Using GIS for Economic Development
GIS is currently used in many municipalities to note and track infrastructure, population characteristics, planning and zoning changes, vacant land and physical characteristics needed for engineering and planning purposes. These uses reflect the original development of GIS as a land-planning tool to replace time-consuming overlays or sieve mapping.
GIS is rarely used for economic analysis of real estate or market trends. And yet, every
time we go to a city that desires a redeveloped downtown or a more vital urban economy,
we are asked to collect information on exactly these subjects because they are vital to
understanding the potential for reaching desired goals. We then ask the city to give us
records: vacant land inventory; square feet of buildings and intensity of development;
square feet of commercial, residential and other uses with land and improvement values;
units of residential (not the same as square feet); retail sales by category; office uses by
category; and so on. The point here is that real estate is valued and used according to its
location and, as consultants we typically have to ask the city or someone in the area for
this information and find a way to understand the dynamics of market by location. Since
GIS is created specifically to show locational data it should be among the most powerful
tools in a city’s attempt to understand its own market opportunities and potential for
development.
When a city does not include valuable economic data in its GIS system, tedious,
expensive dog work is necessary. As an example, retail sales need to be correlated with
square feet of retail space to yield a meaningful analysis of local retail performance. If
the data is not in the database, someone has to go out and collect it by walking through
every retail establishment in town. Needless to say, we would rather not do that—it is a
very expensive undertaking to achieve a small but nonetheless very important gauge of
economic performance that would take only a few minutes with a complete database.
At the risk of greatly lessening our potential fees for being number-crunching drudges
(please help us reduce those), we would make the modest suggestion that since cities
usually have the data necessary or the mechanisms in place to collect it, they should
include it in the system so that we can do what any consultant would rather do: efficiently
use our expertise to assist in achieving community goals and creating vital downtowns
and neighborhoods.
How Do You Get the Information
Most cities already have the data they need, it is just dispersed between various offices.
Here are some ideas of who knows what, and which information should be collected.
Planning Department
The planning department has a good start on the data in its own office:
• Zoning boundaries
• Tax lot zoning
• Current Land Use
• Any overlays or long-range plans applying to the tax lot
• Special taxing, incentive or other districts applying to the tax lot
• Results of approvals that fit into data categories such as changes in zoning,
numeric enumeration of the building program approved (units, square feet of
retail, etc.), conditional use changes, etc.
• Building footprints- These can be determined from aerial photography and can
gauge site coverage and building floors when correlated with assessor’s data on
total building square feet.
Business Licensing
Information about business licenses is useful to understand what types and how many
businesses are in town, as well as indications of business health. Useful information to
be collected includes:
• Leasing information – square feet, ground floor or upper floor lease, lease rate
• Categorize business to allow meaningful differentiation between common types
such as those seen in consumer spending reports
• Sales Information – upon renewal of business license get annual gross sales to
correlate with square feet leased
County (or City) Assessor
This office typically has data on land and improvement market value, building square
feet, lot square feet, land use, public or private ownership (the actual names of private
owners are not important for the purposes of collating economic data), owner location
(which is useful to know how many absentee landlords there are).
Recorder’s Office
Has data on property: age of structure (year built), last property sale date and amount
paid.
Permitting Office
The building and permitting office has data on numbers of units created or demolished by
address (residential) or square feet created or demolished (commercial), and last time of
building renovation and the extent or cost of renovation.
Post Office
Correlating postal addresses to tax parcels allow the estimation of the number of units on
any lot.
Utility Records
Like the postal information, address matching of residential units to apartment buildings
from utility records may allow an estimate of number of residential units.
Real Estate Multiple Listing Information
The city should have access to this data that shows the sales pricing for real estate and
allows trending over multiple years to understand where change in markets is taking
place.
On-going data collection
If time and staff are available, it is useful to measure progress and track issues by
conducting an annual survey of building owners that covers: vacancy, average rental rate
per square foot, expenses per square foot (in many places this is done by BOMA), and in
the case of housing whether the units are dedicated to a particular demographic group
such as seniors students, low-income etc.
Assemble the Information
The tax lot is the most basic unit of analysis. All information, whether held in a single or
multiple database layers should have an id number (usually the tax lot id) that can be used
to identify the tax lot and correlate the different characteristics for each tax lot.
What You Can Do with the Information
Once the data is assembled in a GIS database, it becomes a powerful tool that can help
provide:
Demographic Analysis
Housing Analysis
Retail Sector Health
Office Sector Health
Industrial Sector Health
Under-use and Redevelopment Potential
Building Obsolescence
Impact of Redevelopment
Impact of Policy, Planning Changes
Tracking Economic Indicators
Impact of zoning/land-uses on adjacent zones/uses
These types of analysis are essential to planning for:
Redevelopment
Downtowns
Neighborhood Planning
Corridor Redevelopment
Infill Development
-E. Starkie
Friday, November 18, 2005