What are Other Cities Doing?
Since most states require some version of a comprehensive plan, the Charleston City Plan will be only one example of thousands of comprehensive plans that exist across the country. Anywhere a jurisdiction has a zoning ordinance, there must also be a comprehensive plan. Which means there is plenty of opportunity to look around and learn from other cities’ efforts as our plan takes shape.
When staff sat down to begin planning for the plan – yes, us planners can’t get enough of planning – we started by researching other plans that were exemplary; not just in how they addressed challenges such as flooding, housing and equity – but also in the plan process and final document itself. Read on to learn more about some of the plans that made an impression and inspired our ongoing efforts.
Norfolk Vision 2100
What we liked: a flooding and resiliency framework that can be applied to land use planning and growth strategies.
Like Charleston, the City of Norfolk, VA is intimately familiar with the challenges of tidal flooding, climate change and sea level rise. Through their Comprehensive Plan and Norfolk Vision 2100 report, Norfolk outlined different adaptation, mitigation, and growth strategies for different areas of the city based on flood risk. Check out the Norfolk Vision 2100 report here.
Norfolk’s “Vision Areas” framework and map of the city with appropriate visions applied.
Washington, DC
What we liked: use of guiding values throughout the planning process and an emphasis on racial equity threaded throughout all of the plan’s elements.
Through “DC 2 Me,” the development and engagement for Washington DC’s plan update were guided by a set of key values. The plan also developed a “Comprehensive Plan Equity Crosswalk,” a document which identified 97 policies and actions throughout the Comprehensive Plan that explicitly focus on advancing equity, recognizing that by implementing certain recommendations in tandem, equitable outcomes are more likely. Check out the Equity Crosswalk here.
DC’s core themes and values guiding the process to amend its 20-year comprehensive plan.
Imagine Boston 2030
What we liked: emphasis on housing affordability; the use of data to track progress of plan recommendations; and a user-friendly, online, interactive format.
The Imagine Boston team compiled statistics from a broad variety of sources to reveal unique and interesting information related to different areas of the Plan. Now that the plan has been approved, the team measures performance through the Imagine Boston 2030 Metrics Dashboard, a public-facing data platform.
An example of an affordable housing indicator being tracked through the Imagine Boston 2030 Metrics Dashboard.
Hillsborough County, FL
What we liked: the use of the “meeting in a box” tool to expand opportunities for community input.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has forced communities across the country to reimagine community engagement, Hillsborough County, FL served as a great model for a wide variety of engagement strategies. Click here to view their “meeting in a box” tool that we looked to when developing our “Lead Your Own” meeting toolkit.
Pages from Hillsborough County’s “Meeting in a box” host packet.
Community Question Spotlight:
Why only plan for 10 years? Shouldn’t we be looking further ahead?
The 10-year timeline is dictated by state law, which requires that cities revise their comprehensive plan every 10 years, and update it every 5. The vision we establish can look to a further horizon, but the recommendations we make will only guide decisions in the next 10 years. For example, in our land and water use analysis, we are considering impacts of sea level rise as much as 50 years from now but the plan will include changes and investments we can make in the next 10 years to better prepare for that future.