Solution
Challenge
Transit operators
City of Detroit and Spin Scooters
The City of Detroit has engaged with multiple scooter providers in recent years, including Spin. Like most providers, Spin makes scooter trip data available to Detroit and other host cities. And like many cities, Detroit sought to evaluate use patterns for Spin vehicles in a context of the city’s downtown and neighborhood districts. Also, unlike many US cities, the City of Detroit directly operates bus operations, producing an opportunity for scooter patterns to reveal opportunities to strengthen the design of the transit network.
Results
The Visible City team, working in partnership with the City and with Spin, established a process for data sharing, and collected multiple years of usage data. As a second step, our team processed all of the data – hundreds of thousands of trips comprising over eight million points – to clean and categorize the information. With a comprehensive usage data set in hand, Visible City presented the scooter trips on city maps, to address specific questions of equitable access and usage.
Through the Visible City exercise, the City gained access to fine-grained analysis revealing how and where community members choose to use scooters in relation to land use, employment centers, the existing transit network and other factors. Having such insight provides both cities and scooter providers with critical background for maximizing the value of micromobility in modern cities.
Solution
Challenge
Ramsey County, MN
Ramsey County, home to Minnesota’s capital city Saint Paul and surrounding suburbs, is the lead agency for planning the Purple Line bus rapid transit line in advance of construction and operation by Metro Transit. As planned, the Purple Line is designed to connect multiple communities, through and including Saint Paul, more directly to the regional network. The project team supporting station area planning for Ramsey County, including Toole Design and NEOO Partners, sought to examine and visualize, in fine grain, the community and market dynamics in each of Saint Paul’s Purple Line eleven station areas.
Results
Visible City undertook collection and visualization of community and market elements spanning a full range of demography, multimodal transportation patterns, land use and real estate market activity, and opportunity sites for redevelopment. These analytics have been incorporated into the project team’s engagement and station area planning efforts currently underway.
Our model integrates expertise in transit planning and operations, data collection and visualization, community planning and infill development, allowing the Visible City team to contribute analytics that support decision making by multiple parties involved. In addition to Ramsey County and the consultant team, the products of these market analyses will provide insight to the public, to other project and funding partners, and to actors involved in the redevelopment anticipated to accompany transit enhancements as the project moves forward.
Solution
Challenge
Hennepin County, MN
Over the last decade, Hennepin County and city partners have advocated for a Blue Line Extension to reach north from downtown Minneapolis, linking multiple suburban cities including Crystal. As part of its leadership role, Hennepin County retained a team including Visible City and led by Damon Farber Associates, to develop an updated station area plan for the proposed Crystal station area for the Blue Line extension. As planning for the Blue Line extension continues, Hennepin County and city partners at Crystal sought an updated station area plan that would define how and where to invest public resources for greatest impact.
Results
- Provides current, more specific framework for the near-term and longer-term redevelopment in and around the station area
- Gives the City and County insight into what’s feasible for this suburban submarket, amid prospective changes in market values and land use
- Provides stakeholders with data-driven findings and content to share with the community and other partners.
As the lead on analysis of redevelopment potential for the project, Visible City first assessed the core questions and challenges described by the City and County for the project and the station area. We evaluated existing plans in depth, and proceeded to collect, visualize and interpret numerous layers of data for the market and trade area, community activity, land use, existing ridership, walkability and other factors. We evaluated multiple opportunity sites, ranking each by viability given existing patterns and market disposition, and engaged with the City Council and County leadership to convey interpretation and recommendations, and answer follow up questions.
Solution
Challenge
LOCAL GOVERNMENT
City of Richfield, MN
Leaders of the City of Richfield, Minnesota felt compelled to evaluate transportation and business conditions in a district along the I-494 interstate highway, prior to giving municipal consent to the Minnesota Department of Transportation for proposed reconfiguration of I-494 interchanges within city limits. As a growing first-ring suburb and evolving land use pattern, Richfield leaders sought analysis and interpretation of mobility and commercial patterns in the previously car-oriented district along the interstate.
Results
The Visible City team collected a wide range of data from sources including anonymized mobile phone locations, commercial property listings for sale and lease, detailed car traffic patterns, transit boardings and alightings, land use and parcel valuations and other metrics, to inform an evaluation and the municipal consent decision. Visible City also conducted interviews to capture community perceptions, and examined potential benefit of a multimodal connection from the commercial district under a nearby right of way barrier at Highway 77.
