Please join us for our APA-NJ Emerging Professionals Quarterly Meeting.  The committee will be discussing specific events for the remaining months of the year.  We'll also be looking for people who want to get involved and help to coordinate activities.  If you can't make the meeting, but would like to help, please contact Darlene Green.

This webinar session will highlight trends in transport, and explore sustainable mobility and solutions emerging from local and national partnerships. Successes around the country will be showcased, and strategies noted that scale up the movement. GPC’s tools include: Energy efficient technologies; Hosting of bike-sharing, car-sharing, carpooling, and mass-transit, EV charging; Responsible storm water management, Integration of intelligent transportation; Placemaking: parking assets right-sized, as well-designed, responsible neighbors; Resiliency: parking garages as energy storage and deployment centers in times of crisis; Green Garage Certification: a program inspiring parking assets to be a positive force in the built environment.

This one-of-a-kind event will bring together New Jersey’s top sustainability experts with
academics, state and local agencies, organizations, Sustainable Jersey Green Team and Task Force members and the interested public, at a sustainable venue, Duke Farms!

As we move toward more transit oriented development and work to retrofit our existing suburbs, we search for opportunities to use existing infrastructure and land area efficiently. As we evaluate these opportunities, it is important to fully understand the residential developments in these suburban areas of the post-WWII era -- both lower density modest single-family house tracts and garden apartment complexes with acres of green space. 

Join Roger Brooks of Roger Brooks International (RBI) as he shared his high-energy, high-value expertise to take you through key strategies and tactics for building communities as destinations and then promoting them effectively.  Using uncommon common sense and his ability to cut through the B.S. in our media and marketing-saturated world Roger will leave you with great ideas that are both inspiring and actionable.  

This session will focus on the kinds of incentives and planning tools that can be used that promote both redevelopment in the traditional centers of a city—those outside downtown—and the unification of those areas through mass transit. The session will cover the use of a variety of economic development incentives, form based codes implementation, and use of the Institute for Transportation Engineers Walkable Urban Thoroughfares Manual as a package for revitalization in El Paso, Texas.

This session shows how to calculate the increase in value of private land due to public actions and develop a reasonable figure for developer contributions. This knowledge is particularly helpful to those working in urban design and preservation where much of what is achieved is through negotiating developer contributions. This session was first presented at the APA National Conference in Chicago in 2013.

The purpose of the 16th YP Multi-Group Mixer is to bring together young professionals from various organizations for a night of social networking and for group-to-group cross exposure. Young Professionals attend to make new contacts, make new friends, and to learn about other organizations.

The PP Exam Review Course for the Fall 2013 test period will be held Saturday, October 5 from 8:30AM to 4:00PM, at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Civic Square Building, 33 Livingston Avenue, 2nd Floor, Room 261, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.

Panel discussion the safety and land use implications of rail and truck freight routes through local communities. Learn from national research and from the experiences of the railroads, the City of Baltimore.

Join Camden County and Cherry Hill Officials and the American Planning Association, New Jersey Chapter, to celebrate Cooper River Park’s award as a... GREAT PLACE IN NEW JERSEY!

This presentation describes the scope of the problem in terms of public health risks. federal and state drinking water, water quality, and stormwater laws require permittees to address leaky infrastructure, but local implementers often interpret these requirements in ways that ignore the potential infectious disease risk posed. 

The City of Hoboken’s South Hoboken Waterfront has been named a Great Place in New Jersey for 2013 by the American Planning Association-New Jersey Chapter (APA-NJ).   The City will be hosting a Walking Tour on Friday, October 18 from 2pm-4pm. The Walking Tour will highlight the South Hoboken Waterfront and present the processes which were involved in its industrial-to-recreational transformation.

On Thursday, Oct 24th, from 6-9pm continue our Community Planning Month celebrations with fellow APA-NJ members at this Northeast Area networking event. Enjoy light fare at 12 West in Upper Montclair - conveniently located in Upper Montclair Town Center, adjacent to the Upper Montclair Train Station.

Moderated by Bloustein Local Director and University Professor Raphael J. Caprio, and Senior Research Fellow Marc Pfeiffer, the program includes a macroeconomic overview of  the region, presentations by representatives from Jersey City, Weehawken and Edgewater, all waterfront municipalities that have experienced significant impact from Gold Coast development, and a prominent developer’s view of the region’s future. 

Status quo parking requirements often stand in the way of making communities livable, equitable, and sustainable. Responding to criticisms of excessive minimum parking requirements, many planners feel that improvements should be made but they lack a solid procedure for generating reform. Webinar participants are provided with a handout showing a step-by-step technical and policy process for reforming parking requirements. A brief introduction explains that parking requirements are a policy choice, not merely a technical calculation. 

The downtown area of Freehold is the heart of the Borough, which is located centrally in Monmouth County. Like many towns of its time, it is the historic village center for much of the surrounding population.

On this Day of Service, APA-NJ volunteers will be helping to paint the playground at Belmar Elementary School in Belmar, NJ – renewing students sense of play after their playground was damaged by the effects of Hurricane Sandy. Belmar Elementary School is a public school serving 555 students from Belmar and Lake Como in grades K-8.

