UEP 232
Yuqi Tang
13/12/2013
Final project
Town of Wakefield Buildout Analysis
Project description:
Wakefield is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts in the Greater Boston area. It’s
located about 12.5 miles northwest of downtown Boston.
My final project is doing a buildout analysis of the town Wakefield to estimate the
possible location for future development. The possible potential buildable lands will be
mapped out using GIS. A parcel-based analysis examines each parcel to determine its
maximum feasible future development.
Fig.1 location of Wakefield
The potential impact of developing those buildable lands will be analyzed using land use
and zoning districts. Impacts can be expressed in terms of the number and location of
new housing units, the amount and location of new commercial or industrial square
footage, the size of the new population. The population may be influence by the
development of those areas will be examined.
Buildout analysis is a useful tool for planners and emergency managers who wish to
anticipate the impacts of future development.
The key questions for this buildout analysis is which land can be developed and how
much land area can be developed. And what type of development can occur.
Data Layers:
Layer
Data Set
Name
Descriptio
n
Year
Data
Source
Agency
Boundary
BOUNDARY_
POLY.shp
City
boundaries
2010
MassGIS
Parcels
Polygon
Level 3
Parcels. shp
All tax
parcels in
the City of
Wakefield
2013
MassGIS
Roads
Buidings
Polygon
All public,
and most
EOTROADS_A private,
RC.shp
roadways in
Massachus
etts
structures_poly
_305.shp
All buildings
2012
2013
MassGIS
MassGIS
URL
Key
Attribute
Variables
M:\State\political_
none
boundaries
BLDG_VA
http://www.mass.
L
gov/anf/researchTOTAL_V
and-tech/it-servAL
andLOT_SIZE
support/applicatio
USE_COD
n-serv/office-ofE
geographicSITE_ADD
informationR
massgis/datalaye
STYLE
rs/l3parcels.html
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/researchand-tech/it-servandsupport/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/eotroads.html
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/researchand-tech/it-servand-
none
FEE_OWN
ER
OWNER_
TYPE
support/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/structures.html
Open
Space
Polygon
Census
Blocks
Census
Block
Population
Digital
Elevation
Model
Raster
OPENSPACE_
POLY.shp
All
protected
and
recreational
open space
2013
MassGIS
CENSUS2010
BLOCKS_POL
Y.shp
Census
block-level
boundaries
from 2010
U.S.
Census
2012
MassGIS
P1 Total
Population
Total
population,
by Census
block, from
2010 U.S.
Census
2010
2010 U.S
Census,
American
Fact
Finder
img_elev5k_i
Digital
elevation
data
2010
MassGIS
Wetland
Polygon
WETLANDSD
EP_POLY.shp
Wetland
areas
2010
MassGIS
Hydrograp
hy
HYDRO25K_P
OLY.shp
Includes
lakes,
2010
MassGIS
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/researchand-tech/it-servandsupport/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/osp.html
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/researchand-tech/it-servandsupport/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/census2010.ht
ml
http://factfinder2.
census.gov/faces
/nav/jsf/pages/ind
ex.xhtml
S:\Classes\UEP_
ENV\GIS
data\Massachuse
tts_DEM_1_arc_
second_NHD_pr
ojected
M:\State\MA\Mas
sGIS\
Physical_resourc
es
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/research-
none
none
BlockPop
none
none
none
Polygons
ponds,
reservoirs,
wetlands,
bogs, flats,
rivers and
streams in
Massachus
etts
Zoning
Polygon
ZONING_POL
Y.shp
2013
MassGIS
Land Use
LANDUSE200
5_POLY_MID
D.shp
2009
MassGIS
and-tech/it-servandsupport/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/hd.html
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/researchand-tech/it-servandsupport/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/zoningdownload.html
http://www.mass.
gov/anf/researchand-tech/it-servandsupport/applicatio
n-serv/office-ofgeographicinformationmassgis/datalaye
rs/lus2005.html
ZONECO
DE
PRIM_US
E
GEN_USE
Methodology:
Data Process
First check the coordinate, projection and measurement systems of all the data layers to
make sure they are the same. All the coordinate system I used is NAD_1983_
StatePlane_Massachusetts_Mainland_FIPS_2001. The projection is Lambert_
Conformal_Conic and the linear unit is meter. I transformed all the different linear unit
to the standard unit.
Fig.2 Coordinate and measurement systems of data layers
Then I used the selection tool to select the Wakefield town boundary and created a
town boundary layer. Use the boundary layer to clip the wetlands, open spaces, roads
zoning and DEM in order to speed up the processing time and make it more convenient
to analysis the town information.
Fig. 3 Wakefield Boundary
Removing the developed areas
Then used the intersect tool to add all the attributes found in the zoning and land use
polygons onto the city boundary to build a base map. Then I used erase tool to erase the
limited factors including the water body, protected and recreational open space, major
roads, DEP designated wetlands, current build features and the slope which is greater
than25%.
The problem I encountered here is the water body layer from MassGIS doesn’t match
the water area shown in the parcel layer. This is because the water layer is for 2010 and
the parcel layer is updated 2013. So I ended up using the water area from the parcel
layer.
The major road layer is not polygon, so I can’t use erase tool to remove it. So I use the
select by attribute tool to select and create a new layer without the transportation.
Since the building layer provided by MassGIS only includes part of the buildings in
Wakefield, so I used the building structure data layer for Wakefield to do the analysis. In
the previous paper, eliminating the building can lead to some mistakes, so I directly use
the select by location tool to select parcel intersect with buildings to eliminate all the
parcels that have buildings.
Then I used selection attributes to select the land type that can be developed. The
condition are as followed: "LU05_DESC"= 'Very Low Density Residential' ,'Commercial'
'Forest' , 'High Density Residential', 'Industrial' , 'Low Density Residential', 'Medium
Density Residential', 'Multi-Family Residential', 'Open Land', 'Pasture', 'Very Low Density
Residential'
Last I used slope tool to create a slope raster file from the DEM raster file. Then
reclassified the slope value into three catalog: “1” represents the slope from 0% to10%
which is perfect for construction; “2” represents the slope from 10% to 25% which is
proper sites for construction; “3” represents the slope from 25% to 50% which is
inappropriate for construction. Then I converted the base map which has already
eliminated the development constraints to raster file. After Combining this file with the
slope raster file, I convert the raster file to polygon and delete the polygon with slope
rank in”3”.
Fig. 5 Buildable land
There are some small areas which cannot be taken into the buildable consideration. So I
eliminate the polygon which is a residential land use type and has an area less than 240
square meters which is an estimate average size for a single family. And the commercial
area which has area less than 50 square meters. I set the lower limit for the industrial
area to 1000 square meters.
Quantitative analysis
Use statistic tool to calculate the number of buildable parcels and area of land by
different zoning types. Examine the number of buildable parcels and the area of the
buildable lands by land use.
Results:
The results are shown in the table below.
From the table: (1) others include the land which are forests and open lands, these
lands haven’t been specified the type of development. Either these lands are protected
or these lands are potentially developable lands. I keep them in the buildable land
category since some of the forests are buildable. However, detail analyses are needed.
(2)Lower boundary for the buildable area is estimated by deleting 25% of the total area
in order to get rid of the place for sidewalk, parking etc. (3) Upper boundary is
estimated by the same way but deleting 5% of the total area.