The presentation of findings proved valuable for the Mayor, City Council members and City staff, in vetting potential granting of municipal consent to, and negotiating with, MnDOT. Visible City’s visualizations also helped the City secure a state investment in the multimodal connection at Highway 77.
Solution
Destination Medical Center
The Destination Medical Center is a transformative, $5.6 billion public-private initiative launched in 2013 to leverage the economic development potential of growing medical and related industry clustered around the internationally-renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Two areas for urgent action by the DMC’s economic development agency (EDA) are establishing mobility hubs to facilitate multimodal transportation in and around Rochester, and creating a shared plan for expanding the supply of affordable housing in the marketplace.
Results
The EDA retained the Visible City team to examine dynamic conditions in fine grain, to identify high-impact locations for mobility hubs and for development of housing for Rochester workers. The team gathered data including property and development, social media posting, transit ridership by individual bus stop and intersections where pedestrians and cyclists face highest risks of injury by car.
The Visible City team delivered to the EDA a broader and deeper basis for decision making, as they plan for and guide long-term and large-scale investments in Rochester. Early choices in the $5.6 billion initiative will deliver compounding benefits, and the EDA’s prioritization of dynamic analysis to select locations for mobility hubs will maximize the impact of those investments, in transportation and other areas of community life in Rochester.
Challenge
City of Saint Paul
Challenge
The City of Saint Paul manages a Park and Recreation system ranked among the best performing among US cities by the Trust for Public Land. With more than 175 park spaces and over a dozen recreation centers, the City sought to develop a new system plan that would effectively reflect the community’s population growth and demographic profile, and the need for parks to support equitable access, multimodal transportation, and continued infill development. The Parks and Recreation System Plan is an adopted guide of City policy for the management, programming, and investment in the specific assets that comprise parks system, and the City sought an emphatically cross-disciplinary and behavioral approach to the new plan.
Solution
Results
The City of Saint Paul accepted the new Parks and Recreation System Plan in late 2023 and is actively using it to organize its construction program, its programmatic offerings, and community engagement relating to the system. Other park systems have expressed interest in applying a methodology inspired by the Plan, due to its primary attention to community demography, usage and behavior.
The City of Saint Paul retained Visible City in 2022 to research and develop a new Parks and Recreation System Plan in partnership with the City. Over a two-year period, Visible City elevated community behavior, park usage and demography to organize a plan around what City residents want and need from the system.
The Plan is framed by six principles:
o Equitable allocation of programs, resources and amenities
o People, programming and spaces responsive to changing needs
o Environmental sustainability
o Economic sustainability
o A healthy network of community partnerships
o Strong and accessible connections.
The Plan represents an innovative approach to advancing each of these principles across Saint Paul, by combining Parks and Recreation data with external sources such as Census, anonymized mobile phones, scooters, ecological characteristics such as tree canopy and inland flood risk, and transit usage. Through this kind of approach, the Plan provides direction to the City for coming years, to invest in quality facilities and relevant programs that maximize benefit for residents.
“Our city’s new parks and recreation system plan is dynamic - it’s not like the typical. We set out to create a plan that reflects our community needs and wants first, and facilities second. Visible City has been a great partner to us, supporting us with analysis and urban expertise to plan our system’s future around the city’s most important asset - our people.”
- Andy Rodriguez, Director of Parks and Recreation, City of Saint Paul
City of Northfield
Challenge
The City of Northfield, Minnesota is a community of 25,000 residents, best known as home to Carleton College and St. Olaf College and for its dense, historic downtown and Cannon River frontage. Having recently annexed over 750 acres to its northwest, Northfield leaders sought to examine their existing network of infrastructure and development patterns to maximize use of urbanized land and contemplate how to approach the annexed area. Additionally, the City also sought specific guidance about how the annexed space could be used (including park reserve, data center, industrial, commercial, and housing) to advance community goals.
