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No developer is in the building business just to make things look nice. For good or bad, economics, logistics and demand also drive each development. Supporters of smart growth believe the planning concept, which promotes sustainable growth (the enemy of sprawl), is a win-win situation for all involved, allowing developers, residents and even governments to utilize their tax base more efficiently.

Smart growth can also be an enticement in recruiting new industries. Consider that Tennessee’s Main Street program, part of the state Department of Economic & Community Development, focuses on encouraging economic growth and job creation by (in its own words) enhancing community livability and maintaining an area or business district’s historic character. Never let it be said that an area’s charm doesn’t count in the minds of relocating executives (or their spouses).

Yet, while the upsides of smart growth may seem evident enough, Tennessee has really only just in the past five years seen an influx in mixed-use, higher-density developments. Despite only just keeping up with the smart growth movement, the state has begun to garner some attention—Smart Growth America, a national coalition of preservation and growth planning associations, recently listed Tennessee as one of eight new promising states.

Thinking Outside the Sprawl
Henry Turley with the Henry Turley Co. developed Harbor Town in downtown Memphis, one of the first New Urbanism developments in the country. “Smart growth is quite the opposite of the way we’ve built our cities since World War II,” Turley says, pointing out a key reason people have moved out of the urban cores.

To remain vibrant, Turley says cities have to halt “stupid growth” by making smart growth more attractive to people and developers alike.

Broadly defined, smart growth encompasses rural stewardship, building compact cities and reusing infrastructure so communities don’t have to raise taxes to pay for that expanding infrastructure. DeWitt Ezell, the retired president of BellSouth Tennessee who now co-chairs the nonprofit smart growth advocacy group Cumberland Region Tomorrow (CRT), says smart growth by definition doesn’t mean creating dense development in every neighborhood. Instead, it means looking at an area from a regional perspective and planning the best sustainable growth for that community on a long-term basis.

“The more people we talk to about smart growth, the more people seem to understand,” Ezell says, adding that quality growth is about balance and choices, not one-size-fits-all.

Kim Hawkins with Nashville-based Hawkins Partners says governments are increasingly interested in encouraging more smart growth development to keep their tax base intact, particularly affluent communities across Tennessee including Germantown, Collierville and Brentwood that have maxed out their growth capacity within their city limits. “The question becomes, ‘How do we increase our tax base,’” Hawkins says. As an example, she cites land that previously contained a couple of independent businesses, which, if properly done, could be redeveloped into a mixed-use project housing hundreds of people and providing hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail, restaurants and office space.

“You probably just quadrupled your tax base,” Hawkins says.

Cheatham County Mayor Bill Orange, a longtime booster for smart growth, puts it more succinctly: “You can’t survive on taxation of starter homes.”

Learning Curves
Like any approach that requires a rethinking of long-followed customs, the key to making smart growth “the way things are done” lies in education. To help that effort, smart growth advocates across the state have rolled out different initiatives bringing together key leaders in their communities to address growth needs in their regions.

CRT formed in 2000 and, according to Executive Director Bridget Jones, serves as a platform for community leaders in the 10-county Middle Tennessee region to discuss and work collaboratively toward quality growth and sustainable development.

To that end, CRT in December 2006 released a new “Quality Growth Toolbox,” which looks at everything from the use of design guidelines and conservation zoning to building design standards, streetscape improvements, public transit, pedestrian and bicycle accommodations, and rural land preservation.

The Tennessee Department of Transportation (TDOT) financially backs the toolbox. According to Ed Cole, TDOT’s chief of environment and planning, the state in its recently finished Long-Range Transportation Plan recognized the need to accommodate communities in their growth issues as much as possible.

Bert Mathews, president of The Mathews Company in Nashville, which is bringing rental residential units back to Nashville’s downtown core through the rehabilitation of the historic Stahlman Building, believes the toolbox will be critical to future smart growth development in Tennessee. He says it will teach communities about each other’s approaches and help them identify and locate planning, designing and, importantly, financing tools that make the numbers work.

Driving it Home
Metro planning director Rick Bernhardt, a nationally recognized urban planner, says the next step in moving smart growth forward in Tennessee is to create a statewide civic umbrella organization similar to what CRT is for Middle Tennessee. And, according to Jones, CRT has already agreed under a grant from TDOT to take the lead in forming the Tennessee Quality Growth Network, which will pull together regional leaders to do just that.

Chuck Downham, a planner with the architectural firm Looney Ricks Kiss, would like to go a step further. He is calling for state government to take the lead.

According to Downham, there are a number of states around the country, including Maryland and Wisconsin, that have recognized the importance of regulating development at the state level and passed smart growth-oriented ordinances to achieve just that. “Tennessee needs to stand with them to really regulate growth and development for our future,” Downham says. “We’ve got some exceptional leaders across the state who have stepped up, but we’ve got to get everybody on the same page.”

Many would like to see some ground rules for development established at the statewide level to get Tennessee communities pushing in the same direction. Rusty Bloodworth with Boyle Developments in Memphis argues the need to change zoning codes at the state legislative level in order to forge a true smart growth strategy. But for now, most smart growth advocates across Tennessee would settle for increased fervor in statewide dialogue about smart growth reach a more fevered pitch. And there are reasons for that beyond simply their desire to see building and development move in a “smarter” direction. Bernhardt, for one, warns that managing growth differently isn’t really a choice, but a necessity, given that the American population is projected to grow by another 100 million people over the next quarter century.

“The question is not are we going to grow,” Bernhardt says. “The question is how are we going to grow.”