Case Study: Homelessness, Poverty And Lack Affordable Housing

Homelessness, poverty and lack affordable housing are three major issues in the United States, and the state of Minnesota would like to be a catalysts to start a movement in attempt to better these issues. Minnesota’s seven metro counties of Anoka, Ramsey, Hennepin, Washington, Carver, Scott and Dakota are making efforts to create more housing, specifically affordable housing. The seven metropolitan counties would like to develop a new housing community must be developed in an environmentally sound way that limits the impact to the environment, which is why the new development will also have to be LEED certified. Two main criteria will be looked at within the LEED certification process, they are location and transportation and sustainable sites.
One of the main purposes of adopting the LEED rating system is to help real estate planners and developers make sustainable decisions when planning new construction or restoration projects. This study shows how GIS can be used as a decision making support tool for accessing location and transportation and site suitability in the LEED green rating scale, which uses very similar methods to a study done by Dabaieh et al. and Yamany et al. (2016). LEED has many different rating systems available for different projects, these include new construction, existing buildings, commercial interiors, core and shell, homes, neighborhood development, schools and retail (Sharifi and Murayama 2013). Within each of these systems is categories that focus on specific criteria. These categories according to the 2013 V4 score card, which is the newest system and the one that will be used in this study are Location and Transportation, Site Suitability, Water Efficiency, Energy and Atmosphere, Materials and Resources, Indoor Environment Quality, Innovation and Regional Priority. As of 2013, there was 29,101
All in all, I used similar data manipulation as to the Mohamed et al. study (2006). A series of buffers, select by attributes, clips, merges, reclassifies, raster to polygon, polygon to raster, intersect and the weighted overlay tools were used. But LEED’s rating system has restrictions on land use (Choi, Son, Park and Woods 2011). Through studying these restrictions, the first set of criteria was chosen. They are the avoidance of water, wetlands, floodplains and prime farmland, which all fell under the Suitable Sites category in LEED requirements. For all of these avoidances, a series of clips and buffers were utilized. Developers can obviously not build on these sites, which is why buffers were completed. According to LEED V4 requirements, which came out in 2013, each factor has a different avoidance distance. Waters avoidance distance is 100 feet, wetlands avoidance distance is 50 feet and floodplains avoidance distance is also 50 feet. The next set of criteria falls under Location and Transportation. These are transit systems and density of block groups. For these two factors in the LEED certification process, series of joins, select by attributes, clips and buffers were utilized. The density of a block group had to be 200 or more people per block. This number was chosen because LEED certifications states that there must be 30-80 people per acre and an average block has 2.5 acres. The range of 30-80 was