Solution
Visible City collected, analyzed, visualized and interpreted data from public and other sources, to give the City up-to-date insight about development patterns and areas of opportunity. We also assessed a series of metrics to identify a pool of similar cities whose tax base and development profiles lent insight for Northfield as points of reference. While Northfield is atypical in the prominence of tax-exempt uses including higher education, the City found great benefit in this comparison as regional context. Finally, Visible City provided a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate various land use scenarios for the areas recently annexed.
Results
Visible City’s analysis revealed valuable information about specific sites in developed areas of Northfield, where capacity exists for more intense land use. The process also gave City leaders a sense of how Northfield’s tax base compares among comparable communities, and what potential infill and greenfield development hold for steering the tax base according to City goals for sustainability and growth. The City is calling on Visible City’s analysis and findings for development of their 30-year comprehensive plan, a process currently underway with engagement and planning.
Solution
Challenge
K-12 DISTRICTS
Saint Paul Public Schools and City of Saint Paul
The City of Saint Paul, Minnesota and the Saint Paul Public Schools serve a growing capital city of more than 300,000 residents and 35,700 students. Each agency’s team manages a portfolio of land, facilities and programs to serve community needs. In the past, the City and School District undertook program planning, capital investment, and evaluation individually, not based on data shared in collaboration. Without shared analytic tools, acute pinch points, unused capacity and capital needs persisted.
Results
Visible City coordinated an initial process to identify mutual goals, opportunities and pitfalls relating to the sharing of facilities. Our team next embarked on an analytics phase, bringing together for the first time all of the City and School District data relating to land and facilities, programs and usage. The Visible City team evaluated agency’s fields, gyms, community rooms and other spaces; highlighted pinch points and underutilized assets; and guided the interagency team with custom, real-time digital tools to plan and implement systemwide scheduling.
For the first time, leadership of the City of Saint Paul and the Saint Paul Public Schools have a full, joined data picture, from which to build on their common mission by planning and executing sharing of facilities. Building custom tools specific to client needs, wrapped with policy consulting, the Visible City team has helped the City of Saint Paul and the School District begin a meaningful expansion of their efficient and transparent coordination of shared facilities.
"We have long coordinated with our school district, but with Visible City's help, now our two agencies have a clear, shared view about demographics, usage, and facilities. Their analysis has helped us develop a stronger, more efficient approach to funding and maintaining our system, for sure."
– Mike Hahm, Former Director, Saint Paul Parks & Recreation
Nonprofits + foundations
Solution
Challenge
Midtown Greenway Coalition
The Midtown Greenway, a 5.7-mile bicycle and pedestrian trail that cuts a direct east-west line across Minneapolis, includes some of the city’s most heavily-trafficked cycling points, with a total of over one million estimated trips per year. The car-free thoroughfare is a key contributing factor to Minneapolis’s role as one of the country’s most bike-friendly cities. In contrast, Saint Paul has a less robust cycling network and sees overall lower trip volume. For over 15 years, local stakeholders have advocated for an extension of the Greenway over the Mississippi River to connect to Saint Paul’s existing trails.
Results
Visible City and Damon Farber collaborated to develop an economic impact study that developed first-of-its-kind quantitative analysis to support the Midtown Greenway Coalition’s goals. Prior to the study’s completion, the economic and social benefits of the trail had long been anecdotally recognized, but there was little to no quantitative data to support these claims. The Visible City team developed a unique methodology to measure the trail’s contribution to increases in market and tax value, as well as to make informed economic projections within four study areas identified as opportunities for expansion.
The final report included the breakthrough finding that the Midtown Greenway has contributed to a $1.8 billion increase in market value within 500 feet of the trail, and projections indicated that growth could be similarly strong were the trail to be expanded to the study’s opportunity areas. The methods and visualizations created by Visible City have aided in the Midtown Greenway Coalition’s ongoing messaging and efforts to realize the extension.
Solution
Challenge
Family Housing Fund
The Family Housing Fund is a regional collaboration of public and philanthropic partners focused on fostering innovative approaches to preserve and produce affordable housing in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metro area. Originally, the Fund approached Visible City about collecting and visualizing property data from multiple conflicting sources, to support prospective land assembly by cities and other local governments.
Results
The Visible City team developed a visual, accessible web-based tool to allow the Fund and its stakeholders to sift and sort land parcels, to explore potential assemblages among public partners. With the Visible City team’s management, the Fund has ongoing access to a customized tool with routinely updated data, policy criteria and other variables.
