citizens, and other household types demand a variety of housing types and price points – a strong community should offer all of these options!

2. Create Walkable Neighborhoods
Walkable communities are desirable places to live, work, learn, worship and play. They include safe, attractive streets and interesting places to visit.

3. Encourage Community and Stakeholder Collaboration
Growth can create great places to live, work and play — if it responds to a community’s own sense of how and where it wants to grow. The best laid plans will likely fail unless they have broad community support.

4. Foster Distinctive, Attractive Communities with a Strong Sense of Place
Smart growth emphasizes cultural heritage, activities and events, and aesthetic styles that make each community distinct and attractive. Smart growth encourages communities to set design standards that reflect its collective values and common vision for active communities.

5. Make Development Decisions Predictable, Fair and Cost Effective
Thriving communities make it easy and profitable for developers and property owners to “do the right thing.” No one wins when development plans sit on the shelf gathering dust or when the rules of the game change constantly.

6. Mix Land Uses
By mixing compatible land uses together, communities can create more vibrant, walkable, safe and prosperous places to live, work, and play.

7. Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty and Critical Environmental
Areas Open space preservation supports smart growth goals by bolstering local economies, preserving critical environmental areas, improving our communities quality of life, and guiding new growth into existing communities.

8. Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices
Providing people with more transportation choices to meet all of their weekly needs is a key aim of Smart Growth. Transportation by foot, bike, public transit, and personal car should all be viable options in a community.

9. Strengthen and Direct Development Towards Existing Communities
Smart growth directs development towards existing communities already served by infrastructure, thereby utilizing the resources that existing neighborhoods offer, and conserving open space and irreplaceable natural resources on the urban fringe.

10. Take Advantage of Compact Building Design
Smart growth provides a means for communities to incorporate more compact building design as an alternative to conventional, land consumptive development.

Planning and Context Areas
Learn more about the importance of comprehensive planning and context areas.

The Draft Land Use Toolkit
Review the first version of the Land Use Toolkit.

The Online User Guide
Search the user guide by theme or stakeholder interest.

Additional Project Documents
View presentations, reports, handouts and other publications.