FISCAL IMPACT TOOL AND SMART LOCATION DATABASE UPDATE

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

When assessing potential land developments, local governments and federal facility real estate advisors can benefit from access to tools that enrich their understanding of the holistic costs associated with development projects and alternative sites. Since 2012, Renaissance has been developing and improving the EPA’s data and tools available for scenario planning. We developed version 2 of the Smart Location Database (SLD), a nationwide assessment of the five “D” variables – density, diversity, design, distance to transit, and destination accessibility – that describe the built environment. The SLD summarizes these variables for every census block group in the United States. In turn, these summaries can be used to compare location and transportation efficiency of various places and inform quick-response scenario planning tools like the Smart Location Calculator (SLC).

In 2021, Renaissance built upon our previous efforts with the SLD to develop a new fiscal impact tool and provide technical assistance to beta test tool elements for this joint project between the EPA and the US General Services Administration (GSA). Incorporating multiple datasets, we conducted an analysis quantifying jobs, population, and the types and amounts of roadway facilities available in microzones for every core-based statistical area (CBSA) in the US. The resulting data were used to develop a methodology that EPA and their partners can use to help communities better understand local infrastructure costs – including road, water, and wastewater systems – associated with new facilities and alternative development sites.

Renaissance also completed an update to the SLD’s companion dataset, Access to Jobs and Workers via Transit (AJWT). We updated the AJWT to reflect expanded and newly available data, as well as stratify transit accessibility to jobs, workforce, and residents, with breakdowns across employment industries, age, race, ethnicity, income, disability, status, linguistic isolation, and host of other demographic categories.

We also provided estimates of transit access across multiple time bands to give analysts and researchers rich detail and flexibility in how they use the AJWT to understand the magnitude and equity of transit access. Together with the SLD, SLC, and fiscal impact tool, the AJWT provides planners and federal facility real estate advisors with resources to understand key characteristics of development sites and prospective incidental costs associated with induced travel, infrastructure costs, and equitable transit access. Finally, we generated summary statistics of transit access at the county and CBSA levels to provide easy comparisons of the access available across the country.

We concluded the project with a technical assistance effort, in which we led virtual workshops with EPA and the Capital Region Planning Commission in Louisiana. These workshops consisted of a discussion of the tools, its potential uses, relevant features, and the best timing for tool usage by decision makers. This stage of the project enabled engagement at the local level to further knowledge exchange and provide hands on support to communities seeking to implement smart growth approaches.