Projects <<

CURE's work focuses on two major goals: promoting safe and healthy
communities through smart land-use policy, and sustainable
natural resource management.

In support of these goals, CURE supports research, education and
advocacy on individual projects that make economic as well as
environmental sense, and that serve to bring communities together.
These projects have included responsible floodplain management in
San Bernardino County; the creation of strategically-located affordable
housing that ensures environmental justice and curbs sprawl and
pollution; and assisting communities in creating development plans that
are responsive to and reflective of residents' values and lifestyle.

SMART GROWTH = SAFE AND HEALTHY COMMUNITIES

CURE recognizes that increased population and urbanization has
significant consequences for communities. Local planning often is
more influenced by market and political forces than by the need to
preserve open space and natural resources. Moreover, local planners
increasingly permit development in unsafe areas, do to land shortages.

Poor planning has both short- and long-term implications for
communities. In the short-term, it promotes developments that
contribute to greater traffic, reduced air quality and alienation of people
through designs that separate rather than integrate communities.
Longer-term, unsafe development creates liability for cities. Unfortunately, few communities have active organizations focused on presenting alternative
proposals to City Councils or Planning Commissions at the time projects
are approved for development or on educating less sophisticated cities of the
legal and other consequences of bad planning.

SUSTAINABLE NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Water, air, energy, and open space are finite natural resources on
which we all depend now and must preserve for the future. CURE
supports management approaches in which current resource needs are
equitably balanced with long-term preservation goals; and supports
outcomes that benefit all sectors of a community.

CURE has been active in supporting research and advocacy to ensure
conscientious water allocation, equitable water transfers, and
sustainable landscaping regulations to preserve water supplies. CURE
also works on issues of the air quality impacts of land use decisions,
such as urban sprawl's impact on traffic-based pollution, rural farm
fallowing regulations that increase dust and particulate matter
(leading to asthma and other respiratory diseases), and the impacts of
siting industrial projects near residential areas. In the energy sector, CURE
supports research and advocacy to promote renewable, less polluting
energy sources, including offshore liquid natural gas, thermal solar,
and geothermal development - as well as advocating for self-dependent
industrial and urban complexes that rely solely on power generation
"off the grid."

PROJECTS

CURE's projects each address one, or both, of CURE's major goals.
Please click on a link below to find out more about some of CURE's
projects.

Flood Plain Management
U.S.-Mexico Water Disputes
Water Transfers
Calexico Community Endowment
Responsible Housing For Immigrant Laborers
Support For Local Planning Decisions
Planning For Healthy Communities