Through collaborative local, county, and regional land use planning, CMAP promotes coordinated and sustainable development, redevelopment and preservation within the region.
Where and how the region develops is critical to its health and prosperity. In preparing GO TO 2040, the region's first truly comprehensive plan, CMAP will use scenario modeling to strengthen the functional links between land use and transportation planning, with a comprehensive range of regional issues such as health, economic development, education, environment, and water supply. Because these issues cut across political boundaries, CMAP facilitates planning processes and partnerships that build links between jurisdictional boundaries. Often, local choices have a significant impact on neighboring communities or facilities, and CMAP seeks to provide the regional context in which local decisions should be made.
Metropolitan Chicago's land-use patterns are the result of complex decision-making processes that include private and public participants. Among the most important decision makers are the businesses that decide where they will invest and the families that decide where they want to live. They make their choices within a context created by a wide-range of government agencies. The private choices are influenced by such things as the property tax structure, the quality of local schools, the availability of good roads and mass transit, the availability of water, the probability of flooding, the proximity of recreational opportunities, and much more. Local, regional, state and federal governments greatly influence the patterns of land development, but most of the final decisions are made by families and businesses.
Within this larger context, local governments exercise zoning authority and subdivision control as a means to protect local health, safety and public welfare and encourage a particular community character. This local authority must remain the prerogative of local governments. They determine the location and type of developments that will occur through public and private investment. CMAP's role regarding land-development patterns is to place these local choices in a broader context and to influence decision makers for the good of the region as a whole.
Although land-use choices remain local, these decisions cannot be made in a vacuum.