Scorecards

How "smart" is a new development?

If you've done your homework by reading the major references in the Reading Room, then you can probably just look at a development and give it a rough SmartGrowth grade. For instance, you can look at developments like SouthSide Works and figure that it's pretty SmartGrowth. I also have a recurrent dream that I've made up bumper-stickers with SmartGrowth Grade: "F" and I'm running around at 3 AM pasting them on the CVS in Turtle Creek, and every building at Robinson Town Center.

But is there some way to be a bit more objective about this? Indeed there is.

Development Project Scorecards

Probably the best-known and most venerable SmartGrowth scorecard is the Smart Scorecard for Development Projects, by Colorado developer Will Fleissig. It's a bit dry, but it's required reading for anyone who wants to score a development proposal—and the most respected SmartGrowth assessment tool for analyzing individual projects. Of interest to Carnegie, it is also a way to replace traditional zoning with a design specificiation.

There are many other ways of scoring development proposals. Indeed, the US Environmental Protection Agency's webmaster was nice enough to put together a list of such scorecards. Another scorecard listing comes from the New Jersey Smart Growth Gateway. Even mostly-rural Idaho has its own SmartGrowth scorecards for neighborhood development. and commercial development.

Community Scorecards

There are even more scorecards for evaluating a community. The scorecard for Cleveland, OH is reasonable to apply to the nearby Pittsburgh area. New Jersey's SmartGrowth scorecard is particularly readable and easy to use. The EPA website also has a nice listing of municipal SmartGrowth scorecards. The Capital Regional District (Washington State) has another listing of SmartGrowth scorecards.

The University of British Columbia has case studies of SmartGrowth devlopment that are worth a quick read, and they offer a SmartGrowth checklist with a Canadian perspective.

Indeed, SmartGrowth concerns echo across the globe, and many countries—New Zealand for example—use scorecards to assess community development efforts.

There are two scorecards that I find particularly easy to use while providing a high-quality assessment of a community. One is on community bikability, the other on walkability. Both are from the US Department of Transportation, which provides much additional information on making communities more transit-oriented.

The Press is Coming!

More and more, the press is picking up on smart growth ideas, and the various scorecards are being used to rate and compare community development efforts. I would hope that, with our new-found enthusiasm for urban planning, Carnegie will do well when we get rated by the press—especially since funding is more and more linked to smart growth policies.