Forecasting with Paint The Town
In simple terms, the Paint the Town project aims to forecast future levels of population, employment, and households in the Kansas City region to the year 2030.
To do this, MARC begins with its regional economic model, REMI, to forecast the population and employment growth of the Kansas City Metropolitan area as whole from 2000 to 2030. Paint the Town is then used to allocate that growth around the region by predicting the location of future development, and assigning a land-use type to each area developed. The future land use is either based on local plans or an alternate future land use scenario.
Parcel data is used to determine which areas are available for development, which areas are currently developed, and which are protected or non-developable — such as parks or floodplain. This information, plus the planned future land use and other information have been merged into a new dataset which has simpler (and fewer) polygons than parcel data, yet retains much of the detailed land use information from the original parcel data. (See Data Development.)
The Paint the Town software tool selects areas to develop in each decade, based on:
- Specific input from local planners
- Values from a development probability index created by MARC under the direction of the Technical Forecast Committee.
The index is an empirically calibrated model of development probability, based on historical development patterns and several factors related to the location of development, such as location of roads and employment.
For each polygon selected to develop in a particular decade, the future land-use type for that polygon is filled with a “paint chip” that has associated with it a density level and other characteristics that predict the number of people, households, or jobs expected to live and/or work there.
As polygons are chosen to develop, paint chips are applied and the results of “painting the town” are then aggregated by transportation analysis zone (TAZ). This process is completed for both the currently-planned future land use, and for at least one alternative land use scenario.