This project will study the population density in Newark, NJ, with a specific focus on the relationship between regulations and zoning, and the amount of housing in neighborhoods that are well-served by transit. Newark, NJ is a medium-sized city located in the New York metropolitan area, only 25 minutes from the center of Manhattan. It is a low-income city with many residents who struggle to access transportation, jobs, and affordable housing. As housing in the New York area has become increasingly scarce, residents in Newark are increasingly concerned that this new development will lead to their displacement. The city is now engaged in a highly consultative revision of its 10-year master-plan, which offers an opportunity to address issues, including regulatory and zoning limitations that prevent densification and make new housing unaffordable. This project aims to support that process by empowering residents and policymakers with data and a new decision-making tool that will help identify participatory and effective approaches to increase the supply of housing and improve housing affordability through the master plan revision process.
A newly developed methodology for the measurement of ‘factors’ of population density will be used to create a decision-making tool and generate associated data; these factors include building height, plot coverage, the share of land in residential use, the occupancy rate, living area density, and floor-plan efficiency. The key advantage of measuring these factors from a policy perspective is that zoning and building regulations determine the maximum values for many of them. Earlier work approached density as a horizontal measure, a strategy which furnished useful information but was disconnected from policy. The factoring approach has clear policy implications for increasing the supply of housing. The quantification of these factors uses satellite imagery to measure residential buildings, field information to measure the occupancy rate, and a regulatory audit to associate each of the factors with actual policies, enabling a truly detailed set of policy recommendations to emerge. The goal of this research is to model the factors of density and their relationship to regulations, providing data on the ways in which different regulatory changes might impact the supply of residential floor-space. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program, Track A— Communities and Mobility: Offering Better Mobility Options to Solve the Spatial Mismatch Between Housing Affordability and Jobs—and is a collaboration between NSF and the Department of Energy.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
