City Planning Matters

Plans can fail for a number of reasons, but in today's episode we highlight the top five causes of planning efforts failing to make it across the finish line.

In this episode, we look at how the dollars and cents of development can sometimes result in bad planning. Plus, we discuss opportunities for the land value tax and how this can result in better outcomes.

Most people traditionally think of parking being an issue in their City because they believe there isn't enough. The truth is that your City does have a parking problem; there is too much of it. In this week's episode, we discuss ways to visualize the oversupply of parking in your City and some of the challenges having too much parking creates.

In this episode, we discuss Vision Zero and how to implement the program successfully.

Examining how cities develop service area boundaries and discussion of a new, data-driven approach to doing so. By using this methodology, cities can identify and answer the question of when it comes to city facilities, who do you serve?

Do walkable places result in people actually walking? Check out the Storymap I created for this episode to see the analysis and resources for what was discussed in today's episode.

Many cities struggle to have functional public transit systems. While some blame rests with the agencies on the operations side, many times it’s the lack of transit-supportive policies that doom transit. In this episode, we will look at policies your city can change to help make your transit ridership increase.

In this week's episode, we discuss missing middle housing (like duplexes, triplexes and quads) and why housing choice is important to your City. While City's like Minneapolis and Berkeley make headlines for their so-called ban on single family housing, we cover intermediate steps you can take in the interim.

Traditional measures of equity typically consider only a fraction of person's day, as they rarely examine things other than where people live. In this week's episode, we look at how mobile location data can unlock and reveal larger patterns of equity or inequality by looking at where people shop, work and socialize.  In the episode, we discuss a methodology for how you can examine this same issue for your City. A link to the results of my analysis are below. The El Paso Equity Atlas is available here: https://arcg.is/11HKjr

Walkability is a nebulous term to that means lots of things to different people. In today's episode, we examine whether walkability matters in terms of the price people are willing to pay for housing. Using data from real estate website such as Zillow and Redfin and combining it with walkability metrics from Walkscore, you can examine the correlation between walkability and sales data. Interested in learning more? Leave leave me a message or contact me on anchor.fm/planning.