@Parker307 We wholeheartedly agree. But the point of this presentation was to demonstrate that the Government was accepting "bad math" on the measurements that they were in control of. I think that was the most mind-blowing thing to me, is that here is a Government that adopted policies on capturing some of the impact of development, then turned around and didn't do the math on what was submitted. And it was even more flummoxing that they fought against our math as if it were fictionalized. When you have a government acting that belligerently against their own policies; getting them to see the value of the ecosystem is challenging (to say the least). Or put another way; if they had adopted an impact fee to "maintain biodiversity in the ecosystem", it is clear from this example that this government has no interest in enforcing that policy. I think that is the bigger lesson for the audience, in that we have to be mindful and double check on the math that the government is using to ensure that it meets the goals of the policy. In this case, the impact fee was supposed to ensure that the developments were "net neutral", and didn't impose on costs to citizens. We proved that that was false. The County still moved forward. If we can't get our leaders to follow policies that they create, they're certainly not going to uphold social, health, and environmental benefits. With that said, I do recommend the book "Design With Nature" by Ian McHarg. He laid out the financial argument for environmental protection brilliantly. Sadly, we forgot a lot of what he laid out. My favorite quote of his is "the man on the moon will know the value of a gallon of oxygen!" as a metaphor for the consequences for environmental degradation.

@@josephminicozzi3830 I get that you have to make a case to policymakers and numbers are a solid way to attempt to do that. I In my comment I was latching onto something related to a thing I have been thinking about. That is how does nature and the environment fit into urbanism. I have an interest in nature(most often birding) and I also have an interest in urbanism. Trying to fit these things together in my head is difficult. I have done some google searches - "urbanism and the environment" "urbanism and nature" but I have found nothing along the lines that I was looking for. The way it is thought of usually is that we have preserved natural areas far away and then city areas with people. But I think that people should be in touch with nature. If people are cut off from the natural world they might be less likely to care about it. When I listen to Chuck Marohn and the NJB video about Urban3 it's all about economics, creating economic value. How to urban parks fit into that? naturalist parks, not ecologically bereft ball fields. Central Park in NYC is one example where it works. There quite a few folks I follow posting amazing pictures of many types of birds in Central Park But in general I get the sense that if you want to have parks then the urbanists would say you are a NIMBY and against housing. Here in Northern Virginia I think some of the most passionate opposition to infill development is because the development is taking away a patch of forest that has been de facto green space. The historical promise of the suburbs is that you get to live in a spread out park type environment. If that is taken away for added density then more official greenspace might should be added. When I listened to Jeff Specks book he talked about how designers got together with town leaders in places to work on making more walkable places. I wondered, what would be different if there was also an ecologist in the room too. Wow that book is from 1969!

Quantifying the value of wildlife is not easy. Value in this case comes is defined by people, the more people, the more economic activity. Densification means using the land more efficiently in the sense that it can provide more value - shelter and economic activity per land area. It is also more value relative to the costs of infrastructure and government services. Being wise about urban policy not only saves money, energy, produces more value, due to economies of scale. But it also allows us to conserve more land for that other kind of value which is natural spaces.

The current market prices of denser, more walkable parts laces would say otherwise. Clearly in high demand.

@@JoseppiAJ Inner city areas have always been more expensive, that is nothing new. "Mixed Use" development in suburbia is utterly moronic.

@@andrewmills4861 What is moronic about legalizing neighborhood corner stores in single family neighborhoods?

Density is affordable because you're able to spread the cost of infrastructure among more people. It can often also be desirable by making convenient commercial amenities more economically viable due to the immediately local populace being high enough to sustain those businesses. But that's only possible with traditional mixed use development.

@@JoseppiAJ No issue with that but they just can't compete against the cheaper prices supermarkets provide.

Well, the answer is quite simple: build transit infrastructure and all problems of traffic congestion will gone

Traffic is coming from suburbanites forced to drive, not from urbanites. Mixed use, walkable downtowns with transportation reduce traffic by removing people from motor vehicles. Miami’s increasing congestion is a classic case of urban sprawl caused by structural forces that promote car dependency and low density. Unique to Miami is how the metro area hasn’t expanded Tri-Rail, Metrorail, Metromover, Metrobus or build light rail to account for the doubling of its 1985 population.

Traffic and congestion primarily come from people driving private vehicles. In a dense city, the ratio of car owners to non car owners is less. Those non car owners aren't creating congestion. Even car owners living within the city use their cars much much less than people in the suburbs or rural area. That being said, the better the public transit infrastructure, the better the bike lane network, the less congestion there will be. Its called the Downs-Thompson paradox. HongKong, London, Singapore, Tokyo, NYC are incredibly dense cities where people have no issues getting around and accomplishing their daily tasks. The majority of the traffic in the city is actually from people living outside of the city driving in.

If you know anything about American urban planning, you should know this is actually an extremely difficult thing for the country to understand…

I don't see why they couldn't be set up that way. Though, depending on securities laws, there may be a problem in how it was set up. But if it went together more like a real estate development fund, the way a developer builds investment funds for a development; I don't think it'd be a problem. But this is more a question that is in a real estate attorney's lane, than our lane of conceptualizing valuation. But this is a great question to ask, and I'll send it on so to some folks.

