Successful housing coordination and production often involve a variety of scales. Depending on the state, land use decisions can involve a multitude of stakeholders and decision makers. Funds for housing flow through different bodies that operate in various jurisdictions. 

A growing portion of CommunityScale’s work explicitly employs regional perspectives to foster smart growth and efficient coordination. Our clients—metropolitan planning organizations and regional planning commissions, counties and councils of government—are using a regional lens to weigh housing policies, programs, and partnerships and where solutions are best deployed.

Regions.communityscale.io is a comparison tool, providing both the local and regional perspectives. By aggregating housing, workforce, household, and affordability data at the regional level, decision makers and interested parties can see how a region is doing as a whole and compare with both nearby regions and national trends. Within a region, a Census tract view is also available, allowing the user to spatially explore local trends and variation.

Datasets are drawn from the same sources as CommunityScale’s Housing Forecast: the American Community Survey, Census PUMS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, HUD, LODES, and private data sources. As presently designed, the regional explorer offers a snapshot of population dynamics, employment trends, and housing. 

The regional explorer is launching with metropolitan planning organization geographies. We’re excited to continue to add regional geographies (COGs, RPCs, and others) to the platform and expand its use potential.