Tag: Planning & Zoning

The following text is taken from the United States Conference of Mayors Business Council 2021 Best Practices Report. To view the full report, please navigate here: usmayors.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Final-2021-BC-Best-Practice-Report.pdf

Register for Upcoming Webinar: webinars.gridics.com

How Gridics & the City of Miami, FL Revolutionized Zoning Transparency

Project Description: Zoning regulations are difficult for staff, citizens, and developers to understand and interpret at the individual property level. This leads to bottlenecks in development approvals, increases staff time to service daily questions from citizens, and causes a lack of transparency around solving housing, resiliency, and sustainability challenges.

Together with the City of Miami’s Planning and Zoning Departments, Gridics developed a comprehensive zoning management platform that has been in use across the City since 2016. At the heart of the Gridics platform is its patented zoning calculation engine that combines measurable zoning regulations as outlined in the code with GIS parcel analysis to calculate over 30 data points about every parcel in the city. Once calculated, the city has a foundational zoning property record data set that heretofore has never existed at scale.

Sitting on top of this data is the Gridics zoning information platform which integrates citizen self service tools, realtime code publishing, site analysis, and 3D mapping technology that makes it easy for cities to better service citizens and make smarter planning decisions.

City Challenge: The City of Miami and Gridics have been focused on the overarching goal of translating zoning regulations to the parcel level to make it easier for all to interpret, analyze, and understand. Zoning is too complicated and should promote — not impede — sustainable, equitable development. Addressing these challenges has defined the Gridics partnership from day one.

Additional pain points the Gridics platform solves for the City of Miami include:

• Front counter inquiries: Providing virtual citizen self service tools to look up parcel specific zoning attributes
• Outdated online code: Real-time staff editing allows code text updates in seconds, not weeks
• Development backlogs: Streamlining the plan review process
• Affordable Housing: Visualizing the effect of zoning and housing capacity based on policy levers in a 3D map
• Long Range Planning: Visualizing proposed zoning changes to make data driven decisions

Impact: Use of the Gridics platform delivers value to 6 different divisions within the City of Miami (Planning, Zoning, Building & Permitting, GIS, Information Technology and Economic Development) and drives thousands of dollars in cost savings each month.

The following are just a few of the many concrete process improvements:

• 60% decrease in citizen calls, emails, & visits to the planning/zoning front counter
• Up to 9 hours of staff time saved PER plan review
• Over 5,000 visits per month to online Gridics zoning resources
• Real-time code updates across text, maps, and self-service tools as soon as zoning changes are approved by City Commission compared to 6+ months delay prior

In addition to these efficiency improvements, Gridics delivers an intangible impact that is arguably the most important of all: making zoning accessible for everyone.

How-To: The Gridics zoning management platform was developed in close collaboration with City of Miami staff starting in 2016. The partnership began with questions… What aspect of zoning management is most cumbersome for staff? How could we make zoning easier for the public to understand? Which tools might encourage equitable real estate development in the private sector?

From there, the focus then turned towards building technology tools to address these challenges:

1. Creating a mathematical rules engine to digitize the City of Miami’s zoning code
2. Applying those rules to the 3D built environment
3. Testing the code calibration with City staff and developers
4. Developing a plan review application to interact with the digital zoning code
5. Molding the Gridics platform into three integrated applications (ZoneCheck, CodeHUB, and MuniMap)
6. Promoting the platform for widespread use among the private sector

From conception to implementation, the project took approximately 12 months. Over the following 4 years, the Gridics platform has grown to encompass millions of real estate data points across the City of Miami and handle thousands of web visits per month to its 3 applications.

General Tips: The beauty of the Gridics zoning platform lies in its scalability and flexibility. While building the rules engine for the City of Miami, the platform was engineered to handle both form-based and Euclidean zoning codes (metric and imperial conversions) for dense urban cities and suburban environments alike.

