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Land Use Policies <br />To build the foundation for a prosperous, equitable, livable, and sustainable future, the Council <br />has identified seven policies to guide land use and regional development: <br />Orderly and Efficient Land Use: Align land use, development patterns, and infrastructure to <br />make the best use of public and private investment. <br />Natural Resources Protection: Conserve, restore, and protect the region's natural resources <br />to ensure availability, to support public health, and to maintain a high quality of life. <br />Water Sustainability: Conserve, restore, and protect the quality and quantity of the region's <br />water resources to ensure ongoing availability, to support public health, and to maintain a high <br />quality of life. <br />Housing Affordability and Choice: Promote housing options to give people in all life stages <br />and of all economic means viable choices for safe, stable, and affordable homes. <br />Access, Mobility, and Transportation Choice: Sustain and improve a multi -modal <br />transportation system to support regional growth, maintain regional economic competitiveness, <br />and provide choices and reliability for the system's users. <br />Economic Competitiveness: Foster connected land use options to provide businesses and <br />industries with access to materials, markets, and talent. <br />Building in Resilience: Promote sensitive land use and development patterns to achieve <br />Minnesota's adopted greenhouse gas emissions goals at the regional scale, and to develop <br />local resiliency to the impacts of climate change. <br />To implement these overall policies the Council has identified land use strategies for local <br />communities and the Council to implement. While each strategy is linked to a specific policy in <br />this document, in practice strategies can serve multiple purposes. For example, a strategy of <br />focusing development around centers on transit and transportation corridors supports the policy <br />of aligning land uses to make the best use of public and private investments, among other <br />policies. Guiding development to targeted areas can reduce the development pressures in <br />areas with high quality natural resources. This focus of development along transportation and <br />transit corridors can also improve the efficiency of our transit system by building housing within <br />easy access to the existing system. This method of development can also support specialized <br />housing types to meet the lifestyle needs of a segment of the population seeking more urban <br />living options. <br />We cannot focus on one policy alone to attain the outcomes identified in this plan. Instead, it will <br />take a combination of strategies addressing all of the policies to set the stage for a successful <br />future. While a policy may appear to directly support some of the Council's desired outcomes <br />more than others, all of the land use policies are interrelated and implementation must be <br />integrated to achieve the outcomes. The next section details land use policies for the region, <br />followed by strategies that are common among all communities. In recognition of the <br />opportunities and challenges unique to different communities, additional strategies to implement <br />these policies are tailored to suit the different community types in the region (see Strategies for <br />Community Designations). <br />DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENT <br />Last revised: February 21, 2014 63 <br />