Pollution prevention has been largely a regulatory and industrial movement. Managing community growth has fallen into the realm of planners and developers. Agency involvement from both groups is needed to achieve satisfactory long and short-term community goals. Involving a broad range of stakeholders within the community is also important.

Development Decisions

Here are some commonly made growth decisions with potentially negative repercussions to sustaining the environment and quality of life in a community:

• Zoning rules forbidding mix of homes and shops, limiting walkability and causing worse traffic congestion
• Readily available federal grants and low-cost financing for water and sewer, inviting development further into the countryside
• A federal tax code where mortgage interest and property tax deductions give people a subtle incentive to buy bigger houses on bigger lots, thus promoting consumption of open space
• State finances oriented towards building new roads or capacity expansion rather than repairing existing roads or utilizing alternative transportation, and pulling investment and resources from the metropolitan core
• Commercial development emphasized along transportation corridors rather than "centers based" within residential area
• Conflict between local and state design standards
• Minimum lot sizes, established in pristine places to preserve the open feel, conflicting with principles of clustered development
• Tax rate structures, making sprawl-type developments financially attractive
• Reliance on population growth for lower per capita property tax
• Tax subsidies for new roads, sewer and water systems, schools and new businesses that outweigh the tax revenues ultimately received from them
• Lack of jurisdictional cooperation; where one community (often a city) has more stringent regulations than the surrounding area (county), causing a ring of less dense peripheral development outside the city limits
• National highway system: