Sacramento’s staff and city council demonstrated that they understand that the city can’t afford to install and maintain expensive transit infrastructure and then fail to make productive use of that investment. Their new Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) ordinance does two main things:

Removes minimum parking requirements within a quarter-mile of light rail stops.

Prohibits some car-oriented uses, like drive-throughs and gas stations, within a quarter mile of light rail stops.

There’s more left to be done—for example, Sacramento still has parking minimums in much of the city. But these policies are a step in the right direction. They put the city on the path to greater financial resilience, by phasing out unproductive land uses in these transit corridors, as well as land uses—like gas stations and big parking lots—that deter people from actually using light rail by limiting who can walk to and from it.

These policies will help productive uses fill in those spaces, and ultimately allow more people to live, work, and shop near high-quality transit. They’ll put Sacramento on the path to reducing its dependence on cars. This ought to eventually have an impact outside of the TOD areas, by reducing the need for costly infrastructure that caters to cars and drivers—ample parking, wide streets—and making it possible for the city to evolve toward a walkable development pattern.

We’ve demonstrated time and again that traditional development is a huge money-saver—to the point that even a run-down, disinvested block built in a traditional walkable layout is worth more in tax value per acre (78% more in our classic “Taco John’s” case study) than a shiny and new car-oriented restaurant with parking and drive-through lanes.

Hansen demonstrates some real Strong Towns-style thinking when he says, as quoted by Streetsblog:

“I don’t know what you think came first, the chicken or the egg,” said Hansen, “but it’s hard to sustain BRT [Bus Rapid Transit] if you haven’t laid policy for housing infill. With our commercial corridors, we can get them to begin filling in, and then we can target them for BRT resources. It may not happen exactly simultaneously, but it would give us the opportunity to build [housing and transit] at the same time.”

Yes, yes, YES. Build a productive place first, and then you’ve got the resources for transit to follow. It all has to start with actually productive development, which generates the concentrated wealth to pay for itself over time. That’s the foundation of a strong town. And the more people in City Halls all over America saying things like this, the stronger we’ll be as a country.

(Cover photo: paulkimo9 via Flickr)