This hurricane season, how can the federal government improve the National Flood Insurance Program?

Sandy flooding in New Jersey
Damaged homes along the New Jersey shore after Sandy. Photo by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Flickr.

When communities are hit by a hurricane or flooding, the National Flood Insurance Program helps families recover and rebuild. Changes to the program proposed by Smart Growth America—and supported by the Obama Administration—could help homeowners reduce their flood risk and cut costs for the federal government at the same time.

Most homeowners’ insurance policies do not cover damage from flooding, and the National Flood Insurnce Program (NFIP) is a supplemental insurance offered by FEMA to protect families financially from flood damage. Many NFIP plan members pay highly subsidized rates that do not reflect the true risk of flooding or the costs associated with it, and these subsidies have contributed to increased development in flood hazard areas, putting more people and property at risk. All this has come at a high cost to taxpayers: The program is currently almost $24 billion in debt to the Department of Treasury.

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Now hiring: Intern for Smart Growth America's LOCUS Coalition

Smart Growth America is seeking an enthusiastic intern for advocacy work with LOCUS: Responsible Real Estate Developers and Investors. The intern will provide direct support to the LOCUS network of real estate developers and investors advocating for smart growth policies at the federal and regional levels. Core responsibilities include: drafting legislative summaries for network members, organizing Hill briefings and meetings, drafting advocacy materials on core network issues, managing correspondence with network members, following up with and providing materials to potential recruits, and assisting the President of LOCUS with scheduling and general administrative tasks as needed.

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Councilmember Hans Riemer on the challenge of creating attractive urban areas in Montgomery County, MD

Rockville Town Square
Rockville Town Square, in Councilmember Riemer’s district of Montgomery County, MD. Photo by Dan Reed via Flickr.

Councilmember Hans Riemer has a problem. Residents of the greater Washington, DC metro area increasingly want to live in attractive, high quality, urban neighborhoods—but there aren’t enough of those neighborhoods in his home district of Montgomery County, MD, to meet the demand.

“Cities are reviving and becoming incredibly attractive places to live,” says Riemer, a charter member of Smart Growth America’s Local Leaders Council. “We’re seeing the impacts of that in Montgomery County. Where people used to prefer the suburbs, they now want to live in cities.”

Local Leaders Council

Senators introduce bi-partisan legislation that would improve the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit

American Brewing Building, Baltimore, MD
The American Brewery Building in Baltimore, MD, was redeveloped with the help of the Historic Preservation Tax Credit. Photo via the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

In June Senators Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced S. 1141 The Creating American Prosperity Through Preservation (CAPP) Act, a bill that would encourage developers to invest in and restore historic buildings by updating the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit program.

Since its inception in 1976, the Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit program has leveraged more than $106 billion of private-sector investment to preserve and rehabilitate more than 38,000 historic properties. The credit program has rehabilitated more than 75,000 low- and moderate-income housing units. In fact, nearly 75 percent of Historic Tax Credit projects are in low-income areas.

LOCUS

Building region-wide support for new development along Arizona's Valley Metro light rail line

tempe-az
New development along the Valley Metro light rail line in Tempe, AZ. Photo of the Hub on Campus building via Facebook.

The City of Phoenix, AZ, is working to encourage development along the Valley Metro light rail line, and it’s getting some help from a region-wide effort that’s working to link Phoenix’s investments to others throughout the region.

The Sustainable Communities Collaborative (SCC) is a unique non-profit partnership working to catalyze development along the Valley Metro light rail in Phoenix, Tempe and Mesa. Started in 2011 with a $20 million private investment from Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Raza Development Fund, SCC aims to create “vibrant urban environments and transit-oriented communities that have it all”: a mix of housing starts, new community health care centers, entrepreneurial start-ups, pedestrian and bicycle friendly neighborhoods, eclectic retail and restaurants, and artistic centered community development connected to the 20-mile light rail line.

Local Leaders Council

Join the National Complete Streets Coalition at the 2013 National Walking Summit

Walking Summit
Complete Streets features make this street in Bellingham, WA safer and more accessible for pedestrians. Photo by Walkable Communities, via Flickr.