The North American urban landscape is dominated by the products of late 20th century suburbanization, leaving the built environment littered with dead malls, failing strip centers, foreclosed houses, vacant big boxes, and acre upon acre of asphalt parking lots. What to do? June Williamson will discuss promising planning and design strategies and tactics, illustrated with competition-winning proposals from her book Designing Suburban Futures as well as case studies from her previous book Retrofitting Suburbia, co-authored with Ellen Dunham-Jones.

The Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. In this Webinar, Jeff Speck outlines the compelling economic, health, and environmental mandates behind creating more walkable communities. He then discusses his General Theory of Walkability, which describes the measures that communities can undertake to create larger walking and biking populations by providing the "useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting walk."

Please join this important, informative, and engaging webinar on the ethical rules and considerations governing planners, plan commissioners, and lawyers who work with planners and appear before plan commissions. The webinar will cover the primary sources of ethical rules for planners and lawyers, common ethical mistakes and how to avoid them, and recent cases. In addition, the webinar will have an interactive component that will enable participants to interact with the presenters and other participants on ethical scenarios.

This symposium will showcase recent work from the Transportation and Climate Initiative’s (TCI) Northeast Electric Vehicle Network on electric vehicle deployment in the northeast and mid-Atlantic region. Georgetown Climate Center, facilitator of TCI, will present the Network’s research findings on challenges and opportunities for EV deployment in the Northeast, and will also explore a number of EV planning tools –such as siting and design guidelines and best practices for developing EV-friendly zoning codes –that can help communities in New Jersey become EV-Ready.

This webinar is intended for local officials, planning board members and interested citizens, and will explain how non-contiguous cluster development works, with illustrated case studies and resources for getting started. Speakers will also address how to plan for attractive, walkable neighborhoods and centers, with input and support from the community.

This session will introduce community planners to the concepts and core principles of the NDRF; equip planners and others involved in post-disaster recovery with the tools and techniques needed to design and execute a post-disaster planning process; and will educate planners on how to build community capacity through the post-disaster planning process. Planners will leave this session armed with a number of community recovery and planning resources. They will learn the critical steps needed to guide communities to successful recovery. They will learn how to engage local citizens in the recovery process, and teach community members how to be engaged, successful, local champions who will take ownership of their local recovery planning process.

This second session goes into greater detail on the new law. Experienced practitioners will explain its new features and how municipal planners and attorneys can apply them to craft cluster development ordinances that address community goals. Speakers will cover how to structure a non-contiguous cluster program that is attractive to developers from a financial and risk perspective and how to integrate cluster development ordinances into local open space and farmland preservation programs. Audience members will have ample opportunity to ask questions.

Then two panels will evaluate the September 26, 2013 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling on the Council of Affordable Housing’s round III methodology for calculating each town’s affordable housing obligation.

This introductory webinar will focus on how to do so by describing how to conduct a vulnerability analysis. The webinar will include processes that local, regional, or state planners can use to ensure transportation system resiliency and provide an effective network to support their communities. Participants will develop a deeper understanding of specific vulnerabilities and be informed about a step-by-step process that they can follow to assess and rank vulnerabilities for project prioritization purposes.

Get ready for what we hope will be our largest and best state conference yet!  Join us and you will pick up new tools and tips, reconnect with over 500 of your colleagues, and leave at the end of two days a bit tired, but intellectually energized.

In 2011, the US Department of Justice promulgated rules on “Other Power Driven Mobility Devices” under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Attend this webcast and learn how the new rule applies to Federal, State, local, and privately owned lands as well as the assessment factors and public notice requirements under that Rule. 

Across the country municipalities seeking to reshape dysfunctional auto-oriented development continue to replace conventional zoning codes with new codes that primarily regulate form and only secondarily regulate use. As the fundamentally different approach of Form-Based Codes becomes more popular, practitioners are looking for credible guidance on how to draft and implement form-based codes in their area. In this webinar, we will share lessons distilled from over a decade of experience implementing and administering municipal form-based development and will introduce community planners to the core principles of Form-Based Codes.

This webinar will address the viability of ferry services and their integration into public transportation systems. Speakers include Tim Payne, Principal of Nelson Nygaard and 35 years of experience. He also led development of TCRP SB-23, “Integrating Passenger Ferry Service with Mass Transit” on behalf of the Transportation Research Board.   Also speaking will be Hannah Henn, Assistant Vice President and Director of Ferries at New York City Economic Development Corporation. 

This session focuses on examples of two engaging, community-based plans now being implemented to achieve active, vibrant environments in an existing downtown (Burlington, VT) and a new TOD neighborhood (Santa Monica, CA).  Both plans were adopted in 2013, funded by HUD Office of Sustainable Communities Community Challenge grants, a pioneering Federal program that supports cities to develop integrated land use and transportation plans.   The webinar will include ideas and lessons learned for involving the community, designing and presenting information, and including a phased Implementation Plan that guides and measures achievement of Plan goals.