MapCraft Labs streamlines policy analysis by replacing countless spreadsheets and GIS maps with a modern multi-user web app
How is MapCraft Labs different?
For many policy questions, the answers vary across space—whether a study area, corridor, city, or metro area. Often, policy analysts must compromise: either use sophisticated modeling techniques to examine a few prototypical places, or analyze the entire study area using simplified approaches or proxy measures.
We built MapCraft Labs to resolve this tradeoff. With MapCraft Labs, you get the best of both worlds: high-quality analysis at all scales. Processes that were traditionally focused on creating a few representative spreadsheets—like real estate pro forma analyses—can now be run city-wide.
Ask high impact questions
You define the specific analyses that are relevant to your project. Design the analysis in Excel, and then upload to Labs to see how results vary across places. MapCraft Labs can be used to analyze real estate feasibility, affordable housing, regional growth, transit, and more.
Get context-specific answers
MapCraft Labs runs analyses on every parcel (or TAZ, census tract, neighborhood) and maps the results. Large datasets? Not a problem. MapCraft Labs can help users understand how important parameters affect outcomes on each parcel across a corridor, an entire jurisdiction, or a whole state. For example, we used Labs to analyze more than 2 million parcels covering the entire state of Colorado.
Test scenarios
MapCraft Labs makes it easy to model the impact of different policy options or changing market conditions. With just a few clicks, users create new scenarios to test how widespread changes or geographically targeted measures would impact results.
Get Answers to Your Urban Policy Questions
Gentrification and displacement
Evaluate the factors that influence gentrification and displacement to understand spatial implications for affordability and equity.
Affordable
housing
Calibrate policies like inclusionary housing and density bonus programs that rely on market forces to deliver affordable housing.
transit-oriented development
Analyze TOD potential of transit investment alternatives. Integrate TOD, gentrification, and housing assessments in one tool.
Regional transportation Planning
Model land use impacts of regional transportation investments and visualize scenarios for policymakers.
Upzoning Policies
Understand the influence of different upzoning policies on real estate development potential, including the interaction of multiple policies.
Urban growth potential
Simulate parcel-level development potential to understand growth capacity within jurisdictions and urban growth boundaries.
Real estate funding and financing tools
Evaluate how different funding and financing tools could inform real estate development opportunities in particular contexts.
District Funding
and Financing
Assess the public bonding capacity of real estate tools like tax increment financing, local assessment districts, and development exactions.
Geographic Equity
Compare how the costs and benefits of economic development initiatives and other public investments vary across space.
Supporting Policy Analyses Nationwide
Our clients and users include governmental agencies, non-profit organizations, and private businesses. For-profit clients remain undisclosed.
MapCraft has entered into a strategic partnership with ECONorthwest to configure and deliver MapCraft Labs to ECONorthwest's clients in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Produce newsworthy insights with MapCraft
Case Study: MapCraft partnered with the Terner Center for Housing and Innovation at UC Berkeley in 2021 to analyze the potential impacts of California Senate Bill 9, which legalized duplexes and lot splits on single-family zones in California as of January 1st, 2022. We estimated that the bill could increase the number of potential new market-feasible homes by 700,000 statewide. Our analysis was cited in news coverage by the LA Times, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Vox, Slate, Bloomberg, and more.
Ground plans in the reality of real estate feasibility with MapCraft
Case Study: Sound Transit turned to transit planners, station architects, urban designers, and other experts to help plan the West Seattle to Ballard Link Extension. To advise Sound Transit on station area planning strategies, ECONorthwest relied on MapCraft to categorize context-specific equitable transit-oriented development (ETOD) opportunities, including evaluating the financial feasibility of more than one hundred building prototypes on each parcel in the corridor to test how different transit designs, market conditions, and zoning policies could influence development outcomes.
Formulate better land use and transportation policies with MapCraft
Case Study: SPUR (the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association) relied on MapCraft to understand how different policies could shape the Bay Area’s growth in more sustainable ways. Based on MapCraft’s policy scenario testing, including an evaluation of business-as-usual policies, SPUR identified the best strategies to meet the growth principles that defined their New Civic Vision for the Bay Area in 2070.
Read our case studies to see how MapCraft has helped organizations across the country
Test Drive a MapCraft Lab
Our live Lab demo lets you test how various inclusionary housing policies would change the financial feasibility of new multifamily development on the West Coast.
Built on Experience
MapCraft's founders were inspired to build MapCraft Labs following decades of work in urban planning consulting, real estate investment, and software development
Ian Carlton is a social entrepreneur and educator who helps people shape their cities in sustainable ways. Ian lives in Portland, OR.
Fletcher Foti is a conscientious coder whose projects seek to clearly communicate how our cities work. Fletcher is based in Oakland, CA.
Contact Us
We look forward to hearing from you
We are located in Oakland and Portland
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