Community Is the Heart of Every Neighborhood

SGA Chico holds community at the heart of every development decision. Every neighborhood should have welcoming places, both green spaces and local services and businesses that bring people together. This community-focused approach to growth is essential for creating vibrant, supportive neighborhoods that thrive in the face of adversity.

 

Compact Growth Preserves Our Shared Natural Resources

SGA Chico understands that compact growth and infill are key strategies to enhance the quality of living within our city. We advocate prioritizing growth and development within the city limits with the goals to enhance our existing neighborhoods and to optimize opportunities in corridors like Park Avenue between 11th and the Skyway. By focusing on building within existing urban areas, we help to preserve the open spaces and natural lands that surround us. This approach not only improves the vitality of our existing neighborhoods but also maintains access to the natural resources that are essential to our community's well-being. Through thoughtful development practices, we are actively working to protect the land, water, plants, and animals that sustain us.

 

Transportation Pathways and Community Health Benefits

SGA Chico supports safe and accessible transportation throughout our city by advocating for infrastructure with lower speed limits and dedicated pathways. This allows residents the freedom and convenience to walk, bike, or use public transit easily when visiting local businesses, fostering community connections, and encouraging greater social interaction among residents. SGA Chico also promotes alternatives to cars to improve air quality, since vehicle emissions are a major source of pollution. Choosing other modes of transport helps protect public health and strengthens our resilience. Environmental stewardship supports public health and reinforces our commitment to a thriving Chico.

 

Housing Choices and Affordability in Chico

SGA Chico promotes a diverse array of housing options. Our vision includes townhouses, condominiums, cottages, accessory dwelling units (ADUs), duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes, tiny houses, single-family homes, and mansion apartments. By offering these varied housing types, we aim to meet the unique needs and preferences of Chico's community, making it possible for more people to find homes that suit their lifestyles. These housing choices provide a range of price points for both ownership and rental opportunities. By ensuring affordability, we help more residents achieve stable, secure housing, and support a vibrant, inclusive community.

Mixed Used Commercial & Residential

To achieve these goals, SGA Chico emphasizes planning for mixed-use commercial and residential buildings. This approach not only increases the availability of housing but also integrates living spaces with local businesses and services, creating lively, walkable neighborhoods. Additionally, by building quality housing at higher densities, we make more efficient use of available land and resources, further supporting affordability and accessibility for all.

 

What is Smart Growth? 

 

  • people-centered rather than car-centered
  • infill rather than sprawl
  • new development and redevelopment where there is existing infrastructure. 
  • compact, walk-able and bike-able streets
  • mixed-use development 
  • a wide range of housing choices
  • conservation of valuable natural resources--efficient use of land and water
  • a greater sense of community
  • improved availability of transit--small electric bus service

Instead of the monochromatic new suburban houses, smart growth developments offer a range of housing choices. Instead of development that requires residents to drive long distances between jobs, homes, shopping and recreation, smart growth places workplaces, homes, and services closer together to allow children and adults to walk, bike or use public transit to reach their daily destinations.

What’s the problem with Sprawl?

 

Automobile dependent

Low density--eating up more and more land. 

Consumes significant amounts of natural resources

 

Sprawl eats up open land and eats up money.

 

The American Farmland Trust reports that between 1982 and 2007, the U.S. population grew by 30% percent. During the same time period, developed land increased 57%. In Pennsylvania, between 1992 and 2005, the population grew by 4.5% and developed land increased by 131.4% (1.2 million acres to almost 2.5 million acres).

 

Economic impacts: 

  • increased travel costs; 
  • decreased economic vitality of urban centers;
  • loss of productive farm and timberland; loss of natural lands that support tourism and wildlife related industries;
  • increased tax burdens due to more expensive road, utility and school construction and maintenance costs; 
  • increased car use leading to higher air pollution and increased health care costs for diseases like asthma.

 

Other problems with sprawl

  • Sprawl creates large amounts of impervious surfaces, such as roads, parking lots and residential lawns over which rainwater flows and picks up pollutants; 
  • The capacity to recharge water supplies is diminished both by the decrease in pervious surfaces 
  • increased impervious surfaces include increased water treatment costs, streams and waterways impacted by increased pollutants,
  • increased chances for and intensities of floods.

Environmental Impact

 

The rapid consumption of land in the nation’s fastest-growing large metropolitan areas could threaten the survival of nearly one out of every three imperiled species, according to the first study ever to quantify the impact of sprawling development on wildlife nationally. In at least three dozen rapidly-growing counties found mostly in the South and West, open space on non-federal lands is being lost so quickly that essential wildlife habitat will be mostly gone within the next two decades, unless development patterns are altered.

 

If people really want change in Chico, they need to become informed and insist that Chico developers, architects, and staff and elected officials become informed. 

 

Strongtowns.org

Smartgrowthamerica.org

Cnu.org (Congress for the New Urbanism