Visualize impervious cover per capita.
Using GIS building footprints and data to calculate and visualize impervious cover per person / per unit / per bedroom by housing type and by neighborhood.
People opposed to urban density claim that building more apartments and nplexes will increase impervious cover and increase flooding.
The EPA disagrees because building apartments and n-plexes tends to reduce sprawl and use less impervious cover per capita.
Precise estimates of impervious cover per capita in different kinds of homes and different parts of town could help us argue for more watershed-efficient development patterns.
The main goal of this project is to create a data set that could be used for the purpose of computing impervious cover per capita for the city of Austin, TX.
This data will then be used to produce a set of artifacts to help people advocate in favor of building our city more densely. Potential deliverables will be:
- A series of graphs representing/comparing impervious cover per building type/zipcode/zoning, etc.
- A blog post
- Infographics
- A white paper on this topic
We evaluated several existing data sets in order to find the appropriate information for us.
Our conclusions can be found in the evaluation document.