What Is Planning?
It Takes A Planner to Create Stronger, More Equitable, and Resilient Communities
Planning is elected leaders' most effective tool for managing growth, navigating change, and making tough decisions facing communities, like where to invest in transportation, housing, and parks.
Powered by community planners' data-driven insights, expertise, and sense of residents' needs, the planning process helps communities define their goals and a path to achieving them.
A plan is a roadmap that helps leaders make informed decisions about what residents — and the local economy — need to thrive.
Why do communities need planners?
Long-term Vision
Planners see a broader view, understanding how policy decisions like reconnecting communities cut off from essential services by highways can impact a community now and into the future.
Expertise
Planners are trained professionals with a deep knowledge of the field, best practices, and case studies. They provide elected leaders with forward-thinking insights to handle unforeseen opportunities and challenges like how to deploy a windfall of stimulus dollars or helping communities prepare for extreme heat.
Data-driven Approach
Planners' recommendations are backed by extensive research, community conversations, and deep analysis of data sets from across multiple sources. Planners distill this data, translating findings and revealing insights like which neighborhoods have too few housing options and transit connections.
It Takes a Planner to Increase Housing Supply and Choice
See how planners are reforming zoning to expand housing options in our communities.
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Minneapolis, Minnesota
Legalizing Housing Options
Minneapolis, Minnesota, used its 2040 comprehensive plan update as a catalyst for key zoning and housing funding and program reforms, creating 297 new homes since its passage in 2020 with more approved for development or under construction. -
Sandpoint, Idaho
Reducing Parking Minimums
Sandpoint, Idaho, a resort town with less than 10,000 people, reduced citywide parking minimums to make redevelopment and building renovations less costly for small businesses. -
Chamblee, Georgia
Linking Housing With Transit Options
Chamblee, Georgia, reformed its land use policies, based on planners' expert insights, to make it easier and more affordable for developers to build more housing near a regional transit station. Small businesses are choosing Chamblee and employees can live where they work.
Arlington, Virginia
Allowing Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs)