Aggiornamento

Summary
    In 2015, the U.S Census recognized the City of San Marcos (COSM) as the fastest growing city in the country for the third year in a row. (U.S Census) Like any successful growing city, guiding land development is crucial. This semester, Aggiornamento worked alongside the City of San Marcos, Planning and Development Service, to conduct a citywide susceptibility to change analysis to provide insight on land use trends and to identify areas that have a higher redevelopment probability. This analysis is an important tool that will assist with the city's plan to effectively manage growth. In addition, a detailed survey of current land use within the Heritage neighborhood was conducted to better understand what specific locations are susceptible to change, and to gain insight into characteristics that give this neighborhood its identity.

Purpose
  The purpose of this project serve as indicators to identify areas that have a high probability to be redeveloped versus those that are stable. Identifying these areas, allows the city to guide development and redevelopment projects in such a way that the goals of the preferred scenario are still met. One of these goals, is to ensure that some neighborhoods maintain their existing character. The survey conducted in the Heritage neighborhood, provides a detailed understanding of areas within this part of the city that may be developed or redeveloped in the future based on correlations between factors such as owner occupancy and property values. In addition to this, comments made by residents of the neighborhood were analyzed as these provide insight to what type of development is wanted by the public. This information, can then be used as a tool, that will help manage proposed projects in this area in such a way that guidelines set by the public are still followed. It is our goal, was to provide the City of San Marcos with a product that will benefit in achieving their vision of how they want the city to grow.

Methods
  To conduct our analysis, we used an overlay tool, specifically weighted sum. This tool allowed us to create several layers, each one corresponding to a factor that can influence a location to be developed or redeveloped. The tool then adds the overlaying values of the layers from the input. It also allows for weights to be assigned to each layer, this is important as it helps to take into consideration the fact that some factors may have a significant influence over an area to change or prevent it from changing, while other factors don’t have as much influence.

Conclusion
    In conclusion, the city of San Marcos has potential to continue to grow as it is influenced by factors such as Texas State University and proximity to two major Texas cities. While there appears to be room for areas to supply the demand of future changes that may occur, it is important for the city to plan accordingly. These results illustrate areas that can be focused on to better manage development and redevelopment. However, due to the factors that were into consideration and some of the limitations, it would be wise to continue to run these kinds of analysis introducing new factors and more data to compare results. This allows for more in-depth analysis that may serve better use. We hope that these results not only meet our client’s expectations and needs, but set forth a foundation for future analyst to take this model and make it better.