Miami proved to be the perfect development partner thanks to its new form-based code and unprecedented growth, however, Gridics can be leveraged just as easily in smaller municipalities. Cities large and small can now take advantage of a modern cloud based app and data platform that would cost millions for any city to develop on their own.

Budget: $60,000 Per Year for platform license, support & maintenance

Funding: General Purpose City Funds

By Janelle Jessen | Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | September 30, 2021 at 7:17am ET

Rogers, AR — The city is adopting new technology officials say will make it easier for residents to obtain zoning information about properties and increase efficiency in the Planning Division.

Rogers will be the first city in Arkansas to implement Gridics, a new technology that allows property owners, developers, elected officials and other stakeholders to look up zoning information and regulations online by address, according to Jason Doyle, president and CEO of the Florida-based company. They won’t have to travel to city hall to get such information.

Gridics will organize documents, plans and policies into a single digital platform, according to Ethan Hunter, city planner for Rogers. The self-service property information hub will allow people to understand the rules and regulations that might apply to their property or a development down the street, he said.

The technology will cost about $30,000 a year, and the city hopes to roll it out by the end of December, he said.

Historically, if community members wanted to know the zoning regulations associated with a property or what could be developed on the land, they had to look the property up on a zoning map, then read the lengthy zoning ordinance that describes what can be developed in a certain mapped zone, Doyle said.

Gridics allows people to enter an address into a search engine that provides 30 to 40 data points about a single property along with a 3D map and visualization tool that shows stakeholders current conditions as well as what could be developed on the property, Doyle said.

It can help people answer questions such as whether they may build a daycare on their property or how far their setbacks are, he said.

“Zoning is inherently confusing, and we’re trying to make it less confusing,” Doyle said.

The platform’s 3D maps help elected officials visualize how proposed zoning changes will impact how the city looks, Doyle said.

Gridics will also impact the six members of the city’s planning staff because each information request takes about 30 minutes to an hour to research, Hunter said. Whether community members call or visit the city office or use the new technology themselves, Gridics will streamline the research process to about five minutes, he said.

Cities that have already implemented Gridics report the technology has reduced calls and visits to city staff by about 60%, Doyle said. There has been an especially high demand for the platform since covid-19 caused many city employees to work from home, he said. Once city staff are freed up from answering questions, they can tackle other projects.

About 20 cities and counties in seven states have implemented Gridics, Doyle said.

Rogers’ growth and change in population brings a change in public service expectations, and Gridics offers a way to meet those, Hunter said. The new technology will help staff better serve the public without adding five new positions to the budget, he said.

Municipalities large and small are turning to the Gridics platform to facilitate transparent development regulations, provide click-button, comprehensive real estate data, and help municipal staff conduct business safely through online services.

For Immediate Release: September 7, 2021

Register for Upcoming Webinar: webinars.gridics.com

Auburn, CA — Gridics LLC today announced a partnership with the Community Development Resource Agency (CDRA) in Placer County, CA to adopt its integrated zoning management platform. Placer County will utilize all three Gridics applications in the cloud (ZoneCheck, CodeHUB, and MuniMap) to streamline planning, zoning, and land development and better serve its nearly 400,000 citizens.

As one of California’s fastest growing municipalities, Placer County is committed to leveraging smart city technology whenever possible to promote and manage sustainable development. Through Gridics’ interactive platform, the public can now understand what can be built and where in real-time based on the County Zoning Ordinances and Development Standards.

Steve Pedretti, Director of the Placer County CDRA says, “Gridics gives Placer County the ability to share with the public clearer and more precise parcel information on properties in the unincorporated area of the County. Placer County has wide-ranging land use characteristics from valley suburban to rural foothill properties, mountainous terrain, and world-class resorts near Lake Tahoe. Gridics’ dynamic platform provides easy to use access twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It has never been easier to access property information in Placer County.”

The Gridics platform delivers unique zoning and development allowance data for every property providing a unified zoning information portal allowing staff, citizens, developers, and municipal stakeholders to switch between dynamic zoning code text (CodeHUB), interactive 3D zoning and GIS layers (MuniMap), and user-friendly data tools (ZoneCheck).

