Table of Contents

Built Environment and Health

The city’s comprehensive plan considers the transportation barriers of healthcare access in its Health and Human Services section. The Transportation section includes a statement committing the city to Complete Streets to improve health and well-being and the Environmental Protection section connects its goals to the long-term health of residents.

Capital Improvements Programming

The city’s comprehensive plan includes a section on capital improvement planning in its implementation element (N.2). This section explains the role of the CIP in the comprehensive plan implementation process and includes policy recommendations to guide capital improvements planning.

Community Visioning

This city's comprehensive plan establishes a vision statement in Section 2.3 based on public feedback that provides the framework for the plan. The vision statement is supplemented by six vision themes that serve as the plan's overall goals: Economic Prosperity and Equity; Expanding Housing Choices; Managing Our Growth; Coordinating Land Use and Transportation; Greenprint Raleigh—Sustainable Development; and Growing Successful Neighborhoods and Communities.

Comprehensive Planning

This city's comprehensive plan was used to help refine the Sustaining Places comprehensive plan standards. The cornerstones of this plan are a "commitment to sustainability" and a "triple-bottom line" approach. The plan has six "vision themes":

• Economic prosperity and equity
• Expanding housing choices
• Managing growth
• Coordinating land use and transportation
• Sustainable development
• Growing successful neighborhoods and communities

These vision themes run throughout the plan elements, providing the framework for goals and objectives.

Creative Placemaking

The city's comprehensive plan includes a chapter focused on supporting the arts and culture through creative placemaking. It aims to provide a framework for supporting and integrating the arts in the city through recommendations like encouraging live-work space for artists, promoting partnerships for arts development, engaging the art community in planning.

Environmentally Sensitive Areas

The city’s comprehensive plan incorporates environmental protection through recommendations to design with nature, maintain water quality and conservation, and protect wildlife habitats. It provides policy guidance, including using environmentally sensitive growth and development practices, preserving watercourses, and avoiding development in floodplains. The implementation element outlines the responsible agencies, time frame, and action type for each policy and action component.

Historic Preservation

The city’s comprehensive plan features a historic preservation element. It sets policies and actions related to the city’s historic identity, planning and zoning, rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of the built environment, coordination and outreach, and funding and incentives.

Neighborhood Planning

This city’s comprehensive plan includes 22 neighborhood plans for select subareas of its jurisdiction. Each neighborhood plan includes a brief description of the plan area and a set of neighborhood-specific policies and actions. 

Outdoor Lighting

The city’s comprehensive plan addresses outdoor lighting. The Environmental Protection chapter of the plan includes a section on light and noise pollution controls. Policies address light pollution (EP 8.1), light screening (EP 8.2), nighttime light impacts (EP 8.3), noise and light impacts (EP 8.4), and LED lighting (EP 8.9). A Dark Sky Incentives action item (Action EP 8.2) calls for the development of a package of incentives to promote the use of energy efficient lighting fixtures that minimize light pollution.

Social Equity

The city’s comprehensive plan includes Economic Prosperity and Equity as a key theme. Social equity is integrated throughout each element, but is identified next to each specific policy and action. Some notable examples include Policy EP 9.2 on environmental justice education, Policy ED 8.3 on economic development equity, and Policy CS 1.4 on equitable facility distribution.