Housing and Equity Tools
The Envision Tomorrow suite of planning tools includes models that analyze housing supply and demand, and track potential displacement of affordable housing. These tools can track housing and equity issues at a regional, local, or site-by-site basis. The Envision Tomorrow Balanced Housing Model allows users to highlight mismatches between supply and demand for different housing types and provides a set of housing targets based on a user-provided population forecast. The Corridor Housing Preservation Tool tracks development pressure and potential loss of affordable housing within transit-served corridors. At the site-level, the versatile Prototype Builder allows users to model affordable housing schemes and test various types of public financing.
BALANCED HOUSING MODEL
The Balanced Housing Model is used to analyze a community’s existing housing supply, including the matches and mismatches by age, household income and tenure (rental or owner-occupied). It is also used to conduct a capacity analysis of development potential and a forecast of future age and income cohorts. Using this information, the model can be used to create a series of policy and strategic recommendations for a balanced, sustainable future housing supply along with targeted goals that can be used to determine a community’s future progress in implementing its plan.
Corridor Housing Preservation Tool
As fast growing cities attempt to channel growth to transit corridors, redevelopment has the potential to displace transit-dependent low-income renters. A new district-scale metric developed allows cities to prioritize sites for rental housing preservation. The metric allows cities to compare corridor neighborhoods in terms of development pressure, potential for displacement of renters and location-based benefits to renters of remaining. It was developed for Austin, Texas, under a HUD Sustainable Communities research grant and was designed to be replicable in peer cities.