Unpublished Paper
Decision Modeling for Housing and Community Development: A Methodology for Evidence-Based Urban and Regional Planning
Urban planning and community development
(2017)
Abstract
Urban community development corporations and other local institutions routinely face challenging problems in housing and economic development that require substantial expertise in data analytics and decision modeling. Recent research, inspired by local responses to the housing foreclosure crisis, and developed in cooperation with Boston-area CDCs, has resulted in a collection of applications that can assist CDCs and similar organizations to design local interventions for acquisition and redevelopment of housing. This paper describes these applications. The first of these is values and objective design, i.e. the process of identifying decision opportunities. The second of these is data analytics, or the process of identifying, collecting, and analyzing data to generate management, policy or planning insight. The third of these applications is decision modeling, or the process of formulating and solving problems that capture important aspects of operation and strategy design in order to generate insights regarding specific courses of action to take that represent improvements over the status quo. Finally, I demonstrate how empirical problem-solving, based on these applications, and inspired by the ‘big data’ and ‘smart city’ movements, have the potential to generate valuable insights in other areas of housing and community development.
Keywords
- Data analytics,
- decision modeling,
- foreclosed housing,
- geographic information systems,
- planning support systems
Disciplines
Publication Date
August 25, 2017
Comments
Presented at 56th Annual Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, November 3, 2016; under review at Planning Practice and Research
Citation Information
Michael P Johnson. "Decision Modeling for Housing and Community Development: A Methodology for Evidence-Based Urban and Regional Planning" Urban planning and community development (2017) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/michael_johnson/72/