Using Data for Better City Planning

All right, TGIF. Welcome to In Case You Missed It, GovTech's government technology news roundup, where we're gonna take a look at some of the biggest GovTech news from the past week and give you our thoughts on what it means for government citizens in the market. I'm Dustin Haisler, joined again by Joe Morris and Jed Presgrove. The gang is all back together today, and today we're joined by our special guest, founder and CEO of State of Place, Dr. Mariela Afonso. Now, before we bring out Mariela, let's talk about some of the hottest news that came out this week, and that is one of the biggest features that I love to look at that GovTech releases each year, And that is the Top 25 Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers of Technology for 2022. And this is an annual curation from Government Technology of, you know, 25 individuals across the country that are using technology and not just using it innovatively, but they're really radically leveraging technology, new processes, and innovations to reimagine what's possible in government. I was fortunate enough to be an honoree in 2009 when I was still in government, so it's great to see the class of 2022 and some amazing individuals here. You know, one that stood out to me this year was Tom Lynch. He's someone that has been involved in a lot of different things in the market. He's the CIO of Cook County, Illinois, and has really done some incredible work with reimagining the way that services are delivered. And the great thing about this feature is you can dive into each of these individuals and kind of see their story and learn a little bit more about how they've approached, you know, their respective roles and some of the work that they've been doing. So it's a great kind of way to get to know some of these individuals. Joe, who caught your attention this year?

Well, the whole group is great, right, Dustin? I love it for the same reasons that you do, the opportunity to shine a light on public sector leaders that are, that are really advancing the agenda of digital government across, across the nation. But the one that stood out to me was one of our recent guests. Just a couple episodes ago, we had Lawrence Sanders and Todd Partin on from the Tennessee Diversity and Inclusion Council chairs. They're 2 phenomenal gentlemen who really led the charge. 2 friends that kind of came together and realized there was an opportunity to, you know, increase diversity and inclusion in technology organizations within their state, but now are leading as an example for others to follow. 2 wonderful people. It's absolutely worth going back and checking out the episode about 3 episodes ago with both of them.

We'll make sure to put that in the show notes. And Jed, I know many of these individuals you've talked to over the last year as well. Who made— who stood out to you in this list this year?

Well, yeah, there were definitely, uh, some, some big names here. I mean, earlier I was thinking about John Quinn, the CIO of Vermont. He's done so much for his state over the past few years. But as Joe said, everyone is definitely worthy of a discussion here. The one I wanted to highlight is Brandon Presley, the Commissioner of the Northern District of the Mississippi Public Service Commission. And what's so incredible about his story is that, well, first of all, it's about broadband, you know, one of my main interests. And essentially, Brandon Presley spearheaded a grassroots movement to get legislation passed in Mississippi a few years ago to make it legal for electric cooperatives to offer broadband, but on one stipulation: if they offer broadband, they have to offer it to all of their customers. And so it's just incredible that this guy, this guy was able to get this movement started. And now there are places in Mississippi, very, very remote places that have much better internet speeds than certain towns and cities in the state. And I actually experienced that myself. I went to my friend's house in a place, very rural area outside of Tupelo, Mississippi. And his cellular phone service is actually awful out there, just absolutely terrible. But the Wi-Fi was incredible because of the fiber infrastructure that was built by the cooperative in his area. And again, that wouldn't have happened, wouldn't have ever happened if not for that bill. And I don't think that bill would have happened if not for Brandon Presley. So that, that was the one that really stuck out to me. And I wrote this piece right here, and I encourage you to read it as well as all the other ones.

Yeah, I think such a great, great profile. And there's definitely, you know, some amazing individuals in here like Linda with the City of San Francisco and, you know, many others. So definitely I encourage you to check that out at govtech.com/top-25, or you can view it on the GovTech homepage. But now let's move into our featured guest, Dr. Mariela Afonso. She holds a PhD in urban planning from UC Irvine and has spent more than 2 decades studying the intersection, no pun intended there, of urban design and behavior. In other words, she looks at how our environment affects our behavior, perceptions, and decisions. She's also a Fulbright Scholar, a research professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and the CEO and founder of State of Place. We're so excited to have her join us for our show today. Welcome.

Hi, thank you so much for having me. Love that intro.

Yeah, it's so great to have you on. So maybe just to kind of set the stage, tell us a little bit about yourself and what got you interested in urban design and why you started State of Place.

Yeah.