The Family Housing Fund has used the web-based tools developed by Visible City to strengthen engagement with local and state elected officials and staff, and a basis for targeting their efforts in funding, advocacy, and supporting innovation in the housing marketplace.
Solution
Challenge
YMCA of Greater Boston
After a year of government-mandated shutdowns, safety concerns, and economic hardship, the YMCA of Greater Boston realized a need for a fresh assessment of its facilities, programming, and membership model in 2021. As it endeavored to maintain a viable operating budget while staying true to its mission of advancing equity, the Association’s understanding of its own role in the current marketplace was suddenly more critical than ever.
Results
The Visible City team undertook an intensive analysis of the Association’s 13 branches, and the market and demographic dynamics surrounding each. In addition to geospatial data processing and visualization, the team also worked with professional survey designers and administrators to develop a custom survey instrument. Targeted at both current YMCA stakeholders and the broader Boston community, the survey provided insight into public perception of the YMCA of Greater Boston’s locations, their competitors, and the Association as a whole.
Combining proprietary member and programming data with a broad range of external data layers, plus the survey results, allowed Visible City to develop a set of findings and recommendations that delivered a level of depth and insight that the YMCA of Greater Boston would likely not have achieved otherwise. These recommendations are currently being put into practice as the Association continues to evolve.
"We are pleased to recommend the work of Visible City and look forward to working with them again in the future. Their excellent report on expansion of the Midtown Greenway trail over the Mississippi River quantified return on investment, generated significant media coverage, and led to even more support from elected officials and the public. Critics of the project go silent once they see the study."
– Soren Jensen, Executive Director, Midtown Greenway Coalition
“Family Housing Fund has retained the Visible City team for analysis and interpretation on several projects in recent years, and they've taken housing data and brought it to life through customized mapping and analysis for audiences including policymakers, developers, and housing funders.”
– Sarah Berke, Former Program Officer, Family Housing Fund
Solution
Challenge
YMCA of Middle Tennessee
Amid transformative growth in the Nashville metro, the YMCA of Middle Tennessee retained Visible City to evaluate the location, facilities and programs offered at the downtown Nashville location. In the immediate vicinity of the downtown YMCA, dramatic redevelopment efforts are underway. These include development of Amazon’s Center of Excellence, which is under construction and expected to introduce 5,000 new jobs adjacent to the downtown branch in 2023. Also adjacent is the $1 billion Nashville Yards project, a mixed-use project redeveloping over 18 acres. Visible City’s scope involved evaluation of downtown development and activity dynamics, prospective partnership opportunities, and long term location choices for the YMCA.
Results
The Visible City team collected and analyzed an exhaustive body of enterprise and external data, to inform the Association’s decision making about how and where to serve residents, workers and visitors of downtown Nashville during a time of rapid market transformation. In addition, Association leadership engaged us to help evaluate an invitation to partner with the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, for which we delivered analysis and redevelopment advisory services.
The YMCA of Middle Tennessee used the Location and Facility Analysis to implement choices about programs and facilities with lasting significance. The analysis provided findings to shape location decisions, and also inform how to proceed with programmatic and partnership opportunities to further the YMCA legacy and mission in Nashville.
Solution
Challenge
Saint Paul Downtown Alliance
Downtown Saint Paul is well known as a cultural and arts hub and a center of employment for large and small firms and nonprofits, as well as state and local governments. As a collaborative effort to build on underlying assets, public agencies and private sector partners joined to form the Saint Paul Downtown Alliance to recruit new employers, attract new investments, and create positive experiences for residents, visitors and workers. The Alliance has developed multiple robust approaches to measuring downtown activity, and has sought support to supplement and inform their strategy for collecting, visualizing and using data for decision making.
Results
Since 2018, Visible City has supported the Alliance in multiple forms, including data collection, longitudinal analysis, and visualization of site-level job counts, foot traffic, transit activity, public safety incidents, housing and commercial real estate market activity, and informal workshops to address specific issues.
Our work is in use by the Alliance leadership in multiple forms. Our findings populate their case that downtown is an increasingly populous neighborhood, a dynamic market for leasing and development, and also a district in need of focused attention by public agencies to ensure that residents, visitors and workers from across Minnesota have positive experiences downtown.