“We are excited to partner with Placer County to digitize their zoning and real estate data,” explains Jason Doyle, CEO of Gridics. “Placer County came to us with the exact series of challenges Gridics was uniquely built to solve. Our patented engine provides municipalities with over 30 data points for every property including development capacity, allowed uses, density, and core zoning attributes which helps to streamline citizen services and provide a foundation for making smarter and faster data-driven decisions.”

Both Gridics and Placer County are on a mission to plan, develop, and build better communities. Through this partnership, citizens and municipal staff will be able to make more informed, data-driven decisions to positively shape the future of Placer County. The success of a community begins with smart zoning, and Gridics gives the power of parcel-level insights to everyone, accessible on any device.

About Gridics: Gridics provides real estate data and software applications for cities and counties in the area of zoning and economic development. For more information, visit www.gridics.com.

MuniMap Takes the Hassle Out of Zoning Visualization for Staff & Citizens

Register for Upcoming Webinar: webinars.gridics.com

It’s no secret that municipal zoning can be difficult to understand and navigate. Antiquated code text documents lead to hundreds—if not thousands— of citizen inquiries each year, cause headaches for staff to update, and ultimately impede new development.

MuniMap by Gridics was designed with one simple question in mind…. What if we made it easy to visualize zoning and real estate data at the parcel-specific level?

MuniMap brings zoning and real estate data to life like never before.

How can you expect staff, citizens, stakeholders, developers, and council members to imagine the impact zoning rules in a static text document will have on the skyline of a city? The bottom line is…. You can’t. That’s exactly why we built MuniMap — to make zoning and real estate data interactive, accessible, and transparent for everyone, all the time.

Municipalities across the country are leveraging MuniMap in unique ways, and here are just a few examples:

1) Visualizing by-right zoned development potential in 3D – City of Miami, FL

2) Leveraging the deepest parcel-level zoning data available to help reduce emails, phone calls, and front counter traffic – City of Miami Beach, FL

3) Encouraging and attracting new development – City of North Miami, FL

4) Giving citizens the ability to interact with zoning, GIS layers, and robust property filters – City of Hollywood, FL

5) Showing the real-time status of current development projects – City of Fort Lauderdale, FL

MuniMap delivers transparency for citizens, saves municipalities thousands of dollars each year on zoning management expenses, reduces low-value staff time, and improves collaboration with stakeholders and council members.

Join an upcoming webinar or contact our team today to learn how your municipality can be live on MuniMap in <6 weeks.

Gridics’ Expansion Across Florida Continues as More & More Municipalities Look to Upgrade Zoning & Planning Technology

For Immediate Release: May 12, 2021

Register for Upcoming Webinar: webinars.gridics.com

Miami, FL — Gridics LLC announced partnerships with the City of Coral Gables, FL and City of Winter Haven, FL to adopt its next generation municipal zoning technology platform in an effort to reinforce smart city initiatives and upgrade zoning and planning technology. By partnering with Gridics, Coral Gables and Winter Haven will drive transparency for both developers and regular citizens by making it easier to visualize and interpret how zoning requirements apply to specific properties.

The Gridics 3D zoning platform utilizes the requirements in the zoning text with property records, parcel shapes, and modern mapping technology to allow cities to visualize and calculate development potential such as setbacks, allowable heights, and other dimensional requirements at the parcel-specific level. With this first-of-its-kind capability, Gridics will deliver Coral Gables and Winter Haven a new and improved 3D zoning map, a platform to directly update and publish their zoning code text in real-time, and a robust software for staff to streamline processes and better service citizens.

Smart City Officer Hiep Nguyen says, “The City of Winter Haven is committed to leveraging technology to keep our community safe, our residents engaged, the economy growing, and the quality of life improving. We believe that our partnership with Gridics will be pivotal in improving our operational efficiencies, enhancing government services, and streamlining the way in which the Planning Division serves our community.”