So anytime somebody asks me about why I do what I do, I always talk about where I grew up, which is Miami. And when I say Miami, I always have to start with a caveat. It's not like Miami Vice Miami. It's not South Beach Miami. It's like the real Miami, the part that was really auto-dominated. And for me, living especially in the lower to middle income area in Miami shaped every single aspect of my life, you know, down to the fact that we lived in a lower tax area, which meant that our public schools were not as well funded, which meant that my mom, who had like struggled on secretary salary, she was a single mom, you know, had to put me into private school, which meant that it was like the opposite direction of where she worked. So my whole life was spent in this, in a car. And I just understood that so much of the struggles that my family and I had were tied to kind of the lack of the built environment amenities that were available to us. I wouldn't have put it that way when I was, you know, being 9, schlepped around or anything. But, you know, also when I was 15, a friend of mine unfortunately was killed while she was crossing a 6-lane road that was, you know, basically a highway that was pretending to be a city street. Excuse me. And, you know, that really impacted me because it was basically designed the exact same way that a road that I crossed every single day was designed. So it was very clear to me that, you know, design mattered, that it, you know, there was really much, a lot of power in place. What I didn't understand is why, if that was the case, we weren't investing more in it. And so that's what drove me to get my PhD in urban planning because I didn't want to just tell people that design mattered. I wanted to prove it to them. I'm very nerdy. I like data. So I wanted to kind of have an evidence-based argument. So my work ultimately ended up quantifying how urban design, as you mentioned, impacts our behaviors, our perceptions and feelings, but also how that translates back into value. And while I started more from the social and health and environmental aspect of value, I ultimately brought in the economic piece so that I could make that rationale and really convince the decision makers that looked in particular at economic factors, but the other aspects of value as well. And that's essentially what drove me to start State of Place is while I was doing this as an academic and a consultant, I hit a wall in terms of how many people I was able to help in that way. So I wanted something scalable, and that's when I entered the crazy world of tech. I'm not a technologist.

Well, great. Thanks for joining us again. So maybe you can share with us now a little bit more about what does State of Place do?

Yeah, so that's a great question. State of Place is an urban design and predictive analytics software. So what is that? We collect data on about 150 or so what we call microscale aspects of urban design. So these are things like sidewalks, trees, and benches. If there's crosswalk markings, curb cuts, outdoor dining, right? So we use AI actually to collect that data from digital images, which allows us to provide this data citywide. We then crunch that data into a score that measures walkability, bikeability, and livability, which we call the State of Place Index. And that measures 10 different aspects of urban design performance. So things like pedestrian and bike amenities or traffic safety. We also look at personal safety, density, connectivity, et cetera. So this really helps communities understand what's working and what's not in a really fine-grained way. And we also visualize this data kind of in a heat map spatially so that you can really begin to identify areas of spatial inequities throughout a city. In addition to that, we have a ton of forecasting models that show how that index actually impacts those different aspects of value. So various metrics for quality of life, whether that be real estate value, tax revenues, we've tied it to COVID, traffic collisions, of course, the amount that people drive. And so what we do with that, with those forecasting models, is we put it into the software so that communities can say, well, what are your goals? I really want to decrease diabetes in this area, or I really want to reduce the amount that people drive. Well, then the software recommends specific urban design changes most likely to actually help you achieve those goals, which has a much more effective and cost-efficient use of funds. And then my favorite part of the tool is the SimCity scenario piece where you can actually then test how those recommendations would influence the State of Place Index and those different dimensions of urban design. And then our forecast tool says, okay, if you get 20 more points on State of Place, What does that mean? You can get, you know, a 30% reduction in diabetes, or you can get, you know, a 15% increase in your tax revenues. So you can really begin to communicate the why behind these investment decisions, but also co-create those decisions with the community alongside the tool.

I love that gamification aspect. You mentioned some of the indicators that you're tracking or that you index. Maybe you can share a little bit more about some of the other indicators that are involved in that process. And does it vary between, maybe you're looking at a Miami versus a suburban community, or are they the same indicators across the board?

Yeah, that's a great question. So the list of indicators that we measure, they actually trace back from a project that I started in grad school in a tool that's called the Irvine Minnesota Inventory. If you're ever interested in doing more of the research aspect of it, that tool was meant for academics. So, but we had created this tool to be sort of place agnostic that you can implement it in urban, suburban, exurban, and rural places, low, middle, and high income, and even in developing nations, 'cause we've tested that tool out in China as well. So it can be applied anywhere. And indeed, we've done this work in towns in Iowa of 1,500 people. We've done this work in Nepal, Shanghai, and Miami. So like it really can be applied anywhere. In terms of the built environment features, we also look at things like parks and public spaces and all different manifestations of public space. We look, we have quite a bit of indicators of how the space is actually being used. So different kinds of land uses. And then also a little bit on the zoning side, like how are those uses, you know, are they single-use areas or are they vertical mixed-use? So it's really, it's everything that you feel like that influences how you feel down the street, you know, and it's like quantifying what you love about places. It's what my husband says that I do. That's his shorthand for what I do.

