10 Principles for Smart Growth in Existing Communities

"These days, a lot of projects are crashing through the gates of community plans and dashing existing neighborhood character under the banners of smart growth or transit oriented development. Typically, such projects are simply high density or near transit corridors, or sometimes they include gratuitous green space and walking paths.  However, they fail in many of the finer points of smart growth, new urbanism, or transit oriented development."

Therefore, San Diego land use attorney Bill Adams offers 10 clarifications and extrapolations of existing smart growth and new urbanism principles, as follows: 

1. Purge the term NIMBY from your language and your thinking. It stultifies any further understanding of community concerns, or how to reach a compromise. 
2. Respect community planning. 
3. Integrate with the surrounding community. 
4. In transit oriented developments (TODs), transit orientation should exceed auto orientation. 
5. Respect neighborhood character & identity. 
6. Increase density incrementally. 
7. Conform to existing “smart” retail corridors and centers. 
8. Look for opportunities to narrow (verb) streets and vanquish parking lots. 
9. Prioritize non-auto transportation by creating unique or exclusive pedestrian and bicycle amenities. 
10. Design for human nature rather than efficiencies and logic.