Beginning in 2005 I led MAPC’s long-term demographic projections and land use forecasting activities. These efforts include the detailed scenarios used in the MetroFuture planning process; a thirty-year forecast completed in 2014; and ongoing efforts to improve models related to demographic change, household formation, location choice, and development activity. I oversee the development, refinement, and implementation of MAPC’s UrbanSim land use allocation model. Working with MassDOT and a dozen other regional agencies, my team produced census block-level projections out to the year 2050 for regional planning and policy analysis. 

I directed an effort to use a pair of land use and travel behavior models to forecast growth in vehicle miles traveled by 2030 under various scenarios, and estimate the relative impact of different land use patterns and pricing policies, alone and in combination with each other. MAPC’s UrbanSim model was used to create three land use scenarios; and the VisionEval RSPM model estimated VMT and emissions. The results show that transportation efficient land use patterns are essential to curbing runaway growth in VMT. 

At the request of the City of Boston, I led an effort to prepare detailed housing demand projections for the city’s comprehensive housing plan. Our team refined regional projections with more detailed city-specific assumptions in order to produce projections of housing demand by tenure, income level, household type, and householder age. We collaborated with City of Boston staff to incorporate projections into the citywide housing plan. 

At the request of a coalition of mayors and city/town managers, I directed an effort to produce a regional housing production target for 15 municipalities in Metro Boston’s Inner Core. I co-designed methods to estimate housing demand associated with projected economic growth; directed efforts to estimate parcel-level development capacity for the region; and oversaw the creation of a digital report for disseminating the findings of the research. The production target was adopted unanimously by the Task Force, was the subject of extensive press coverage, and remains the official policy goal for the participating municipalities.

I managed a research effort to analyze the impact of school construction on district enrollment in Massachusetts public school districts before and after major school construction or renovation projects that took place between 1996 and 2006. The primary goal of this effort, conducted for the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) was to ascertain whether enrollment increases after construction or renovation of a school facility were above and beyond what would have been projected to occur in the absence of a construction event. Our research found that new school construction is associated with a modest and temporary increase in enrollment; and we provided specific recommendations for how to incorporate these findings into facility design.