Smart Growth and Sustainability
Background
Sustainability
Considering that the world population is expected to grow to 12 billion by the year 2500 (which is double the current population) and that several vital natural resources are reaching extinction, the time has come to address issues of global resource consumption and international equity. While U.S. citizens consume enormous amounts of the world's resources, millions of people's basic needs are going unmet — access to clean water, sufficient food, safe shelter, and basic health care.
Given this, the United States must reduce its level of resource consumption and assist developing nations to stabilize their populations. Despite the obvious necessity, Congress continues to reduce or deny funding for international family planning programs, foreign aid, domestic conservation and development of technologies. The organized Jewish community, with our partners from other religious and ethnic communities, will increasingly be called upon to articulate the moral imperative to adopt domestic and foreign policies which promote the development and use of environmentally clean technologies in the U.S. and abroad, to reduce dramatically overall consumption of natural resources, to stabilize world population, and to effect a more equitable distribution of wealth around the world.
Urban Sprawl/Smart Growth
Metropolitan areas have expanded dramatically in the last fifty years, reaching into undeveloped farmlands and rural areas now more than ever before in U.S. history. The unchecked development, or "sprawl," that America is experiencing is the result of a variety of factors including a desire for a "better" way of life, better infrastructure, and better economic and educational opportunities outside the metropolitan areas. Sprawl is defined as scattered development that increases traffic, saps local resources, and destroys open space. Decreased air quality, destruction of wetlands, declining urban centers and higher local tax rates are just a few impacts of sprawl. According to the Sierra Club, each year, sprawl destroys more than two million acres of parks, farms and open space. Every hour, America loses 45.6 acres of its highest quality farmland to subdivisions, strip malls and roadways.
Smart growth is an effort to plan cities more wisely in order to curb sprawl as our nation develops. Advocates of smart growth argue that "urban flight" of wealthier families from the metropolitan areas has often lead to less reinvestment in the cities, causing infrastructure to decay and a loss of metropolitan economic vitality. Due to postwar priorities of spreading the US population out from the cities and government sponsored home ownership, many federal and local policies favor low density, discontinuous, auto-dependent, single use, and new development. Smart growth advocates feel that this unchecked development has led to an ever-growing problem known as sprawl.
Smart growth aims to minimize development's impact on the environment through sound site decisions. For example, smart growth initiatives put new use to property where an old business once operated, which makes good economic and environmental sense. In this way, communities can be revitalized by the cleanup of contamination, wisely planned new development, and a renewal of civic pride. Urban sprawl can thus be minimized if properties are redeveloped where infrastructure already exists.
Additionally, smart growth seeks to enact growth boundaries, parks and open space protections — like those in Oregon, Tennessee and Colorado — allowing growth without creating sprawl. This open space within developed areas could then serve as future parks or community gathering places. The approach creates enjoyment and increases the value of homes in the community more broadly.
Position of the Reform Jewish Movement
At Biennial 2000, the URJ passed a Smart Growth Resolution which resolves to:
- Requests that the Religious Action Center and the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism studies urban planning and other initiatives sponsored by Smart Growth advocates, which may resolve the various problems (such as lack of affordable housing, the destruction of our inner cities, serious community problems facing our inner ring suburbs, the destruction of the environment, and the loss of open space and farmlands) facing our communities and to distribute the results of their studies to the regions and member synagogues;
- Authorizes the Religious Action Center to join national coalitions advocating effective "Smart Growth" initiatives at the federal level;
- Encourages the regional directors and regional Social Action Committees to provide a format for ad hoc state committees to become knowledgeable about "Smart Growth" or similar initiatives at the state level and to provide education on such initiatives to member congregations within each state so that they may take appropriate action in advocating for such initiatives; and
- Urge member congregations to become knowledgeable about state and local initiatives regarding "Smart Growth" approaches to stopping urban sprawl and to explore ways in which communities can address problems of urban society to further our previously established goal of fostering tolerance, affordable housing, educational opportunity for the poor and minorities, and stewardship of the environment.
For More Information
To learn more, contact RAC Legislative Assistant Rachel Cohen, or visit the following websites:
Last Updated January 22, 2004
