Founded in 2007, Empire State Future (ESF) is New York’s first and only statewide smart growth advocacy and education organization. We consist of a coalition of organizations from across the state and a small but dedicated staff.

ESF is working to revitalize New York’s cities, town centers, villages, and rural hamlets. Our top priority is to ensure that smart growth principles are applied to the far-reaching land use and development decisions that are made every day.

Smart growth is essential to restoring and improving quality of life in all New York communities and regions, as it foments healthy communities where economies are prosperous, environments protected, and equity achieved. Smart growth offers everyone choices in transportation, housing,   employment, education, culture, recreation, and services while respecting farmland, open space, and natural and historic resources. We engage in policy and governance work, aid select,  specific smart growth projects and initiatives, and conduct communications and outreach statewide.

Empire State Future is a program of the Tides Center, which provides fiscal sponsorship and administrative assistance to over 200 progressive organizations nationwide.

Empire State Future advances smart growth in order to

• Advance sustainable and equitable growth and economic opportunity across New York State
• Restore economic prosperity, reduce tax burdens on government, and taxes on taxpayers
• Reduce poverty by reinvesting in existing population centers
• Promote development organized around public transportation and pedestrian circulation in mixed-use and mixed-income urban, suburban, and rural centers
• Thwart inefficient, low-density, automobile-based development known as “sprawl”
• Build affordable, accessible housing for the full range of residents
• Strengthen rural economies by protecting open space, farmland, and water supplies
• Reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy demand.
• Maximize public return from public infrastructure investments.

Across Upstate, which is faced with protracted  population and economic stagnation, it is not fiscally sustainable to continue to add inefficiently located new development that demands expensive new  infrastructure. Extending roads, bridges, curbs, schools, water/sewer, and services such as police and fire  further into the countryside–while trying to simultaneously maintain older infrastructure– is counterproductive to the goals of economic development.  The result of this new development in the absence of more taxpayers leads inevitably to increases in property taxes, dramatic cuts in services, or both. Inefficient land use and development in these ways extends the vicious fiscal cycle that now distresses much of Upstate New York.

Downstate faces serious challenges borne by population growth and the dispersion of development further away from the cities, villages, and town centers. Skyrocketing housing costs and taxes, strained school districts, and aggravating traffic have greater and greater effects on quality of life downstate.

Empire State Future and its Coalition seeks to address these ills by advocating for the directing of resources to  the existing public investments in infrastructure and community. Doing this provides citizens with communities  built in a economically and environmentally sustainable fashion. These are places where families feel safe, homes are affordable, and schools, stores, and recreation are easily accessible by a choice of transportation modes. We seek places that promote a healthy lifestyle, where citizens are offered the prospect of walking, riding a bike, taking public transit or driving short distances, as they choose.

In short, putting smart growth principles into action is a win-win for many of our common values and goals–across professional and political spectra, and across walks of life.

What’s more, in a distressed economy, actualizing smart growth principles is even more essential. Smart growth allows a right-sized, sustainable  ‘American Dream’ to thrive in a new and changing century.

To advance our mission, Empire State Future works in several vital program areas:

Policy and Governance

On September 1, 2010, the Public Infrastructure Priority Act was enacted by the Governor. This law–passed in landslides in both houses of the state legislature–instructs State agencies, authorities, and public corporations to ensure that their infrastructure grants and appropriations across the state enable smart growth, and not sprawl. ESF is working with our allies and Coalition partners to ensure that state agencies will fully implement and comply with this landmark new law. In addition, we will continue to advocate for future smart growth legislation and monitor state government to ensure that decisions and resources enable smart growth. ESF will also look to foment smart growth at the local government level, as well.

ESF and its Coalition also advocated intensively in its first years for two other key pieces of legislation: Complete Streets, and Land Banking Authority.  Other key issues in our focus are “right sizing” communities, location efficiency in development, transit-oriented development,  funding of the state’s Environmental Protection Fund, high speed rail, brownfield reclamation and redevelopment, and more. You can click here to see the full slate of our current policy work.

Engagement in specific smart growth projects and initiatives

ESF engages in select, specific smart growth projects and initiatives such  as transit oriented development, inter-municipal and regional planning,   infill development, and “right sizing” efforts that remove or re-envision  vacant or abandoned property and obsolete  infrastructure.

Communications & Outreach
Through our direct outreach across the state and through empirestatefuture.org, our staff and Coalition seizes on opportunities to inform the public, civic organizations, local elected officials, and the media about smart growth principles and practice, and about the current state of land use and development in New York State. We illuminate inspiring smart growth options and provide customized  guidance to employ those options. Above all, we strive to help citizens, government, and business understand that smart growth is imperative to  fiscal and environmental health for all people in all types of communities across the state.
To expand our reach and advance our goals, we expand seek to expand the ESF Coalition membership across geography and interest area. The relationship between ESF and its Coalition members is truly reciprocal–we aid each others’ quests for sustainable communities.