Ramon Trias, Director of Zoning & Planning, further explains, “Coral Gables has developed and implemented best practices for town planning since founder George Merrick’s team of professionals conceptualized the community in the 1920’s. The Zoning Code was adopted in 1930, and in 2021, Gridics partnered with city staff to update the structure and content and to enhance the experience of the user and the accuracy of the information provided to the public. The 2021 version of the Zoning Code contributes to a century of best practices that built Coral Gables’ quality of life and should promote excellence in design and sustainability into the future.”

As a complement to its technology offering, Gridics urban planners and architects will assist Coral Gables and Winter Haven staff as they conduct zoning code amendments and model the real-time impact of zoning changes on development potential. The combination of Gridics’ patented 3D zoning engine and tech-enabled professional services proves to be a natural fit for municipalities like Coral Gables and Winter Haven that are looking for ways to drive efficiency and deliver world-class citizen services.

“We are excited to add the City of Coral Gables and City of Winter Haven to the growing list of Florida cities adopting our platform, but more importantly, we look forward to partnering with staff to help support their mission to bring government and citizens together,” says Jason Doyle, CEO of Gridics. “At Gridics, our core mission is to do our part to make cities and communities better places to live, work and play. Zoning plays a foundational role in achieving that mission, so we set out to make zoning easier to visualize and understand.”

About Gridics: Gridics provides real estate data and software applications for cities and counties in the area of zoning and economic development. For more information, visit www.gridics.com.

Miami-Based Smart Zoning Data & Tech Platform Begins Nationwide Expansion

For Immediate Release: April 21, 2021

Register for Our Upcoming Webinar: webinars.gridics.com

Miami, FL – Gridics LLC, a Miami, FL, based zoning and real estate technology startup, announced today that it has joined the United States Mayors Conference Business Council in support of their national expansion after seeing strong adoption across numerous cities in South Florida. Gridics is revolutionizing zoning, housing and development capacity analysis with its patented zoning calculation engine, providing cities and counties with a unified zoning information platform that combines modern geospatial analytics, mapping, code publishing and most importantly, deep parcel level zoning data. The Gridics platform helps municipal staff virtually service citizen inquiries and makes it easier for developers and investors to more seamlessly do business with its partner municipalities. After launching their public facing zoning platform two years ago, it has been adopted by the cities of Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Miami Beach, Hollywood, Coral Gables, North Miami and Bal Harbour.

The City of Miami was an early adopter and recently expanded its partnership to make its new Comprehensive Neighborhood Plan available on the Gridics platform. “Our partnership with Gridics has been outstanding, and through the [Gridics Municipal Zoning] platform, we’re providing innovative new tools to the public, while increasing process efficiency and reducing costs,” said Mike Sarasti, the City of Miami’s Chief Information Officer and Director of DoIT.

“We are excited to join the US Mayors Conference’s Business Council to bring our zoning technology and data expertise to cities and counties nationwide in order to help build and develop smarter and stronger communities of the future” says Gridics CEO Jason Doyle. “We are on a mission to bring our technology to every municipality in the country, providing the first ever zoning parcel record data layer for every parcel. Once a municipality joins the Gridics platform and calibrates their zoning ordinance into our engine, they open up a world of data that has never before existed at scale. This data significantly streamlines citizen services on a day-to-day basis and provides a foundation for conducting detailed long range planning analysis to better understand housing capacity, zoning inequities, economic development potential and infrastructure bottlenecks.”

The City of Miami Beach, FL, recently announced the start of a zoning code rewrite and turned to the Gridics platform to visualize their existing code in 3D via the Gridics MuniMap to be able to make it easier to visually convey to citizens and stakeholders the proposed code changes while improving citizen information access in the meantime. “Gridics developed cutting edge technology that facilitates analysis of a city’s zoning ordinance and allows for the visualization of changes in a built environment,” says Carmen Sanchez, Deputy Planning Director, Miami Beach.

