Implementation Plan for Sustainable Development

The New York-Connecticut region, an area that includes New York City, Long Island, the lower Hudson Valley, and coastal Connecticut, is one of the largest and most complex urban areas in the United States. A part of the larger tri-state metropolitan area surrounding New York City, it is home to 14 million people and a productive, energy-efficient economy built around the nation’s most robust transit network. The region also includes some of the wealthiest and poorest communities in the country, and is one of its most racially and ethnically segregated regions. As a coastal region, it is also increasingly vulnerable to sea level rise and frequent and intense storms brought on by climate change.

Three years of collaborative planning by the New York-Connecticut Sustainable Communities Consortium, a partnership of nine cities, two counties and six regional planning organizations, has resulted in an agenda to create more sustainable and equitable economic growth. The components of this agenda include plans to create more jobs and mixed-income housing in specific downtown locations and low-income neighborhoods served by the MTA Metro-North Railroad and the MTA Long Island Rail Road. It also proposes improvements to the planning processes that often fail to adequately connect transportation, housing, economic development and environmental planning and policies. And it includes actions to promote fair access to good schools, job opportunities and healthy communities.

The work of the Consortium was supported by a Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant, a key initiative of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, a federal partnership of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Consortium’s planning program was built from a shared vision of its members – derived from their own planning efforts individually -- for sustainable development in the New York-Connecticut planning area. This shared vision for sustainable development rests on the following key characteristics of the Consortium’s planning area:

• A globally competitive regional economy that will require strategic investment in infrastructure, business centers and neighborhoods to maintain and expand prosperity and improve quality of life.
• A low per capita energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, largely a result of safe and reliable public transit service providing for more compact and efficient land-use patterns. These services not only dramatically reduce a traveler’s carbon footprint, but also facilitate a larger shift away from automobile use.
• Transit systems with rich legacies and great scalability that have received and will require sustained investment.
• A network of downtowns and neighborhoods supported by the transit network with underutilized potential to provide needed housing and jobs.