News Item
Westchester County Business Journal: "Smart growth drives development in suburban communities"
Visiting Westchester recently, Parris N. Glendening, the former Maryland governor, dined one evening at a restaurant on Central Avenue. A national advocate for smart growth – high-density, mixed-use development near mass transit centers to reduce sprawl and protect the natural environment in more walkable cities and suburbs – Glendening glimpsed the commercial avenue’s possibilities beyond its streaming lanes of exhaust-emitting auto and truck traffic.
“What a grand boulevard that could be,” he mused before an audience of about 225 real estate, finance and planning professionals and municipal officials from New York and Connecticut at Pace Law School.
Glendening – the keynote speaker at a recent panel discussion on smart growth presented by the Land Use Law Center at Pace and the Business Journal’s parent company, Westfair Communications – was alluding to a rising trend among municipal planners and private developers that promotes foot traffic in place of driving in urban areas being redeveloped for a new generation of downtown residents. The new urbanism championed by Glendening, first as Maryland’s governor and now as president of Smart Growth America’s Leadership Institute and the Governor’s Institute on Community Design, and adopted by an increasing number of municipalities in this region is to a large degree, as New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson noted on the panel, “the old urbanism all over again.”
For public officials like Bramson, smart-growth development proposals often encounter strong local opposition. “The job of a mayor in moving development forward is tough,” said panel moderator John R. Nolon, a Pace law professor and founder of the Land Use Law Center. “There are two things that Americans hate: one is sprawl and the other is density.”
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