Traditional landscaping that helps keep the air clean, regulates temperatures, and helps prevent soil erosion and flooding may also be used. All housing development plans should include a designated space that will serve as the "lungs" of the community. This might be a park, a forest, or significant plantings throughout the development. Green roofs are now being used on buildings of all heights. This involves growing vegetation on the roofs of buildings, and is a way of managing storm water, reducing urban heat island effect, and improving air quality.
Innovative housing designs can adapt to global warming and can also mitigate the severity of climate-change. Energy conservation and alternative energy use are not only ways of protecting the environment, but also of working towards energy independence and strengthening national security.
Smart
Smart growth subsumes the notions of housing affordability, inclusivity, mixed-use of space, mixed-income residents, livability and sustainability. Smart housing development uses land efficiently and emphasizes the connectivity of places and people. This is directly counter to the synthetic, disconnected spaces seen in urban sprawl models of development.
Unaffordable housing is a quiet crisis that has been plaguing our communities for more than a decade. It is a quiet crisis because the people bearing the heaviest burden of it are low-income families, and in alarming numbers, working families with low incomes. Among the lowest-income 20 percent of renters in the U.S., more than one in two renters pays greater than half of income for housing.
These severe problems of working families and renters have not merited newspaper headlines to the extent that the home foreclosure and subprime mortgage problems have. Nevertheless, the problem of unaffordable housing is widespread in the nation, and imposes costs on working families in the form of their greatly diminished ability to invest in the education and health of family members, consume adequate food, and save for their own retirement.
Affordable housing is an essential outcome of smart housing development. Lower average production costs are achieved by smart housing because more units are built on a given plot of land, units are smaller and sensibly-sized (rather than McMansions), units are designed to consume less energy, and housing is a part of mixed-use development. Mixed-use of land, such as when residences are built above retail stores, can help lower the cost of producing housing, and thereby create affordable housing.
Innovative land-use planning under smart growth decreases land costs for the development, such as when cheap parcels of inner city land are combined to create a sizeable development. Transit-oriented development reduces transportation costs for residents, thereby, easing the strain on the budgets of working families. Pedestrian-oriented development also reduces transportation costs and is environmentally friendly.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