Mariella, thanks a lot for that breakdown. So I'm just curious, could you provide some examples of actionable items that can arise from these different indicators that you're looking at?

Yeah.

So, you know, as I mentioned, we really start with the built environment features of a location, right? So we really try to stay away from any sort of formula. These are the 5, you know, people ask me, what are the top 10 things you should change? And it's like, it depends. And everybody hates me when I give them that answer, but that's the truth, right? So we start from, you know, the built environment assets and needs of a place. That will influence what types of recommendations we give, of course. But then the other layer is what I mentioned before. It's like, well, the recommendations will change depending on what your priorities are. What does the community actually wanna achieve? Because most cities, you can't do everything, right? So you have to have some sort of way to prioritize which aspects of urban design you're gonna be investing in. So the recommendations that you would get to, you know, maybe bring down rates of asthma in your area might be slightly different than if you're talking to a private real estate developer and they really wanna be able to, you know, create better premiums for office rents. So it's always hard to give an example of the exact sets of indicators we would, you know, give recommendations for without that context. The other thing that we also do is allow our users to adjust the feasibility of making some changes over others. So for example, it's really hard to change the street network of a place, right? You know, or, you know, things like aesthetics are usually really easy to change, relatively speaking, but you might be in a historic district and it's like, oh, we're not going to give you aesthetic type recommendations because that might be really difficult. Or you might be in Houston, they have a lot of parking lots, you can actually recreate a much more fine-grained, you know, approach. So in those kinds of cases, we might say, yeah, you know, Make your roads, you know, not 6-lane roads, but 2-lane roads or maybe 3-lane roads. You know, we might recommend, oh my God, getting rid of the surface parking lots. You know, and again, I'm not the one recommending it. It's the tool based off of what they're actually trying to achieve. And certainly, if you are trying to become more walkable, like many of our customers are, that often is one of the recommendations is that You might want to rethink how you do things like parking, you know, or what you put in those parking spaces, maybe flex uses and things like that. I'm not sure if I answered your question directly, and I'm sorry if the academic sometimes like takes over.

No, that's okay. We're just happy to have someone from the real Miami on the show right now. So, uh, so, okay, so thinking more, um, more about this, um, you know, you've talked about a lot of different indicators that can directly impact someone's well-being, someone's health. And so that kind of brings me to this next question, which is sort of a 2-part question. First, what is your definition of a healthy community? And then the second question, do you think there's been an increase in interest for healthy communities today?

Yeah, that's a really great question. You know, in terms of healthy communities, it's funny you mentioned that because they literally just co-wrote a chapter around health and the built environment and equity. But for me, a healthy community, it's more broad than just physical health, right? It's mental health, it's emotional health, it's environmental health, it's physical health, and then community and more social health. So you really need to be able to understand this at multiple levels of a person's lives and how that interacts with built environment. Um, you know, in terms of why, uh, you know, this, this is seeing more attention, I mean, I think obviously COVID has made us all think about kind of all those different aspects of health, um, and, and center that more in, in our lives and, and kind of understand just how much the built environment, especially of our specific neighborhoods, impacts us. Because everyone— we all had different experiences with COVID depending on what was near us, right? So I do think that there's been a heavier focus on that, but also with respect to equity and sustainability.

Fantastic. So I want to shift gears and bring in a question actually that came off of LinkedIn. So one, you got a fan here, but they're curious as to what the greatest challenge is related to working with multiple data streams. Any thoughts on that one?

Oh, that's a— yeah, that's a big challenge. It's interesting you ask that because when we first started State of Place, we just offered one forecasting model that was tied to the economic piece that you could just recalibrate. So you just would enter in, you know, let's say the average retail revenues for your area, and then we would be able to apply our forecast models and say, okay, if you do this, then it's going to increase by X. Right? But now we actually can offer customized forecast models, which is awesome for our cities. But oh my God, it always creates a headache because, you know, first, how do you pull all this data in together? They, you know, every city kind of manages it differently. Flood data, which we recently did a forecasting model, oh my God, it's such a mess, you know? So there's a lot of, I guess, data wrangling involved. I'm so happy to have brought on finally a full-time data scientist. So I'm not the one dealing with this stuff, even as much as I love data, I just get way too into it and I kind of have to run a company. So yeah, I mean, we're trying to come up with a way that we don't have to customize this every single time we go into a city, but there's always a little bit of finagling we have to do. But, you know, we have the overall regression methodology in place, so that's the hardest part. So it's just kind of cleaning the data, massaging it a bit, and putting it into the model.

Yeah, definitely not an easy task, but super fascinating to see what you're doing with it. Now let's talk a little bit about the stalled Build Back Better agenda. In a piece you wrote in Slate, you mentioned this term spatial justice. This may be a new term for some in our audience, and I would love for you to kind of break this down and explain what it means and how it relates to Build Back Better.

