Smart Growth and Rainwater: Stormwater Dos and Don’ts
The March/April issue of Stormwater includes Paul Crabtree’s Guest Editorial, “Principles of Smart Growth and Their Corresponding Rainwater Dos and Donts,” which is full of useful guidance that translates Smart Growth into stormwater best management practices. Here’s a sampling of excerpts from the piece, which includes some great illustrations.
1. Create a Range of Housing Opportunities and Choices.
An integral component in any smart growth strategy is the provision of quality housing for people of all income levels. Conventional sprawl patterns consisting of large pods of single-use, large lot subdivisions and gated communities do not accomplish this goal.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do represent how stormwater best management practices (BMPs) can apply in different types of housing configurations, not just single-family
detached houses.Don’t represent low-impact development (LID) BMPs with examples where both the “do” and the “don’t” are sprawl.
2. Create Walkable Neighborhoods.
Walkable communities are desirable places to live, work, learn, worship, and play, and therefore a key component of smart growth. Drive-only suburbia is not walkable; one must drive to get to everything because all of the services are remote and separated, such as school complexes, shopping malls, business parks, and park complexes.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do ensure that BMPs within urban streets provide for great walkability and are complete streets that include sidewalks, street trees, narrower vehicle lanes, on-street parking, and attractive and safe frontages.
Don’t eliminate elements of a complete street in order to achieve rainwater improvements.
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. Developers and their specialist consultants deciding beforehand what a project will consist of and entering into adversarial “negotiations” during a public entitlement process can be very inefficient and counterproductive.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do educate the community on rainwater issues and get their feedback on potential solutions. Encourage engineering professionals to work as part of a holistic team to help change the mindset and rules of municipalities, developers, and the professions as a whole.
Don’t write regulations and programs without public engagement, and without looking outside the silo of your own profession for holistic solutions.
4. Foster Distinctive, Attractive Communities with a Strong Sense of Place.
Smart growth encourages communities to craft a vision and set standards for development and construction which respond to community values of architectural beauty and distinctiveness, as well as expanded choices in housing and transportation. Conventional land use codes and engineering standards often encourage or mandate sprawl patterns that lack distinctive character.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do: Professional consultants and builders need to design aesthetically to create facilities that people will enjoy and care for. An important part of this effort is designing and building attractive rainwater treatment facilities that fit the context of the site within the community or watershed. For example, see http://www.lightimprint.org/.
Don’t design and build BMPs for technical performance only, without responding to community values of beauty and distinctiveness.
5. Make Development Decisions Predictable, Fair, and Cost Effective.
For a community to be successful in implementing smart growth, it must be embraced by the private sector. Development regulations and processes that are onerous, confusing, expensive, and adversarial will be despised by the public.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do make BMPs and regulations clear, simple, and economical, and encourage intrinsic green tools such as source control and natural drainage solutions.
Don’t issue ambiguous regulations that ignore economic factors, such as enforcing gold-plated devices or high tech as the only compliance alternatives.
6. Mix Land Uses.
Smart growth supports the integration of mixed land uses into communities as a critical component of achieving better places to live. Multiuse facilities that are still separated pods-such as a power center that is adjacent to an apartment complex, which is adjacent to a business park, which is near a hospital campus, all of which have huge parking lots-do not achieve the integration of mixed uses that can reduce vehicle miles traveled.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do encourage compact mixed uses that can reduce parking spaces through shared-parking scenarios and reduced driving, not drive-only sprawl.
Don’t display as exemplars BMPs located in separated-pod, single-use developments that result in drive-only access and create wide streets, large expanses of parking lots, and sprawling one-story building programs.
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. Avoid the tendency to spread out to develop cheaper agricultural or natural lands, which is only possible because the automobile allows lack of discipline in urban planning.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do encourage the improvement of existing sites by incentivizing infill and redevelopment. Significant watershed gains can be made by retrofitting existing areas and avoiding the development of greenfields.
Don’t make the rainwater regulations for retrofitting of infill and redevelopment sites the same as for greenfield sites.
8. Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices.
Providing people with more choices in housing, shopping, communities, and transportation is a key aim of smart growth. Planning and building communities with the assumption that in America everyone owns and drives a car is harmful to the environment and ignores the large number of non-drivers such as the young and elderly.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do integrate rainwater solutions into all types of streets and highways and recognize the multimodal needs for varying thoroughfare types.
Don’t design green streets without integrating the rainwater needs with the needs of transportation, pedestrian, bicycle, and vehicles. An example would be a bioswale on a street with wide paving and no sidewalks.
9. Strengthen and Direct Development Toward Existing Communities.
Smart growth directs development toward existing communities already served by infrastructure, seeking to utilize the resources that existing neighborhoods offer and to conserve open space and irreplaceable natural resources on the urban fringe. Overextending infrastructure into the hinterlands is an often misguided effort to encourage the real estate growth machine.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do study the regional watershed and locate ways to fix problems within the existing community. Encourage regulations that are scaled toward the neighborhood and community and that address BMPs based on the site’s contextual basis along the rural-to-urban transect. See http://www.transect.org/.
Don’t create regulations or programs that make it easier to comply in new developments than in existing communities. Don’t write or adopt land use codes or stormwater regulations that are one-size-fits-all-ignoring the context of the development site. Main Street blocks need to be treated differently than detached single-family blocks.
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. Regulations that severely limit density, building heights, floor-area ratios, or mixed-use buildings should be considered potentially harmful to the environment.
Rainwater Dos and Don’ts:
Do consider “density as a BMP” on the basis of impacts on a per capita basis rather than a per-acre basis only.
Don’t portray the effects of percent impervious area without also addressing the per capita impacts and acknowledging that there is a basic sustainable human footprint that needs to be accounted for.
Conclusion
Make your rainwater regulations and practices smarter, and avoid unintended negative consequences, by expanding your expertise through learning and applying the Ten Principles of Smart Growth.
