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End date: 2021 × search.filters.applied.f.isSeriesOfPublicationTitle: Master of City and Regional Planning × search.filters.applied.f.resourcesubtype: Masters Project ×

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 394
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The Chattahoochee Brick Company Studio: Envisioning a Commemorative Future

2021-12-05 , Abel, Hunter , Carnell, Phillip , Coutinho, Pedro , Hopkins, Alison , Nyman, Tanning , Oliverio, Gabrielle , Roth, Grace , White, Reginald , Xie, Ray

Our report aims to function as a vision plan for the development potential of the Chattahoochee Brick Company site and its opportunities for reparative justice. item_description: Our report aims to function as a vision plan for the development potential of the Chattahoochee Brick Company site and its opportunities for reparative justice • Background • Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Analysis • Conversations with various stakeholders in the community and wider surrounding area to determine visions: • Greenspace • Industrial (I-Mix) • Housing/Commercial • Analysis of proposals that includes examples and impacts **Now that the City of Atlanta is starting the process to begin possible acquisition, some of the visions are more likely to occur than others.

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Race and Transit Investment in DeKalb County, Georgia

2021-05 , Lapwood, Bonnie

This paper aims to dissect intra-county neighborhood-level attitudes to transit in DeKalb County, Georgia, and the way in which they have fallen along racial and class lines during the five decades that the county has funded MARTA. This paper explores how these attitudes and their expression in neighborhood organizing have affected where transit dollars have been spent, where they have been wasted, and where they have not gone despite general support for them.

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Housing for the cost burdened: a step toward a just society

2021-01 , Dyott, Sarah , McKinney, Michaela , Newman, Ian , Thompson, Brock , Mykulyn, Bryan , Durham, Audra , Lapwood, Bonnie , Miller, Bryce , Murphy, Eirin , Zou, Nina , Chapman, Olivia , Yap, Soo Huey , Wong, Summer

Affordable housing is one of Atlanta, Georgia’s most pressing, pervasive, and persistent urban planning crises. Additionally, the advent of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the preexisting affordable housing issues across housing security, demographics, the supply and demand of affordable housing policy, and the health of low-income housing occupants. This report aims to address these issues, as they currently persist in Atlanta, and offer recommendations and considerations for their solutions. This document consists of four sections: Affordable Housing Finance in the City of Atlanta, Wealth Divide and Housing, Homelessness, Health & Hazards. A case study of Atlanta’s Healthy Hotel Project, and the Nexus of Housing, Transit, and Jobs. This report was created by graduate students in the master’s in City and Regional Planning Program (MCRP) at the Georgia Institute of Technology in collaboration with multiple local stakeholders. Though this report will not solve the affordable housing issue in the city of Atlanta, it will address the current conditions and numerous challenges associated with affordable housing in Atlanta and will offer a pointed recommendation to create a path toward solutions for these wicked problems.

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Staying Afloat in Affordable Housing Production: An Initial Examination and Framework of Cost Savings for Mercy Housing Southeast

2020-05 , Dervarics, Kelly

As income disparities continue to increase nationally, finding and constructing housing that is affordable and provides a stable environment to those in the lowest-income brackets has become extremely difficult across the nation. Financing residential projects that are affordable to families earning less than 60% of the area median income (AMI) involves creative layers of financing as construction costs are seen as fixed whether the units are priced at or below fair market rent. In this paper, I will focus on affordable housing in terms of residential developments with a portion of their units serving households that earn less than 60% AMI but there are many types, methods and definitions of affordable housing. Due to my familiarity with the federal and state programs of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) through my internship with a nonprofit affordable housing developer, this paper will center on LIHTC’s efforts (one moving pie ce in the puzzle) to combat affordability. As the LIHTC program is complicated, this paper aims to provide the framework for a development and construction manual to be used by affordable housing developers like Mercy Housing Southeast. For this paper, Mercy’s recent projects in Georgia will serve as case studies and provide insight into cost savings at different stages of the development and construction process. This manual can serve as institutional memory and re-evaluation for Mercy Housing Southeast in addition to providing guidelines for cost-effective projects. In this way, affordable housing developers can be better prepared and resilient when unexpected costs are incurred on a tight budget with a variety of funding sources.

