Infill Redevelopment
In our practice the first principle of sustainable development of smart growth is to fill in the existing holes and increase the density of existing communities.
There are thousands of acres in almost every American city that lie vacant with the complete complement of public infrastructure and services in place. Yet this empty land contributes little to local government solvency because they effectively pay no taxes.
Sprawl, no matter what you call it, exacerbates the economic, ecological and social problems of our communities and squanders our most precious economic opportunity, growth.
While major metropolitan areas are experiencing a significant new wave of a return to the city living, the small and medium sized cities are still largely being passed over. Many prominent reviews discussing sustainability feature low-density rural or suburban projects. While these romantic projects are important experiments for building technology, the ecological heavy lifting comes with rebuilding our existing cities: mass transit, recycling of massive infrastructure investments, dramatic reduction of automobile dependence, diminished encroachment on wildlands and agriculture, and, perhaps most important, increased sustainability for low-income urban populations through job creation and community reinvestment. Only infill development affords this multidimensional, multilevel synergy.
Benefits of Infill versus Sprawl growth include:
- Less infrastructure to build and maintain per tax dollar
- Lower costs for government services, such as police and fire
- Cleaner air
- More fiscally solvent mass transit systems
- Protection of farms and wildlands
- Lower costs of living for residents