Bringing Regional Smart Growth to Life

Implementing California's New Smart Growth Law, SB 375, In the Bay Area

The Need for a New Way to Grow

TransForm's very first victory in 1998 was getting the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission to develop a regional "smart growth strategy".   The strategy lays out a way for a pattern of future growth in the Bay Area that is more compact and mixed-use, with a range of transportation options - showing a real alternative to low density development. This smart growth vision helped our residents and elected leaders understand how much better off the region could be with less sprawl and more compact, walkable communities. 

Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego followed suit and developed their own regional "blueprints".  Yet all of these blueprints had the same basic shortcoming: they had no funding or accountability to make them happen.

A groundbreaking California law, SB 375, is creating an incredible window of opportunity to fundamentally change this.

How SB 375 Can Reshape How the Bay Area Grows

SB 375 will require regions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by improving transportation choices and how communities are designed so they require less driving.  Right now, leaders are deciding by how much metropolitan regions will have to reduce their emissions by 2020 and 2035.  Stuart Cohen, TransForm's Executive Director, has been appointed to the Regional Target Advisory Committee, which is helping the California Air Resources Board determine how to set the regional emissions targets.

Once regions have been assigned an emissions target, they will be required to develop a plan to meet it, called a "sustainable community strategy", which is similar to regional smart growth blueprints.  Agencies are also supposed to identify transportation investments and policies that would support this growth in order to reduce driving and emissions.

The Bay Area's regional agencies have embraced SB 375 as a way to better coordinate our transportation, land use, and housing.  Local governments are already signing up for "FOCUS", which unites the efforts of four regional agencies into a single effort to encourage future growth in areas near transit and within the communities that surround the San Francisco Bay.  Willing jurisdictions have signed up for these Priority Development Areas and Priority Conservation Areas.

TransForm Will Work to Maximize Benefits of SB 375

In the Bay Area, local governments will soon begin discussing their land use plans for the sustainable community strategy.  County and regional agencies will be developing transportation investments and policy proposals, all working towards a 2013 adoption.  

TransForm is working with Greenbelt Alliance, Urban Habitat, the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California and other partners to ensure that residents are deeply engaged in these issues and SB 375 leads to a new paradigm for growth and transportation in the Bay Area - and a more sustainable, livable, equitable future for us all.

To learn more or get active on these issues in the Bay Area please contact Carli Paine. If you are interested in other regions or state policy efforts please visit our ClimatePlan page.