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Maximizing Opportunity in Atlanta's Housing Opportunity Bond

2021-08 , Thompson, Brock

The affordable housing crisis burdens the nation and America’s largest cities, in particular. In the absence of comprehensive federal action to provide residents adequate housing, local governments (cities and counties) are employing massive general obligation bonds for the purpose of providing residents affordable housing (“municipal housing bonds or MHBs”). From Asheville & Charlotte to Denver, San Francisco, & Portland, governments have pledged hundreds of millions over the last two decades alone to address the issue (see “Other References Not Cited”)1. Direct public provision of housing, site acquisition, gap financing for private development, and owner-occupied rehabs are among the most common uses of funds. To date, cities using housing bonds have taken different approaches to spending with little documentation about the extent to which that approach addresses needs. Some have focused on public housing while others aim to leverage private funding; some have committed funds mainly to assist the lowest-income households while others look to expand higher-AMI workforce housing (see “Other References Not Cited”). In the context of Atlanta’s proposed $100M 2020 housing bond (Pendered, 2020a), this paper is aimed at developing a spending strategy for City of Atlanta housing bonds. Goals include maximizing the number of households served in the near term and prospects of long-term affordability. This paper looks to reconcile the (1) Current and projected demand for affordable housing units in the City of Atlanta (by AMI and household size), with the (2) Costs required to supply affordable units of various types for each of those groups. A pro forma will model the impact of various housing strategies on the existing and projected housing gap relative to their costs. The spending strategies of other cities will serve as a benchmark.

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Evacuation with Efficiency: An Inland and Coastal Flood Based Emergency Evacuation Planning Scorecard Proposal

2021-04 , Newman, Ian

This paper focuses on the need for flood-based natural hazard resilience planning. It also addresses how having a quantifiable and practical scorecard for communities to asses their current statuses, in relation to their levels of preparedness for evacuation plans and programs, is a current need in emergency management planning. This paper offers a transferable, pragmatic, and implementable scorecard, the Flood Emergency Evacuation Scorecard (FEES). The FEES is this paper's proposal and can be used to help address necessary economic and policy directions towards helping to develop further structured and pragmatic flood emergency evacuation programs for communities that face chronic flooding.

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The Impact of Traffic Density on Lane-Changing Frequency

2020-12 , Jiang, Qian

Fluctuations on roadways are widely considered as an effect of lane-changing activity. Lane-changing has been recognized as microscopic behaviors and elements in lane-changing models are considered to be mostly dynamic. But lane-changing decisions can still be influenced by some traffic conditions reflected as macroscopic factors. This paper attempts to correlate microscopic models with macroscopic models by exploring the relationship between lane-changing frequency and density. A descriptive analysis is generalized to explain lane-changing behaviors as a reaction to traffic density. It is observed that the lane-changing frequency increases in the low-density region and reaches a peak around a certain density. Five simple regression models are constructed to fit the NGSIM (Next Generation SIMulation) data. Based on three statistical indicators, the cubic model is selected as the best fit for the relationship between lane-changing frequency and density.

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Community as a Core Principle: Restoring Urban Headwaters and Implementing Green Infrastructure in the Upper Flint River Basin

2021-05 , Muller, Rachel

This Applied Research Paper presents strategies for incorporating community engagement in green infrastructure projects. More specifically, it will develop strategies for engagement within Finding the Flint, a project seeking to daylight the Flint River and create a Nature Preserve Park in College Park, Georgia. This paper focuses on Finding the Flint because the project exemplifies both the obstacles and opportunities associated with increasing community voice in watershed management issues.

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An Analysis of COVID-19, Air Quality, Race and Socioeconomic Status in Georgia

2021-04 , Chatman, Olivia E.

In the United States, the existence of air pollutants, which may have adverse effects on respiratory health, have disproportionately impacted communities of color and of lower socioeconomic statuses, an issue described as environmental injustice. Following the spread of the COVID-19 respiratory virus in late 2019 that resulted in a global pandemic, and has also disproportionately impacted vulnerable populations, identifying the correlations between the air quality and COVID-19 occurrences among BIPOC groups, also known as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, is essential to moving forward in addressing issues related to environmental injustice and health disparities among vulnerable groups. This study examines the question of whether Black populations in Georgia at the county level are more likely to experience disproportionality higher levels of air pollution and COVID-19 infection rates beginning with the conduction of literature review that identifies current knowledge and research gaps related to COVID-19, air quality and environmental justice. A spatial analysis of the relationship between PM2.5 air pollution, COVID-19 cases and deaths, race demographics, as well as socioeconomic factors in Georgia counties reveals any disparities related to health and air among Black populations.

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A Tale of Two (Modern) Cities: A Comparison of the Attempts to Regulate Airbnb in San Francisco and Boston

2020-05-03 , Ferreira, Andrea

This paper provides an overview of the history of Airbnb and its challenges within the city, including some of the studied impacts that Airbnb has had on both the residential and tourism sectors. Next, the paper evaluates the steps some cities have taken to regulate or ban the platform, through case studies in two comparable cities—San Francisco, California, and Boston, Massachusetts. Through these case studies, guidelines for other cities looking to regulate short-term rentals are established.

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