Yeah, I'm so happy you're asking me that question, Dustin. So in terms of spatial justice, Part of what we were referring to in that piece was that there have been historic divestments in the built environment in particular areas of our cities, you know, and many of those divestments unfortunately have been tied to historically racist planning policy and investment decisions. And those things have manifested themselves in disparate outcomes from these quality of life factors that we're talking about, from economics to health to environmental justice issues. And certainly these other social outcomes as well. And so what we saw as part of the— so that's basically spatial injustice, right? So the fact that where we live essentially predetermines how well we live and where we live isn't from a quality of life, quality of built environment perspective isn't equal, right? So from the Build Back Better perspective, what we were trying to really advocate for is to take the standpoint of racial justice, which is what is embedded in many of the current administration's policies, you know, and broaden that out to create that link back to the built environment because so many of the racial justice issues are really tied to these disinvestments in the built environment. The other advantage that kind of broadening this out has, you know, is that you can also begin to think about not what type of infrastructure we're going to be focused on, but rather what benefits those infrastructure investments are. So kind of flip the script to say, hey, this is why we're doing all of this. You know, we have all of these different disparate outcomes across our communities. We're investing so that we, we can basically raise all Tides, right? Or all right, whatever, however the phrase is. I'm from Miami, I don't know these phrases.

Your, your passion and energy, enthusiasm comes across, and this has been phenomenal. Uh, you, you've talked about, you know, livability, equity, resiliency, sustainability. We want to also, you know, get a little self-serving here. We imagine you've looked at a lot of communities across the, uh, across the US. In looking at those metrics, where should our audience visit? Where should they buy their next home or rent their apartment? Everyone's shifting around now in this new work arrangement. Where are some communities that bubble to the top of the list?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I'd be like, go to CNBC. You know, I'm not the forecaster in that regard. But, you know, and again, you're going to hate me for this, but it really depends, right? You know, I think that One of the things that we would love to do to be able to better answer your question is actually create a national repository for this state-of-place data. And I don't know if you all heard, but the ARPA funds now— not ARPA like the Rescue Plan Act, but the ARPA Advanced Research Funding— is now being tied to health. So it's really interesting potential opportunity to create this national repository, not only to let you know how to— how you, you know, where you should live, But also to create all of these forecasting models for, you know, nationwide. You know, I would say to try to answer your question, you know, the importance of public space, whether that's green space and hardscape space that's activated, has been, you know, really, really brought to our attention in the last couple of years, as I mentioned before. So that's something that I would make sure that, A, you can— you have those kinds of spaces, and B, that you're able to walk to those kinds spaces. And when I had to see that there's actually stuff, you know, maybe in between that walk that's activating for you, you know, so other kinds of uses, other kinds of destinations, even if it's just a couple of streets, you know, on a small main street, it makes a huge difference to your mental state to be able to kind of— I call it the clickety-clack, you know, like the— if you walk down the street and you hear the noises of the urban street, it just I don't know, makes me happy at least. So that's kind of what I would look for. Can you find the clickety-clack? Maybe that's the new name for our State of Place Index.

All right. Well, I agree with, you know, another comment in saying this is amazing. And I think we all agree here. But before we go, we always want to give you an opportunity to tell us where to go to find more information about State of Place, but also give the opportunity to share anything that you're working on that's caught your attention, anything you want in terms of a call to action or you think our audience should be paying attention to. To the floor.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, before I forget, you can go to our website, which is stateofplace.co. You can also find me pretty active both on LinkedIn and also Twitter. I'm City Food Lover on Twitter and also State of Place on Twitter as well. You know, the thing that I'm excited about is we're creating a new release of our software to really take advantage of all of the things that I talked about earlier. Um, really, I think one of the things that's most exciting is that you'll be able to filter by all of these features, kind of getting at this last question about where to live. You can find the areas within the cities that have parks, you know, that have sidewalks, or on the flip side, that, that don't. Um, so I'm really excited about that release, um, hopefully coming next quarter. Um, I'm also just generally excited about, um, how the conversation has shifted in the last couple years to really centering our efforts around equity, but also health. I've been following the intersection between health tech and urban tech and gov tech, and I'm really, really excited by that. So yeah, and I'm just excited that this is all beginning to resonate. You know, 20 years ago I sounded like the crazy lady because I've always been a little bit ahead of the curve. So it's nice that people are maybe catching up a bit.

Well, that's awesome. And we want to thank you for, for joining us today. We'll make sure to include the links to State of Place and your social profiles in our show notes. That's all the time that we have for today. For those of you that tuned in, please make sure to join us next week at 12 o'clock Pacific on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter for more In Case You Missed It in GovTech. Until then, have a wonderful weekend.

Thank you.