Comprehensive Planning Committee Guiding Principles

Guiding Principles for the Comprehensive Planning Committee

see also CompellingQuestions

see also PlanningLinks

Amherst Comprehensive Planning Guiding Principles

Sprawl growth is a problem. It encourages reliance on automobiles, chews up open space and creates a development monoculture of large single-family homes.

Alternatives to sprawl must be considered in a comprehensive manner. Addressing one component of the problem while neglecting others is likely to lead to an unsatisfactory result.

We see the following as an outline of principles that must be incorporated into any effort to address the problem. We seek to:

1. Encourage a diversity of housing types and sizes.

2. Encourage the proximity of housing to opportunities for work, goods and services.

3. Encourage developments that are pedestrian and bicycle friendly.

4. Discourage growth in outlying areas of town, especially growth that is in conflict with the Town’s Open Space Plan.

5. Encourage design that reflects the best of our local and regional architecture.

6. Strengthen the role of site evaluation in the approval process, including how the design relates to long-term plans for adjoining parcels.

7. Find ways to make the approval process responsive to the overall impact of the plan and less tied to the dimensional minutae of zoning.

8. Recognize that any changes must be market oriented. That is, no plan will succeed unless developers, bankers and investors can make a profit by doing the development right. Incentives and disincentives must be structured accordingly.

Amherst Comprehensive Plan: A Model for Sustainable Development

Goal: Planning that promotes responsible development practices that protect the land and the environment while allowing for growth to meet the ever-changing needs of Amherst residents, farms, businesses and educational institutions. (Ideally a planning partnership between the town and the institutions.)

Purpose: To develop and manage our land, communities and commerce in ways that support the well-being of the community and the environment in which we live, both for now and future generations.

Concepts:

1. Collaborative Regional Planning
2. Community Growth Management
3. Creation of Strong, Diversified Local Economy
4. Community Design:

• Use land efficiently
• Retain public open space
• Promote mixed-use and mixed income development
• Provide diverse transportation options

(Example: Compact development patterns that simultaneously preserve farmland while enhancing a sense of community; using local resources and products; and providing creative housing that locates workplace and home closer together to shorten commutes, lessen energy demands and improve quality of life)

A Sustainable Plan should address, associate and assimilate the following components:

Economic Vitality:

• Village Center Development
• Research Parks
• Institutions

Environmental Protection

• Land-use Plan/ build-out plan
• Conservation and Preservation Plan
• Balanced growth

Downtown

• A development and re-development plan
• Parking and Transportation Plan

Housing and Living:

• Housing Mix
• University Housing
• Cluster Housing

Education and Human Services:

• Lifelong learning
• Lifelong services

Cultural Enrichment:

• Community venues
• Institutional and Regional Venues

Principles for Guiding Change in Amherst

Preserve the qualities of life in a community of thoughtful, neighborly, inclusive, diverse, curious, responsible, open-minded residents who have expressed the nature of those qualities in documents about planning (SCOG, Visions, etc.) and through actions of town meeting re zoning and land use.

Preserve open space and the historic built environment

• Conservation, historic preservation, farmland preservation, wetlands, etc.

Prevent SPRAWL

• Sprawl and congestion are considered by cities around the world as one of

the most important problems affecting quality of life and economic and personal health. Much is known about how to do this.

• Some of the things we need to do to prevent sprawl:

  • Carefully consider the growing use of the automobile and adopt mitigating strategies.
  • Strengthen our public transportation system
  • Increase pedestrian amenities
  • Stop widening our highways (freedom from MASS HIWAYS)
  • Encourage our educational institutions to discourage students from bringing automobiles to Amherst

Village Centers

• This strategy holds promise for accommodating needs for mixed housing and changing housing demand. We need to examine the dimensions of assumed growth: is it inevitable growth or inevitable change? How does this relate to a demographic of stability in population? Consider new planning concepts such as "smart growth"

• For village center concept to succeed consider two things:

  • One, improved public transportation between centers.
  • Two, insurance of essential services, especially in the town center. Amherst loves our local businesses. We do our best to support them. There is much benefit to the economic welfare of the town to keep these businesses here. They do not operate out of a big cash flow as do the national corporate giants. The big guys can afford the high rents that expensive properties engender, our friends cannot. Big guys send our money back to Chicago or wherever; our friends keep it here in the Valley. What can we do to preserve reasonable retail rents for local businesses?

THE AMHERST COMPREHENSIVE PLAN

an ongoing way to maximize citizen control

of our shared community environment

by periodically revalidating & updating

the following design elements:

1 land use & growth management

2 balanced development of housing & zoning protection

3 educational institutions & services

4 open space & outdoor recreation

5 community facilities & services

6 gradual expansion of commercial needs & employment opportunities

7 public & private transportation

AMHERST COMPREHENSIVE PLANNING GUIDING PRINCIPLES

1. Does this plan or any part thereof become arrogant by self-assigning to a single generation the excessive shaping of our community to the detriment of future generations?
2. Does this plan respect the planning by previous generations by providing continuity from where this community has come from?
3. How much of our major comprehensive planning efforts can be made on an incremental basis?
4. What elements of our comprehensive planning efforts provide new major imaginative visual elements to attract short-term visitors as clearly distinguished from new long-term residents?
5. How competitive are our comprehensive planning efforts with those of comparable communities?
6. How do we build-in to our comprehensive planning efforts a way to make those efforts less vulnerable to the varying political and economic storms?
7. In comprehensive planning efforts, exactly where in the processes is democratic decision-making appropriate and where is it not appropriate?