Our work focuses on

• Zoning Code Audits

• Policy Sensitivity Testing

• Feasibility Analysis

• Redevelopment Parcel candidates

• Development Simulations

• Yield Projections

Zoning Code Audit

Approach

Neighborhood Workshop has the ability to directly analyze a range of development types in order to quantify effects of policy and code changes on both the physical and the financial viability of development. The code audit approach includes modeling conceptual development projects, physically and financially, based on inputs and local insights from staff, housing professionals, business owners, and developer interviews.

Auditing the commercial, residential, and mixed-use zones in the compact neighborhood areas of your community will help to understand the opportunities and challenges of each as they relate to desired development outcomes.

Recommended changes are based on achieving community goals of increasing housing affordability, neighborhood amenities, and compatible building types.

Sensitivity Testing

Measuring Results

The process to achieve suggested recommendations includes modeling locally calibrated Middle Housing building types and then measuring outcomes through a process called ‘sensitivity testing’.

Sensitivity testing is taking a zone standard and adjusting it while holding all other standards constant in order to measure its relative effect on physical and financial outcomes. After each of the standards are tested in isolation, they are layered in cumulatively and also measured.

Yield Projections

Measuring Scenarios Across a Geography

This exercise often accompanies exploring build-out scenarios for a small area to neighborhood scale master-planning exercises. Often working alongside a design team, this approach analyzes and informs the overall design as it relates to the market study and absorption rates.

A Yield Projection builds detailed development prototypes and places them in the landscape, according to the master plan, to measure aggregated outcomes such as total square feet by development type, number of new residents, number of new jobs, levels of affordability, and new municipal value per acre. Understanding any newly created value per acre measures the public Return on Investment and time horizon of cost recovery should any public expenditures be made.