What gets people's blood boiling are the pressing needs of the day, such as defeating a development that crowds schools, exacerbates flooding by taking out one of the last remaining green spaces, or clogs up the streets even more. Comprehensive plans (also called masterplans) are seen as a snooze, geeky and boring. Naturally, the cooler heads of master-planning are  much better suited to prevent bad outcomes than the boiling blood when the bulldozers are already rolling.

This article will show that a good masterplan is an essential tool for fighting bad development and that directing development is like directing water:  Easier done upstream than downstream. In development that means that it is easier and much more effective to pro-actively place development correctly in a long range plan (along with preserving open space) than react to a bad development that was approved because of a bad, defective or missing masterplan. 

The advantages of  a long range consensus on where to direct resources and investments in a predictable manner should be appreciated by communities and developers alike. Who doesn't want to know what will happen next?

Yet,  precise and instructive master- or comp plans remain the exception. Even rarer is it........READ FULL ARTICLE