Responsible Development
Accountable or Responsible Development happens when concern about impacts on local residents and our natural environment are front and center in the development process. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that this is not how most community development takes place.
What Went Wrong?
Home builders are supposed to be in the business of making dreams a reality – developing the neighborhoods of the future and laying the foundation for families and communities to grow.
However, home builders are too often homewreckers, creating master-planned communities that aren’t good for families, neighborhoods or the larger community.
- Their lust for profits at any cost isn’t just destroying the dreams and financial health of families. Their greed is rapidly replacing the desert landscape in unique communities like your’s with mile after mile of master-planned mediocrity.
- And, because local job generation is outpaced by local home building, many workers living in the hinterland are forced to drive to employment centers miles away.
- At a time when gas prices are high, and existing traffic is overwhelming the capacity of area transportation systems, builders are pushing a community planning and development model designed for sprawl, creating the many negative impacts on traffic, schools, air, water, and family health we’ve all come to expect.
But we don’t need to settle for sprawl and bad community planning and development. We can demand more from developers and local governments! This approach is called Accountable or Responsible Development. We have a more positive vision for Community Quality of Life.
Like you, we believe in an “Accountable Development” approach, one in which we and our local government officials demand:
- Efficient, open local government.
- Impact fees and other legal tools that shift development costs off the backs of local taxpayers and on to the fat profit margins of big developers.
- More efficient, lower cost land use strategies resulting in attractive new neighborhoods close to existing development and supporting infrastructure
- That new homes be located near emerging job centers, instead of far-flung subdivisions that just generate more and more traffic.
- Limits on construction activity that can negatively impact all of us with dust, noise, storm water run-off and erosion, construction traffic and parking issues.
- Safe, productive worksites where workers are able to exercise their rights.
- A diverse array of local housing options with real affordability.
We don’t need to settle for sprawl and bad community planning and development. We can demand that developers be held responsible by local and county governments from the first proposal for a new subdivision to the last house they build. See the Links page to more information about Responsible Development.