Democratizing Strategic Planning in Master-Planned Communities

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel decision-support tool for master-planned communities that quantifies residents' preferences and predicts support for infrastructure and amenity projects using survey data and utility theory.

Contribution

It introduces a new strategic planning tool that incorporates resident preferences, cost and risk sensitivities, and predicts funding support, enhancing participatory decision-making in community planning.

Findings

The tool effectively ranks project plans based on resident preferences.

It accurately predicts the percentage of households supporting each plan.

The mathematical model incorporates utility theory to handle diminishing returns.

Abstract

This paper introduces a strategic planning tool for master-planned communities designed specifically to quantify residents' subjective preferences about large investments in amenities and infrastructure projects. Drawing on data obtained from brief online surveys, the tool ranks alternative plans by considering the aggregate anticipated utilization of each proposed amenity and cost sensitivity to it (or risk sensitivity for infrastructure plans). In addition, the tool estimates the percentage of households that favor the preferred plan and predicts whether residents would actually be willing to fund the project. The mathematical underpinnings of the tool are borrowed from utility theory, incorporating exponential functions to model diminishing marginal returns on quality, cost, and risk mitigation.