Comprehensive & Strategic Plans

Little River Transit Village Plan (2006)
Newbury and Newburyport, MA

Brown Walker Planners (formerly Taintor & Associates) led a team of consultants working with the two municipalities to extend the planning concepts initiated by the firm’s award-winning Newburyport Strategic Land Use Plan to a much larger area. The expanded planning project was designed to promote:

• conservation of a greenbelt of open space;
• concentrated, mixed-use development around a Commuter Rail station and along Route 1;
• construction of multifamily, mixed-income housing in the concentrated development area.

In the first phase of the Little River Transit Village planning project, the firm led a team of consultants to complete a series of studies that evaluate the feasibility of concentrating development in the “transit village” area, and of implementing the strategy through the establishment of Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) programs. The firm developed a build-out analysis under existing zoning regulations, prepared an alternative development scenario using proposed overlay zoning districts with associated use and dimensional standards, and oversaw a real estate market assessment and analyses of impacts of concentrated growth on stormwater, traffic, and water and sewer infrastructure.

In the second phase of the project, our planners worked with the City and Town to draft zoning for new overlay districts for the project area.