Land Use

This report looks at the potential impacts autonomous vehicle deployment could have on parking demand and how that might impact urban development. The study focused on three distinct areas of San Francisco. The research found that, contrary to headlines about AV impacts on parking, achieving large reductions in parking demand based on AV deployment will not be easy. To achieve significant parking reductions, AVs would need to be shared (not privately owned), pooled (riders willing to pick up other passengers along the way), have widespread geographic deployment (across entire metropolitan areas), and would need to complement high-capacity transit. Without all or most of these factors, parking demand may only by marginally impacted by AV deployment. The study also found that if parking demand could be reduced, different areas of the city would see quite different results. While many areas in San Francisco would see minimal development impacts as parking is not currently a significant driver or limiter of development, more auto-dominated areas could see substantial impacts if parking demand could be reduced by more than 40%. This raises interesting questions of how these levels of parking demand reduction might impact more auto-dominated and suburban areas throughout the country. This research was funded by Waymo.

This report is an examination of parking, curb zones, and government service changes in the context of AVs. Given that there are very few actual AVs on the road, the analysis in this report is an attempt to project what we might see, using the current phenomenon as starting points. The report uses a mix of econometric modeling, cost accounting, and case studies to illustrate these projections.

How is the COVID-19 pandemic changing urban living? In this paper, we explore the landscape of COVID-19 disruptions to date on land use and real estate, urban design, building design, transportation, e-commerce and retail, and goods delivery. We also highlight the longer-term questions and potential ongoing impacts COVID-19 might have on the built environment.

Urbano has been developed by Cornell University and other organizations. This software has some special features like download geospatial data, import and aggregate data, lookup and modify metadata, routing in different modes, analyze amenities and streets, integrated cad workflow, etc. Also, is useful to quantify urban parameters like amenity demand, streetscore, amenityscore and walkscore. It has a friendly interface to visualize different urban planning parameters.

Make pedestrian ways, particularly sidewalks, first class members of an open data transportation network. The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project has made available extensive, user-contributed open data on transportation networks, providing the basis for many use cases and downstream activities, including rich analytics, travel route optimization, city planning, and disaster relief. Sidewalks in the built environment have generally been treated an addendum to streets, failing to serve people with limited mobility.

Townscaper is an experimental community simulation and town-building game where the user can draw a series of buildings to obtain a town and represent urban spaces.

This report details the current state of the North American industrial market in 2020 and its projected growth over the next couple years.

"This memorandum outlines the process, objectives, and findings of an analysis the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) engaged Economic & Planning Systems (EPS) to undertake regarding whether proposed density bonuses would create sufficient additional residual land value to compensate for newly-established regulatory requirements in Multi-Dwelling Unit zone districts."

This zoning amendment aims to prepare the City of Chandler, Arizona for changes in land use as a result of changes in transportation behavior resulting from an increase in ride sharing and autonomous vehicles.

This paper examines the relationship between ride-hailing and parking demand by looking at ride-hailing trips that otherwise would have needed parking.

This article questions the effects of parking minimums and policies on residential renters in the U.S. by analyzing a sample of rental housing units from the 2011 American Housing Survey.

Parking drives up the cost of development and puts the burden on tenants who purchase or rent housing in these developments. Most zoning codes and practices require generous parking supply, and tenants are forced to pay for parking regardless of if they are using it. This reduces housing affordability which has a disproportionate effect on lower-income households.

Ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft are reducing the need for parking, which negatively affects parking companies but is otherwise beneficial for cities.

This report studies curb use at five typical locations in Greater Downtown Seattle to understand how cities can effectively manage curb access.

This report gives a detailed analysis of the United States’ housing market, demographic drivers, homeownership, rental housing, and housing challenges for 2019.

This article identifies how changing emerging technologies and consumer behavior and priorities will influence retail. These trends include preferences for experiences over things, faster delivery options, and brand identity.

This article discusses what makes a retail experience meaningful. Executives in retail design, experience, and real estate agreed that the main elements of meaningful retail experience are localization, service, and shareability.

This report outlines the factors contributing to Millennial homeownership, explaining why their preferences differ from previous generations'.

This article provides a list of retail store closings including department stores, specialty retailers, grocery stores, and food service chains.

Nordstrom plans to open smaller stores in dense urban areas that have no inventory and instead have experiences and services such as a seamstress, a nail salon and a bar.

