Economic Development Recovery and Resiliency Playbook - Flipbook - Page 51
Zoning and Land Use Designations
The zoning and land use designations provide a more specific framework for how various land parcels can and cannot be used.
When addressing economic resiliency, these policies need to be viewed in terms of which public policy objective they meet for
the community and whether it potentially impedes the type of business development that a regional market can support and/or
meets business needs. It is important to consider which, if any, requirements for prospective development would undermine the
success of the eventual development or make it infeasible; for example, parking mandates systematically raise the price of new
development and perhaps should be compared with alternative land use and transportation approaches that emphasize other
modes of travel.
Industry and Economic Information
In addition to local information, industry and economic reports that focus more on national and international trends can
provide important context for what has happened and what potentially could happen at the local level. The research divisions
for consulting organizations such as Moody’s Analytics, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Deloitte publish publicly accessible
industry-focused reports that report on various topics about specific industries. This includes recent trends as well as the future
outlook for those sectors. IBISWorld is another research firm that produces industry reports for purchase.61
In addition, site selection-focused publications such as Site Selection, Area Development, Expansion Solutions, and Business
Facilities provide information on the site development criteria that businesses in diferent industries evaluate. This information
also looks at how industry trends afect space utilization. All of these tools take a big-picture approach to the type of business
development that a community might be able to support.
Location-Based Data
Economic base analysis typically focuses on industries or clusters. However, when addressing economic recovery, locationbased data has emerged as another important tool for communities to use in identifying the composition of their businesses
and other measures at more of a neighborhood or district level.
Open data portals. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other location-based data tools have greatly advanced in recent
years. Public agencies have not only increased their own internal usage of location-based applications, but they have also made
a lot of their information available to the general public through the use of open data portals. This data varies considerably by
jurisdiction but can include a broad range of indicators, including demographic information, transportation data, zoning, vacant
land, population, housing, projected growth, number of jobs, and numerous other data points.
These portals are linked to web-based applications that can display the information and allow users to create custom maps
and other visualizations. The information can also be downloaded and used by stand-alone mapping applications like ArcGIS or
open mapping platforms such as Google Earth.
COGs use portals to make much of their regional data available; for example, the Southern California Association of
Governments (SCAG) has an open data portal that includes a variety of items such as land use data, various index scores,
socioeconomic data, COVID-19 vulnerability indicators, environmental justice areas, and transportation analysis zones.62 Users
can either use the web-based mapping application or download the data for their own analysis.
Economic Development Takeaway
Location-based data can serve as an important bridge toward identifying the extent
to which changes to the economic base disproportionately impact diverse groups of
residents and businesses.
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https://www.ibisworld.com/
https://gisdata-scag.opendata.arcgis.com/search?groupIds=57ba7b0e494f400ebd1abb89ccee201f
Understanding Your Economic Base Through Cluster Analysis, Business Size, and Supply Chain
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