News + Insights
How does your community plan for uncertainty and complexity?
Scenario planning is an approach to planning that puts uncertainties at the heart of the planning process, prompting the community to examine key variables like climate change, uncertain growth trends, and evolving housing preferences. Cascadia Partners is working with the City of Flagstaff and Coconino County Arizona to incorporate scenario planning in their Regional Plan for 2045.
Over the course of 2023, we engaged the Flagstaff community in both exploratory and normative scenario planning, using games, surveys, open houses, and community conversations to gather information to create a set of potential scenarios for future growth in the region. We recently kicked off our next round of engagement, where the public will choose a preferred growth scenario.
Welcome New Hires!
Cascadia Partners has continued to grow and expand our urban planning services in 2023. Please welcome our newest team members! Rhey, Sara, and Rebecca have all joined the CP team in the last few months and we are excited to introduce them here.
Using TestFit to Demystify Zoning
TestFit is one of our most valuable tools for land use analysis - it allows us to consider all the options, identify the most viable scenarios, and make informed decisions about how to maximize the potential of our project sites. So we were thrilled that TestFit featured us as a use case on their website - check out this article featuring Cascadia partner Jamin Kimmell and how we use this software.
Making ADUs More Accessible in Sacramento
How can we make housing development for small scale housing projects like Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) more accessible and easy to understand for everyday people? We led a team to develop an ADU program and a Housing Development Toolkit for the City of Sacramento that serves as a comprehensive one‐stop‐shop resource website where the public can navigate the myriad of regulations and permitting processes in developing an ADU, in addition to a Housing Development Toolkit that identifies developable sites and outlines resources for development.
Let’s Play: Building Games for Public Participation
This September, CP community engagement specialist Ayano Healy facilitated a workshop called “Let’s Play: Building Games for Public Participation” with Giovanni Pérez Kelly Guthrie and Sara Dechter at the IAP2 USA International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) conference in Seattle.
This approach to community engagement is not only effective, but it’s creative and fun! The workshop covered how and why gamification can enhance public involvement. Workshop attendees got to brainstorm gaming ideas and created prototypes of games to use for problem-solving and building community for their own projects.
Planning for Housing in Rural Oregon
Our recent work helping the City of Lebanon address their housing shortage is in the news. "The report acknowledged Lebanon’s “significant progress” in development for low- to upper-income households since 2019 but outlined a major housing need for very- and extremely-low-income households. However, Cascadia partner Jamin Kimmel said the latter was harder to incentivize for developers because the profit wasn’t high enough to make it worthwhile."