This article examines how consumer behavior in retail has shifted to a trend of making online purchases and picking them up in stores. It identifies the retailers that have been most successful with this trend and makes investment recommendations.

Large San Diego parking company Ace Parking has reported lower parking rates due to the increasing popularity of Uber and Lyft.

The closures of brick-and-mortar stores are causing towns in the U.S. to miss out on sales, income, and property taxes that local governments rely on for revenue.

The city of Chandler, Arizona is preparing for autonomous vehicles’ impact on parking by allowing developers to provide less parking if they provide accommodations for ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles.

Buffalo has become to first major city to completely remove its outdated minimum parking requirements citywide.

A study of five U.S. cities, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming was conducted to analyze how much land and money is being devoted to parking.

This article outlines a case study of Los Angeles parking requirements, studying whether parking requirements impact the amount and type of housing that is developed, particularly in housing developed in old vacant and commercial buildings.

The City of Houston removed its minimum parking requirements for property owners in east downtown and part of Midtown. Developers in those neighborhoods will now be able to decide how much parking is needed for businesses and residences.

Cities around the country are beginning to change their parking minimums in order to reduce vehicle dependency, lower construction costs, gain back valuable real estate and make urban areas more desirable.

A map locating cities that have removed laws requiring minimum parking. The map differentiates between cities that have completely eliminated minimums in at least one area of the city, removed or lowered minimums for certain uses, and cities that are discussing their minimum parking laws.

This article discusses regulations around land use and why careful implementation is important. The author studied how two areas of Los Angeles near rail stations developed housing under baseline land use regulations and found that developers were most sensitive to density restrictions and parking requirements.

In this book, Donald Shoup reports on the progress cities have made on the principles outlined in book The High Cost of Parking. Remove off-street parking requirements, charge the right prices for on-street parking and use that revenue towards improving public services.

Since John Bela and his collaborators installed the first temporary park on a parking space in San Francisco in 2005, Park(ing) Day has become a global event.

In Seattle, a suburban shopping center’s parking lot is being transformed into a new walkable neighborhood.

The city of Tainan, Taiwan has plans to demolish an abandoned mall and transform it into a public park.

Gas stations around the country have been in declines for the past couple decades due to shifting fuel sources away from gasoline and changing land value in cities.

As parking demand declines, some developers and designers are thinking about the long term uses of parking garages and designing them to be able to adapt to changing future land use needs.

An increasing number of architects, developers, and engineers are designing new parking garages that can be converted into other uses in the future if needed.

Gas stations can be tricky sites to redevelop because they are often contaminated. However, developers around New York have recognized the potential in their often desirable locations and converted them into a variety of uses such as shops, offices, housing and places for generating renewable energy.

The owners of a parking garage in downtown Boston have proposed constructing a 20-story tower on top of the existing parking structure.

Columbus Commons is a six-acre public park in downtown Columbus, Ohio that replaced a former shopping mall, and has transformed the downtown into a walkable community.

San Francisco’s emerging trend of transforming parking spots into “parklets” has sparked residents, businesses and nonprofits from around the city to come up with creative ways to turn parking into public space.

San Francisco’s “parklet” trend of transforming parking spots into small public spaces has mixed reviews among residents. Some people think that they are provide spaces for neighborhoods to come together, while some believe they exacerbate gentrification.

This website serves as a guide to how e-commerce has affected industrial real estate and building design.

One-day and same-day deliveries are causing companies to need warehouse space closer to the dense urban areas they are serving. However, this land is scarce, expensive and involves a long development process.

Amazon’s shipping network has been increasing rapidly over the past decade which has led to severe working conditions for their thousands of employees around the world, especially during events like “Prime Day.”

With the rise of e-commerce, Americans are demanding more deliveries. However, with declining warehouse availability, congested streets and limited curb access, the U.S.’s infrastructure may not be able to handle the increasing demand.

“Retailers and logistics firms are establishing warehouses closer to large urban centers to keep up with rising consumer demand for faster delivery of products ordered online.”

Logistics development company Prologis has built the first multi-story industrial warehouse in the U.S. just south of Seattle. Other multi-story warehouses have been planned or proposed in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles as growing e-commerce demands faster deliveries.

“This research examines office parking at a series of case study sites in suburban Southern California, identifying its impact on travel behavior, development density, development cost, and urban design.”

“Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems.”

“Using the number of square feet leased in similar center types, data shows a cyclic shift from more traditional tenants – such as apparel – to necessity-based and experiential tenants.”