"Seeing data mapped onto the streets and sidewalks of downtown is invaluable. Our work with Visible City has helped our advocacy, our fundraising, and made our programs more successful. Visualizing investment, transportation, or foot traffic at such fine grain disrupts commonly held assumptions—and makes us more effective. It's that simple."
– Joe Spencer, President, Saint Paul Downtown Alliance
Solution
Challenge
Affordable housing
CommonBond Communities
As a leader in development and management of affordable housing across the Midwest, CommonBond is always looking for ways to streamline the process of identifying priority candidates for property acquisition, to advance their mission. In addition, policy documents including each state’s Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP), combined with proprietary criteria, help guide CommonBond’s investment strategy in communities they serve.
Results
In multiple markets, Visible City has assisted CommonBond in identifying off-market and listed sites, ranging from vacant land to naturally-occurring affordable housing, to expedite acquisition.
Visible City’s combination of data collection, analysis and interpretation, along with industry expertise, have served CommonBond well in efforts to expand affordable housing in multiple states.
Solution
Challenge
Roers Companies
Roers Companies is a rapidly growing developer of multifamily and mixed use projects, based in Minneapolis and active in markets in multiple states. Starting in 2018, Roers leadership sought to expand their pipeline of affordable housing projects, and expressed interest in renovation of historic property as a way to accomplish the goal. To evaluate prospective projects across numerous markets, Roers sought out an approach to focus their efforts on historic reuse opportunities that promised to score well for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (“LIHTC”).
Results
Roers looked to the collaboration between Visible City and our partners in historic reuse at New History, to conduct a far-reaching search for candidate properties. The collaborative team began the engagement by listening and clearly articulating the kinds of structural and site characteristics to prioritize. With that insight in hand, Visible City assembled data for millions of parcels in target markets, relating to site features, proximity to other holdings, and other strategic values. In addition, the Visible City team layered together numerous geographic elements that comprise the scoring of projects in the highly competitive allocation process for LIHTC – which are unique to each state.
In stark contrast to the typical, buckshot approach of searching for candidate sites for historic reuse and affordable housing, the Visible City + New History collaborative package has delivered to Roers Companies comprehensive, curated lists of quality leads in identified markets. The approach has helped Roers accelerate and simplify their growth strategy by leveraging combined bandwidth in high volume data analysis, and historic reuse.
PROPERTY OWNERS +
DEVELOPERS
Crescent Investment Group
Challenge
As in every US downtown district, demand for office space in St. Louis has fallen substantially since the Covid-19 pandemic. The Crescent Investment Group owns and manages One US Bank Plaza, a 36-story office tower and adjacent plaza space, in the heart of downtown. To anticipate upcoming lease renewals with existing office tenants, Crescent retained Cushman and Wakefield and Visible City to undertake a process to evaluate the downtown submarket, interview key private and public stakeholders, and develop recommendations for prospective changes to the property and to the surrounding downtown blocks.
Solution
Visible City collected, visualized and interpreted data to understand the role of One US Bank Plaza in downtown St. Louis and the critical role of downtown for the city as a whole. As a city, St. Louis collects revenue from property, income and sales, and the Visible City team produced 3D visualization to demonstrate how and why the future of downtown is significant for stakeholders all across the city and surrounding region.
Results
Along with the voluminous and insightful interviews that Cushman and Wakefield conducted, Visible City’s visualizations and consulting have supported Crescent Investment Group both in retaining and attracting tenants for One US Bank Plaza, and in building stronger relationships and an agenda for downtown action for St. Louis.
Solution
Hexagon Wireless
Hexagon Wireless is a distributed wireless network provider engaged in a national build out. Hexagon reached out to Visible City to explore ways to achieve scale in the identification of prospective new sites for wireless infrastructure on urban and metropolitan rooftops.
Results
Visible City undertook work in multiple metro markets for Hexagon, developing a methodology that integrated site criteria including configuration of street intersections, rooftop characteristics, pedestrian activity, tree canopy and ownership specifications. From millions of records, Visible City delivered a discrete number of highest-potential candidates for focused outreach by Hexagon.
Hexagon Wireless has used Visible City’s method and resulting candidate sites to support their continued network build out nationally.
MultI-location
Challenge