About Gridics: Gridics provides real estate data and software applications for cities and counties in the area of zoning and economic development. For more information, visit www.gridics.com.

Gridics’ Municipal Zoning Platform Enables Citizen Self-Service, Smarter Planning

For Immediate Release: March 10, 2021

Miami, FL – Gridics LLC, a Miami, FL, based technology company, is revolutionizing zoning, housing and development capacity analysis with its patented zoning calculation engine, providing cities with detailed zoning data for every parcel. Using the Gridics platform, staff and citizens gain remote access to the data via a unified zoning portal which combines property search tools, code text publishing and a robust 3D zoning map. Since the launch of its Municipal Zoning Platform less than two years ago, Gridics has been adopted by numerous Florida cities of all sizes and with varying levels of complexity in zoning, including Miami and Fort Lauderdale.

The City of Miami recently expanded its Gridics partnership with the addition of its new Comprehensive Neighborhood Plan hosted on the Gridics platform. “Our partnership with Gridics has been outstanding, and through the [Gridics Municipal Zoning] platform, we’re providing innovative new tools to the public, while increasing process efficiency and reducing costs,” said Mike Sarasti, the City of Miami’s Chief Information Officer and Director of DoIT.

Their most recent addition, the City of Hollywood, FL, is the second largest city in Broward County. The Gridics platform aims to make it easier for residents, investors and developers to do business and interact with the city to get the information they need as efficiently as possible. “These new tools developed by Gridics allow Hollywood users to easily and quickly see the City landscape and the options available to them for building and development,” says Raelin Storey, City of Hollywood Director of Communications, Marketing and Economic Development.

The City of Miami Beach, FL, recently announced the start of a zoning code rewrite and turned to the Gridics platform to visualize their existing code in 3D via the Gridics MuniMap to be able to make it easier to visually convey to citizens and stakeholders the proposed code changes while improving citizen information access in the meantime. “Gridics developed cutting edge technology that facilitates analysis of a city’s zoning ordinance and allows for the visualization of changes in a built environment,” says Carmen Sanchez, Deputy Planning Director, Miami Beach.

In addition to the larger Florida cities above, Gridics has also been adopted by Coral Gables, North Miami, Winter Haven and Bal Harbour Village. “It was important to us to ensure we could service cities large and small. We’ve designed and built a next generation online zoning information platform that is affordable and easy to implement,” says Doyle.

“Our mission is to help build better cities and we’re doing that by arming cities with in-depth zoning and development capacity data for every parcel in their city for the first time ever,” says Jason Doyle, CEO of Gridics. “The old way to determine how zoning applies to a specific property requires citizens and developers to read through the zoning text and try to figure out how the various rules apply to their property. Most give up and contact city staff. We bridged that gap with our technology, making it easier for developers and citizens to get the zoning data they need via self-service apps, freeing up resource constrained staff. Without a zoning property record database for every parcel in your city, it’s like needing to ask for directions to go anywhere versus using the GPS map on your smartphone,” says Doyle.

About Gridics: Gridics provides real estate data and software applications for cities and counties in the area of zoning and economic development. For more information, visit www.gridics.com.

A look at how Gridics’ proprietary zoning technology helps municipalities calculate and visualize the impact of policy changes on housing capacity in real-time 3D

To view our full affordable housing report, please click here.

---

Background: The Affordable Housing Crisis

Municipalities across the US are grappling with a systemic problem that is worsening by the day: a lack of affordable housing

Rents have dramatically outpaced wages for the last decade, which has led to cost-burdened households in cities across the country. The affordable housing crisis is not new, though it is being exacerbated by the global pandemic, economic instability, inequality, policy decisions, rising construction costs, and a lack of transportation infrastructure.

For most municipal governments, addressing affordable housing begins with an understanding of the problem… Unfortunately, city officials don’t know where to begin.