“Industrial real estate analysts say that in recent years, an increasing number of massive distribution centers have popped up in response to growing e-commerce.”

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 3,000 new establishments classified as warehouse or storage were added between 2009 and 2018.

Many developers are trying to keep their malls relevant as traditional big-box retailers announce store closures. This articles highlights five examples of malls around the U.S. that have plans to reinvent themselves as mixed use and experiential destinations.

Many traditional malls have come up with creative ways to transform themselves to stay relevant in the 21st century and maintain sources of revenue as store closures rise. The typical malls with large atriums, department stores, food courts, and parking lots are finding new uses for these spaces including fitness centers, apartments, event spaces, markets, and mini theme parks.

2019 saw a record number of retail store closings, however the actual retail square footage was not proportionally impacted. This emerging trend is due to smaller tenants opening more stores and retailers shedding space in order to improve sales productivity.

This is an organization that advocates to end parking minimums in cities and towns. Included is an interactive map showing progress being made to remove parking minimums.

The impacts of e-commerce and changing consumer behaviors have caused brick and mortar retailers to shift their business models and reduce store square footage.

Traditionally massive big box store retailers like Target and Dollar General are opening smaller versions of their stores in urban areas and college campuses to bring in new customers that were previously too far away from their bigger suburban stores.

A smaller, “planning studio” style Ikea store is opening in Manhattan. This downtown NYC version acts solely as a showroom, without the warehouse of build-it-yourself products.

“Parking is expensive. We can break these costs down into two categories. One is the explicit fiscal costs of parking, to the provider and to the public. The other is the implicit opportunity cost of parking, which occupies land that could have been put to another beneficial use, and/or is often built at the expense of another beneficial activity.”

Credit Suisse predicts that as many as 25% of U.S. malls will close by 2022 due to the rise of e-commerce, discount chains, retail bankruptcies and store closings.

This article provides a complete list of all stores planning to close in 2019.

As people are relying more on ride-hailing services instead of driving themselves, cities are seeing a reduction in parking demand.

This framework provides an overview of the work Urbanism Next does and how we approach our research.

The goal of this white paper is to consider the impact of AVs on municipal budgets. AVs create a “potential rat’s nest of a budgeting challenge.” This paper seeks to begin the process of untangling that rat’s nest, and provide the foundation for future phases of the project that will consider potential additional revenue sources to fund the infrastructure changes that may come from the integration of AVs as well as land use planning implications.

Residential Preference: the social, environmental, and physical preferences that affect a person or family’s choice of residential location (for our purposes, in relation to the urban core and other amenities offered as a part of living in density) The introduction of autonomous vehicles and the comprehensive integration of E-commerce into the urban and suburban fabric will have a widespread effect on the factors the influence a resident’s location preference.

The invention of the internet introduced a new typology to the marketplace, the online retailer. Omnichannel retail strategies - where a retailer operates through both physical locations and online sales - have become a necessity in today’s market.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are a near future reality and the implications of AVs on city development and urban form, while potentially widespread and dramatic, are not well understood. This report describes the first order impacts, or the broad ways that the form and function of cities are already being impacted by forces of change including⁠—but not limited to⁠—AVs and related technologies.

Today, warehouses are transforming into massive “mega-distribution centers” located in increasingly suburban areas. However, the rapid delivery expectations of E-commerce will also perpetuate the need for a network of local, smaller-scale supply points.

Open source simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

Urban Footprint provides a cloud-based urban planning software built by urban planners and designers who truly understand planning needs. Service includes actionable data, scenario building, and multi-metric analysis.

Metro data enables deep analysis of cyclist and pedestrian activity including popular or avoided routes, peak commute times, intersection wait times, and origin/destination zones. Metro processes this data for compatibility with geographic information system (GIS) environments.

Urban population movement simulation tool for strategic planning.

Open source and free, web-based urban design platform.

Policy Guidebook for urban transportation and land use decision makers.

Open-access scenario planning package that allows users to analyze how their community's current growth pattern and future decisions impacting growth will impact a range of measures from public health, fiscal resiliency and environmental sustainability.

Bicycle and pedestrian counting technical equipment and consulting services.

Citilabs offers a number of analytical and visualization products to aid in modeling population movement, scenario planning, and transit operations.

