The Sustainable Urban Systems emphasis merges traditional data analytics with complex systems analysis to better inform decisions around the wicked problems of urban development like urban land use, mobility, sustainability and hazard analysis.
An Opportunity to Purchase Act ("OPA") policy gives tenants, qualified nonprofits, or jurisdictions the first opportunity to purchase a residential property or assign their right to purchase to another entity when the owner is ready to sell. The City of East Palo Alto (EPA) has been considering an OPA policy, which has aroused heated discussion among stakeholders. The report tried to explore quantitatively from the perspective of policy necessity. More specifically, two questions will be answered:
- whether the housing burden is a relatively severe challenge for most residuals in EPA and
- whether single-family dwellings should be included in the policy.
For a given discrete hazard event, whether it happened in the past or is predicted to happen in the future, we could geospatially visualize the boundary of the hazard. The vulnerability of each point in the boundary can be quantified based on its physical meaning. The project developed a hazard risk analysis to estimate the vehicle damages caused by flooding in Menlo Park City.
We evaluated the accessibility of critical amenities for each block in Menlo Park City by introducing "isochrones," which are bands of equal distance (or duration) travel. In our report, "isochrones," contain 5-minute, 10-minute, and 15-minute walking, driving, and public transit distance from the center of each block. "Complete Score" is imported to quantify the accessibility, with which we can analyze whether an area has convenient amenities. Also, for urban planners, our work can be a reference to determine where the next amenity should be built.
The report develops an assessment of the equity implications of air quality (via PurpleAir) in San Mateo County. The report takes two cities (Menlo Park and Redwood City) as examples and analyzes their geographic equity by mapping the Air Quality Index(AQI) of each block group and plotting the average PM 2.5 in February. The population equity is conducted by comparing the PM 2.5 distribution across different income groups and different racial groups. Finally, in data equity part, the report gives some suggestions to the suppliers of PM 2.5 probes by proposing two sets of metrics for selecting which block groups have greater demand to PM 2.5 probes.
The report analyzes Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in Redwood City. Vehicle emissions and building emissions are considered as main GHG contributors. We compute the commute emissions based on block group (cbg) granularity to get higher accuracy. LODES 2013 to 2019 data are used to calculate commute emissions for the city as both an origin and destination. Residential and commercial electricity and gas usage from 2013 to 2019 data (PG&E) at the ZIP code level is used to estimate the building GHG emissions. We also analyze the effect of EV adoption on GHG emissions with an exponential decay model.