2024 SAG Award Winners

City of Rocky Mount and ViewPro

Project Goal

Problem Statement: Evaluate the city of Rocky Mount’s current affordable housing policy for and validating to propose alternatives to reach the goal of building 250 affordable housing units in the next 5 years.

With the average house prices within the city well above the national average, the dwindling home ownership (51.9% compared to 65.3% statewide) within the city area, rising interest rates and a lack of stronger housing policy, affordable housing has been one of the primary challenges for the city council at the city of Rocky Mount. The goal of the project is to test the city’s current affordable housing policy to check if the policy is capable of achieving it’s set goal of building 250 affordable housing units in the next 5 years. If the policy is not substantiated with valid analysis and confirmation, then the city needs to amend the policy to ensure it reaches its self-attained goal of building 250 affordable housing units.
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Business Problem Solved

With the growing technology and access to data, it is becoming increasingly important to validate policies put together by the city planners. To substantiate policy results, we need right tools and solutions that go with it.
In case of City of Rocky Mount, we needed a robust scenario planning tool to validate housing policy and check its feasibility in the real world. To perform this analysis, we relied on ArcGIS Urban platform to run various scenario to extend our learning about the city’s adopted housing policy.
Citywide suitability analysis was done to identify catalytic sites to build affordable housing. We extended the use of ArcGIS Urban by tweaking the housing policy and check the future scenarios to see if the goal is attainable. The results were clearly in alignment with the housing goal. Without the use of ArcGIS Urban, it would have been not possible to showcase how minor changes in density bonus and parking requirement were sufficient changes to accomplish the goal.

Technology Implemented

ArcGIS Pro was used to gather all the existing data and prepare them to be used into ArcGIS Urban. The suitability analysis within ArcGIS Urban was used to identify areas where the affordable housing is more suitable to build. This tool allowed the team to leverage data created in ArcGIS Pro (i.e. access to parks, transit, civic facilities and avoid areas near floodplain) to build a comprehensive list of parcels that are suitable for affordable housing. The results generated from Suitability analysis was then used in ArcGIS Urban to run scenarios to validate current housing policy and build new policy alternatives to check its feasibility.

Development Team Biography

Consultant: Suhag Kansara, Founder & CEO, ViewPro
Suhag Kansara is the Owner and CEO of ViewPro, a leading SAAS based solutions providers for Cities and Local Government that enable city staff to perform decision making on easy to use GIS tools.

With a degree in Architecture and a master degree in City Planning, Suhag brings 20+ years of unique experience as a City Planner. Suhag recognizes the value of growing use of technology in day to day planning decisions. He is passionate and committed in helping cities harness the true power of GIS data and bridge the technical gap that hinders its growth. Let's build leaders together who can leverage GIS to get a complete picture by viewing, mapping, sharing, analyzing, and acting on information about their community.

City of Rocky Mount: JoSeth Bocook, AICP Deputy Director of Planning
JoSeth has worked with the City of Rocky Mount since beginning his career as a city planner in 2008. A native of the rural eastern North Carolina area