BikeAble can use mapping technology to model the low-stress bike route options available from any origin to any destination. Doing this for a large number of origins and destinations allows us to aggregate the results to show not just how connected one household is to key destinations, but how well connected an entire community is.

Resources designed for people who will be conducting community engagement activities in the context of enhancing mobility and public space to co-create more vibrant, healthy, and equitable communities.

The American retail sector is undergoing a long-term structural shift away from small “mom-and-pop” stores and toward national chains. Retail establishments have gotten larger and more concentrated; the mass-market merchandisers of the later twentieth century continued a trend toward consolidation of the retail sector into national chains operating large stores that started before their widespread emergence. In the late twentieth century, Wal-Mart emerged as the world’s most important (and controversial) retailer. The evidence on Wal-Mart’s effects on retail employment suggests either mild positive or mild negative effects, but Wal-Mart’s effect on prices suggests increases in real income.

This policy paper focuses on the primary concept of the street as space that can be repurposed – real estate that can be allocated in similar or different ways than done currently. Cities generally refer to this publicly owned and regulated space from one side of the street to the other as the right of way (ROW). Our focus is on the centrality of the ROW in dictating many other community functions and values – transportation and otherwise. And our particular bias is to focus on the opportunities that AV technology is likely to create to rethink how the ROW is allocated, so that our communities can meet their substantial and unique environmental, social, and economic challenges.

Urban innovations company Sidewalk Labs and the Canadian government announced a partnership Tuesday to develop 750 acres along Toronto’s waterfront into what they envision as a high-tech living laboratory for solving urban problems. It would be the largest urban redevelopment project in North America.

This chapter estimates how minimum parking requirements increase the cost of constructing housing, office buildings, and shopping centers. It also explains proposed legislation to limit how much parking cities can require in transit-rich districts.

The article describes the trend of mall development strategy and how the now model of development is integrated into the new lifestyle and space of community.

A new era of shopping centers is upon us. They’re beginning to look and function less like traditional malls and more like lifestyle centers with a strong community vibe.

The storm clouds of sprawl addiction had been gathering for years, but it took the Meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession to make it clear just how damaging that addiction had been to the health of cities across the US and abroad. Sprawl has two really big things going for it, but three even bigger things now going against it which are poised to turn the tide against the pattern of sprawl.

As we build new developments, are we still short on parking? Parking minimums have created endless hot, asphalt deserts in our developments and now cities are working to reverse these laws.

This commentary discusses about how AVs have impact on the space such as parking and road safety, etc.

This report describes a shoppers trip and what the planner may be most interested in about it as well as street design and it's accommodation for all activities that may need to happen throughout the day.

"This paper explores the relationships between transportation, land use and taxation. It investigates how current land tax and regulatory practices affect the amount of land devoted to roads and parking facilities, and how this affects transport patterns. It discusses ways to measure the amount of land devoted to transport facilities, examine how this varies under different circumstances, estimate the value of this resource, evaluate how tax policies and regulations policies treat this land, and analyze whether current practices are optimal in terms of various economic and social objectives."

The main objective of this research project is to provide FDOT with information and guidance on how best to begin to prepare for a future in which AV technology first takes root and then takes over the market. The FSU Research Team is investigating the potential impacts of widespread adoption of AV technology on the transportation network and urban form for four key land use and transportation nodes that are vital to the welfare of the State of Florida: Downtown, Office/Medical/University Center, Urban Arterial, and Transit Neighborhood. To accomplish this, the FSU Research Team engaged one-hundred planners, engineers, industry professionals, and public officials in a facilitated visioning session at the 2015 Florida Automated Vehicle Summit (FAV Summit). During this session the research team gathered input on how AVs will impact our communities and how the built environment will need to adapt to accommodate AVs in the coming decades.

In the first year since Amazon bought Whole Foods, two large grocers are already beginning to suffer and make drastic cuts.

The rise of renting in the U.S. isn’t just about high housing prices, or preferences for city living, but about the flexibility to compete in today’s economy." This article examines the changes in trends of housing ownership versus renting.

This article explores the rate of retail store closures, its effects on employment, and the role of economy market forces on the changes.

"This paper provides a review of scenarios on these issues to date. Although some scenario studies provide useful insights about urban growth and change, very few consider detailed impacts of AVs on urban form, such as the density and mix of functions, the layout of urban development and the accessibility of locations, including the distance to transit."

This white paper will discuss the non-technological trends logistics managers much know and then will hone in on the technologies that will impact the logistics in 2018.