The towns and villages of Southeast Orange County are at a crossroads in planning for their future. The land use and transportation decisions made today will affect the residents of this region for decades to come and impact the lives of future generations.

One potential future adheres to the status quo: the Business As Usual. Under existing zoning, the dominant development types will continue to be automobile-dependent singlefamily homes and big box and strip commercial establishments. They would be spread inefficiently across the landscape. Over the past several decades these developments have led to congestion on the region’s roads since there is little alternative to the automobile and few major routes. This has resulted in increasing travel times and frustration while reducing air quality. The predominance of a single home type coupled with rising demand in the Metropolitan Area have led to declining affordability for the existing population. Monotonous and disconnected development is threatening to blanket the landscape and starve the region of its rural character.

But there is another way: the Smart Growth alternative. In the fall of 2006, a group of urban planning, landscape architecture, urban design, and land use law professionals worked with the Southeast Orange County Traffic Task Force to illustrate this alternative and determine the implementation tools most appropriate to achieve it.