Table.1 Buildable land by Use
Use Type
Area
(10^3 m2)
No. of
Parcels
Lower
boundary m2
Estimate(2)
Upper
boundary m2
Estimate(3)
% Total
Buildable
Area
Commercial
34
48
25,500
32,300
4.6
Residential
31
57
23,240
29,437
4.2
Industrial
4.3
2
3,364
4,262
0.6
Others(1)
670
383
502,286
636,229
90.6
739.3
490
554,390
702,228
100
Total
The number of parcels for each catalog in table 2 is slightly different from table 1. This is
because table one used land use dataset which was updated at 2009 while table 2 used
zoning data is recently updated. So some of the commercial areas defined in table 1
were put in the residential or industrial category.
Table.2 Buildable land by Zoning Type
Zoning
Type
Area
(10^3 m2)
No. of
Parcels
Lower
boundary m2
Estimate(2)
Upper
boundary m2
Estimate(3)
% Total
Buildable
Area
Central
Business
Limited
Business
Light
Industrial
Multi-Family
Residential
14.4
26
10,800
13,680
1.9
23.6
11
17,700
22,420
3.2
26
42
19,500
24,700
3.5
0.3
1
0.188
0.238
0.3
(2 units)
SingleFamily
Residential
Total
675
410
506,250
641,250
91.3
739.3
490
554,390
702,228
100
To measure the impact of developing all this buildable lands, I calculated the people
living within 500 meters to the buildable lands for industrial use using the census block
data. And I estimated the future population by assuming that there are 2~3 people live
in one single family house and analyzed the impact those growing population will lead
to. (Including the water will be used and the solid waste will be produced and the
additional vehicles will be on the roads)
Table 3 Summary Build-Out impact Statistics
Developable Land Area
Commercial Water Use
Total Residential Parcels
Future increasing Residents
Residential Water Use
Increasing Municipal Solid Waste
Additional Vehicles on Road
Population influenced by develop the
commercial buildable land
739,500 m2
114L/day
411
822~1233(1028 average)
411m3/day
478,020 kg/person/year
411
12498(%50 of the current
population)
The data are based on the following estimation:
1.
2.
3.
4.
“Residential Water Use” is based on 0.4 m3 per person per day
“Commercial Water Use” is based on 3L per square meter of commercial space
“Municipal Solid Waste” is based on 465 kg per person per year for residential uses only.
“Additional Vehicles on Road” is based 1 car per household
Literature review:
1. Applied Geographics, Inc. Boston, Massachusetts,Philip B. Herr & Associates
Newton, Massachusetts(2002) Build-Out Analysis and Future Growth Study
http://amherstma.gov/DocumentCenter/Home/View/385
This article is about the buildout analysis of town of Amherst. The GIS component of
Amherst buildout study was undertaken in two phases. The first phase is to create the
accurate baseline model including numerous constraints layers to determine the area of
all the buildable lands. The second phase is to find how the development can impact the
future environment. The article discusses the current and the future trends of
development alternatives.
2.Godschalk, David. (2006). “Build-Out Analysis: A Valuable Planning and Hazard
Mitigation Tool”. Zoning Practice. American Planning Association. Issue 3.
http://www.planning.org/zoningpractice/2006/pdf/mar.pdf
This guide provides the basic information about buildout analysis, including the
definition of buildout analysis, how this method can be used and also gives some
examples. It introduces the buildout analysis carried out in Massachusetts. A general
buildout method is provided in the guide which including two stage, first is to develop
map preparation, second is to do a quantitative analysis. The guide also mentions the
problem related to data availability which can affect the buildout analysis.
3.Montgomery County Planning Commission.(1996) Shaping Future Development: The
Role of Current Zoning. http://www.epa.gov/greenkit/pdfs/futgrow0.pdf
The article describes all future development permitted in the municipalities of
Montgomery County under current zoning ordinances. The study indicates future
development is likely to be characterized by low-rise shopping and office centers. And it
mentions the effects that new development has on transportation, open space, and
population.
4.US Environmental Protection Agency. How to Do a Build-Out Analysis
http://www.epa.gov/greenkit/build_out.htm
This webpage gives the basic methods for a buildout analysis. It provides a good guide
of the process at the start point which is very useful.