A Different Approach to Public Engagement: Use Tech to Put Residents in Planners’ Shoes

When California law required Elk Grove (pop. 176,000) to create a strategic housing plan that involved the creation of 4,000 new units—no small feat in the age of NIMBYs—the city decided to take a different approach to public engagement. They partnered with a company called Balancing Act to create a simulation that put residents in city planners’ shoes.

Molly Bolon from Route Fifty writes, “Users were tasked with meeting a 2,063-unit goal for low-income households. They could review all the potential sites where increasing housing density had been proposed and learned about the zoning changes each site would require and how many affordable units each site would create.”

Residents could then try out combinations of sites to locate the required number of housing units and then “submit” their suggested plans to the city council. Chris Adams, the president of Balancing Act, told Route Fifty that the aim of the digital simulation was to “help users shift their mindsets from how developments affect their immediate vicinity to how it could help the entire community reach its housing goals.”

People today, “are very cut off from traditional civic institutions and engagement. Figuring out ways to use technology to our advantage to cut through that is of critical importance,” Ben Metcalf, managing director of the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation, told Route Fifty.

Elk Grove’s simulator is just one example of how communities are turning to online to gather better public feedback. Bolon’s article explores some additional strategies and examples of how modernizing the traditional public engagement process can yield positive results and involving a more diverse spectrum of the community.