In early October, the National Complete Streets Coalition, a program of Smart Growth America, will be at the National Walking Summit here in Washington, D.C., sharing information and skills for successful Complete Streets policy and implementation with the many other national and local leaders in attendance.

Walking is the most basic form of travel, an easy way to be physically active and a powerful tool for economic and social well-being of our communities. The Coalition works to improve safety and access to community destinations for people who travel by foot, as well as by wheelchair, bicycle, public transportation, or automobile.

On the Summit’s opening day, October 1, join our 4:00 PM session “Completing Our Streets: Policy and Advocacy Tools to Get You Moving.” Laura Searfoss, our Policy Associate, will open the session with the basics on Complete Streets policy: What makes a good Complete Streets policy? Who has one already? Why does any community even need one?

Complete Streets

Cambridge Main Street wanted to support local businesses—and new zoning is helping to make it happen

Downtown Cambridge
Main Street in downtown Cambridge, MD. Photo by Eli Pousson, via Flickr.

It took a golf course to make the city of Cambridge, MD, reconsider how it was planning development.

The 1,000-acre project would have added 3,200 homes to Cambridge, a city of just over 12,000 people on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore. After several rounds of city approval followed by fierce public opposition, the Maryland Board of Public Works purchased 70% of the land back from the developer and committed it to preservation.

“That experience was a major impetus to rewrite the City’s comprehensive plan,” said City of Cambridge Planner Anne Roane. In 2008 the City began the process of updating its plan for growth. And city planners weren’t the only ones excited about the new initiative.

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View our 500 Complete Streets Policies Celebration in full

On August 14, 2013, Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition hosted a 500 Complete Streets Policy Celebration in which complete streets leaders the 500 communities across the United States that have made their streets safer and more accessible for everyone who uses them with Complete Streets policies, and looked ahead to the … Continued

Complete Streets

Complete Streets News – August 2013

Policy Action

Concord, California has been awarded funds from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s One Bay Area Grant (OBAG) program to redesign Detroit Avenue. To be eligible for OBAG funds, communities in the San Francisco Bay region must show that the project follows a Complete Streets approach, in line with a locally-adopted policy or plan. (Concord Patch)

Sacramento, California’s Complete Streets Coalition brings together community non-profits and regional public agencies to ensure Complete Streets implementation in plans, projects, and processes. WALKSacramento gave an update on its work in a recent blog post. Read more >>

Los Angeles Departments of City Planning and Transportation are working together to develop a Mobility Element of the city’s General Plan that fully considers the needs of all users of the roadways and responds to citizens’ input. Streetsblog L.A. gives an update on their work so far and how community members can engage and share their ideas. Read more >>

Complete Streets

Completing Our Streets: Celebrating 500 Policies

This post is the first in a series of excerpts from Completing Our Streets: The Transition to Safe and Inclusive Transportation Networks, the forthcoming book from Island Press written by Barbara McCann, founder of the National Complete Streets Coalition. The book discusses the keys to the movement’s success, and how places and practitioners in the United States are tackling the challenges of putting a new transportation paradigm into daily practice. This series will run twice monthly. Look for the book out on October 11, 2013.

Completing Our Streets coverThe passage of the 500th Complete Streets policy was a remarkable moment, especially for those of us who felt bold back in 2005 when we set the first goal for the Completing Our Streets coverNational Complete Streets Coalition: new policies in five states and twenty-five local jurisdictions, more than doubling the policies in existence at that time. Since then the Complete Streets movement has helped bring about a tremendous burst of activity in changing how roads are planned, funded, designed, and built.

The Complete Streets movement, though, is far from the first to point out that roads should be safe for everyone traveling along them, or to argue for more transportation choices. Why did the movement take off the way it did? What does this success teach us about the next steps in creating roads that are safe for all users?

Last year I stepped down from leading the Coalition to take some time to try to answer these questions. I knew that while supporters love the name, many don’t look beyond its definition as a street that is designed to be safe for everyone using it. I also knew that the movement’s success is rooted not in this simple definition, but in the strategies we have used to change transportation practice.

These strategies had little to do with defining exactly what an individual Complete Street looks like. The lack of a design focus may surprise anyone who is following the explosion of exciting new street design guidelines, manuals, books, and individual projects that are getting deserved attention in transportation circles these days.

Complete Streets