Officials are going around in circles trying to answer questions such as:

• Are my city’s zoning ordinances too restrictive?
• Are my city’s regulations and processes not development-friendly?
• How is transportation making the crisis worse?
• What role do labor and material costs play in encouraging/limiting development?

---

How Gridics Addresses the Affordable Housing Crisis

Gridics has helped municipalities large & small analyze housing data, model the implications of each variable in 3D, and provide data-driven insights for policy recommendations.

Our technology and services encompass 5 areas:

1) Deep Urban Planning Experience
Examining ordinances with our team of experts who have written codes around the world

2) GIS Analysis
Applying rich GIS capabilities at the parcel, block, and entire city level

3) Parcel Scoring Model and 3D Visualization
Leveraging our patented technology to visualize citywide development capacity

4) Scenario Planning and Forecasting
Understanding the timeline and effect each variable has on affordable housing supply

5) Data-Driven Decision Making
Providing insights for policy recommendations based on 3D scenario analysis and capacity calculations

---

Getting Started With Gridics for Your Municipality

For more information about Gridics or to speak with our team, please contact info@gridics.com.

To view our full affordable housing report, please click here.

This week, the City of Miami added the Miami Comprehensive Neighborhood Plan (MCNP) onto the publicly-available Gridics Municipal Zoning Platform, CodeHUB. The MCNP is a key zoning document that creates the policy framework that guides all future public and private development decisions in the City of Miami to ensure the City meets the needs of existing and future residents, visitors and businesses, while preserving the character and quality of its communities.

The incorporation of the MCNP into CodeHUB will help to drive smarter regional planning decisions for the future by integrating future land use, environmental, and infrastructure requirements into an interactive, parcel level, 3D map. This is the first time that the MCNP has been made available to the public in such an interactive and accessible tool, allowing the public to be actively involved in understanding the direction of their community, including how the infrastructure will change to support future growth. The most updated version of the MCNP and Future Land Use Map (FLUM) will be made available 24/7 through this new platform.

This week’s online publication of the MCNP follows the successful 2018 launch of the Miami 21 Zoning Code on the Gridics platform, providing citizens an up-to-date and fully digitized version of Miami 21, plus parcel-specific lookup tools for citizens to get zoning property record data for their property or parcel.

About Gridics: Gridics develops real estate data and software applications in the area of zoning analysis and interpretation, scenario planning, site-selection and urban planning professional services. For more information, visit www.gridics.com.

The City of Hollywood has launched the Gridics 3D zoning map, text and property data platform. This new online tool brings simplicity, transparency and efficiency for City planners, residents, developers and those trying to research the City’s zoning code and development regulations. The new tool helps in three ways.

• First, a 3D interactive map with zoning code allows users to visualize the buildable capacity of every parcel in the City as allowed by zoning. The interactive map combines a wide range of data layers for a more complete understanding of the parcel. The tool also enables publishing code text changes in real-time.

• Second, the online property lookup tool delivers deep, parcel-specific zoning data to help users get the answers they need.

• Third, the City’s Code of Ordinances and Zoning and Land Development Code have been digitized into an easily searchable tool.

The Gridics platform aims to make it easier for residents, investors and developers to do business and interact with the City and get the information they need as efficiently as possible. “These new tools developed by Gridics allow Hollywood users to easily and quickly see the City landscape and the options available to them for building and development,” says Raelin Storey, City of Hollywood Director of Communications, Marketing and Economic Development.

“The technology is very powerful and provides a quick view and searchable, integrated options for a fast and easy user experience,” says Shiv Newaldass, Director of Development Services for the City of Hollywood. “We’re are extremely excited to be able to offer these tools to our customers.”

The City’s Code of Ordinances and Zoning and Land Development Code have also been converted into an easily searchable tool for customers’ ease of use.

Start using the interactive suite of tools today.

About Gridics: Gridics develops real estate data and software applications in the area of zoning analysis and interpretation, scenario planning, site-selection and urban planning professional services. For more information, visit www.gridics.com.