Across the Portland area, cities and counties are trying to create more walkable neighborhoods and vibrant downtowns.
But often it's difficult for communities to understand what their visions could look like when their plans come to fruition. Beyond pretty pictures, city planners want a way to make sure their visions are grounded in real estate market realities.
A workshop at Metro presented Envision Tomorrow – a software tool that does just that – with results in the click of a button.
About 70 planners from local, state and federal agencies came to the June 12 workshop to learn about Envision Tomorrow, an open-sourced software tool that can help them develop and understand the feasibility and effects of their local land use plans. Envision Tomorrow allows planners to design and test land use patterns, from redevelopment along a single street to regionwide plans across a metropolitan area. Test results can illustrate the impact of future visions on a variety of factors, including housing affordability, public transit use and energy consumption.
Users start with prototypes of individual buildings, group them into development types that represent a mix of buildings, streets, parks and other urban features and then virtually paint them onto city maps. Examples could include main streets, transit-oriented developments and office parks. With changes happening block by block, planners can use video simulations with separate software to show what the plan could look like.
"It's about being able to model future conditions and compare different scenarios," said John Fregonese, of Fregonese Associates, the Portland firm that developed the software.
At the workshop, Fregonese clicked through an example of a potential apartment building. Add retail to the building, see how the profit margin goes up because of higher retail rental rates. Need a 12 percent profit margin? That will require charging apartment rents of $1.27 a square foot.
With a simple spreadsheet, planners and real estate pros can customize the assumptions to make sure they're realistic.
"That's a really cool part of this – you can refine it to meet your local conditions," said Leila Aman, a Metro planner who helped customize the tool for the Portland metropolitan area.
Based on software developed at Metro in the early 1990s, when Fregonese was Metro's planning director, Envision Tomorrow has been used by Fregonese's firm in cities across the country and in the local area. Locally the tool was used to develop the Beaverton Civic Plan, McLoughlin Area Plan, and the Portland Plan.
Now open source and free to the public, Metro is using the tool to help evaluate different land use options for the region's analysis of carbon emissions from transportation. The focus of the tool is helping communities realize their own goals for how they want to grow, said Robin McArthur, director of Planning and Development for Metro.
"It really is about what you want to have in your downtowns and main streets."