Depends on the City, but for those that really expanded in the 60's-70's, yes. But do note Edmonds' 30 years beyond the 70's. It's going to be super-painful.

@@josephminicozzi3830 Thank you very interesting. Do you have any educated timeline when the Country as a whole might be forced to make some changes?

It depends. Muni-bonds have a lot of special status (tax free, lower interest rates...), so they can be bailed out with special federal-backed revolving credit lines. However, if the local govs are known to have poor financial practices (Louisiana), then they are more likely to go belly-up. Strong Towns could be a good resource to look this matter up.

And that's just one window!

We do a lot of that. I wrote a blog post about it back in 2010ish (I can't find that piece) but I did find this from 2015. www.urbanthree.com/blog/mchard-revisited/ Also, this is worth watching all the way through, though the first 5 minutes are awful until Mcharg shows up. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/a9Ryec5yt6m0YH0.html

It depends on the models we're doing, but for a regular property tax modeling, the answer would be "no" because they are non-taxable. This isn't to say that they don't have merit or value per se, but more to show the cash flow of taxable properties.

That's not a simple thing to answer, as it depends on the city and if they charge for parking.

From what I've researched, parking is generally a tax drain. It's just a plot of land saved for cars and even if it's paid parking it doesn't make up for the cost of it's existence. If you have low density population, road side parking is ok because there's not enough people/ traffic to cause any congestion. As the population grows, road side parking becomes irrelevant. It can only park so many cars. That's where transit comes in.

I’ve always wondered why parking is free at night and on weekends in downtown areas where these are the most popular times.

Kindly thanks Joe!

Hello Gorky. Joe here. If you go to about minute 1:02:00, you'll see a straight assessment of the inequity of impact fees in how they're practiced in Palm Beach County. Basically, the money is generated in areas that already have infrastructure and it is exported out to the burbs to pay for infrastructure that they can't afford in the first place. Also, if you continue from there, you'll see a straight comparison of 88 houses in South Bend done as a straight analysis (not a per acre) and it shows how low density costs more. This isn't about "packing people in" as both examples are single family housing. With regard to "profit", I would never argue that governments should profit from anything. The same way I wouldn't argue that an orphanage should make a profit. But I think you and I would agree that the orphanage shouldn't lose money on every transaction and bleed out financially. Well, the same is true for cities. Our whole thesis is that citizens should "see the money" in a geospatial model so we can see what is happening with those transactions.

mixed-use is kind of this i think? but i dont think its possible everywhere, particularly in already existing buildings and sections of infrastructure

Not saying it's not possible, but you would definitely incur a lot of pushback from NIMBYs, and ultimately people would in the suburbs would still be located far away from where the majority of services are located.

Cities generally pay higher salaries and have services for businesses. It is easier to provide those services to a company when it is near other companies with similar needs which lowers costs which increases funds available for salaries. They are willing to pay higher salaries because there is a concentration of jobs that compete for workers which is attractive to workers. Cities have infrastructure to support shipping goods to other population centers, as well as shipping people for business trips as well as many more customers. Suburban mixed use is good, but those businesses will have less demand in the suburbs because of the lower density. Transit oriented development can help to have workers commute downtown for work, but still get food in their dense housing.

We'd love to, but they haven't hired us yet. However, we are doing work in Dickenson, TX, which is close.

That's a pretty wide question, so let me take a crack. Practically speaking, its less people per infrastructure, so it makes cities cheaper to manage.

@@josephminicozzi3830 Here is my understanding of the covid situation. We want to understand whether population density correlates with covid cases (per 1000). We plot all cities we have on a graph, with x axis being population density and y axis being covid cases per 1000. Then we run a linear regression, and if the slope is positive, then denser cities are worse for covid. If the slope is big, then they are much worse. It would make sense to divide one by another (covid per 1000 by density) to tell whether New York is above some barrier. If it is, then it's a bad city. But it's not the same as covid cases per density -- it's covid cases per 1000 per density.

Sorry for the jargon. TIF = Tax Increment Financing. There are multiple ways to use it, one is to cap taxes in a district, and leverage future tax gains to finance projects today. So a builder could build those 18 houses, but you preserve the properties at current tax value for 15 or 20 years, and the builder or home-owner realizes a considerable tax benefit over that term, as the land will be taxed as if it were a vacant lot. There are lots of tools available, and this is one of them.

@@josephminicozzi3830 So the current council gets to be Santa Claus, and leave future financial difficulties to future elected officials. Got it.

@@billsmith5109 Well, no. TIF was just one option. If you have constructive solutions, please share.

Virtual Presentation Assistant.

or Artist

Sorry about the lingo. "Value Per Acre" is VPA.

He linked this one in a comment, guess the video name seemed a bit dry. 😅

Thats admirable

nice, more power to you. Hope you find what you're looking for

The models are done in Esri software and are built within that software. The images are from the "value/acre" layer. That code is inside the Esri software, but it's basically taking the parcel area and dividing the value into it. The harder aspect is that any county data will have a bunch of weirdness going on. And there's not code to solve that. So there's no real way to automate the models due to standards of assessor practice. We'd like to change some of that, but that's a big battle. But if you know what models you want to look at, we may be able to export them.

Me too!

Indeed! It's sad to see happen, especially considering what happened to the rest of the state of FL.