Virtual Main Street-A new computer program helps communities plan for the future.

For residents of Steamboat Springs, Colo., a popular resort two-and-a-half hours northwest of Denver, finding affordable housing has become a chore. Known for winter skiing on the slopes of Mt. Werner and summer boating on the Yampa River, over the last few years this mountain town of 9,800 people has experienced a boom in year-round tourism, and the cost of living has skyrocketed.

Story by Willa Reinhard Preservation Online

Yet three years ago, when the city made plans to develop a mixed-income apartment complex west of town, neighbors worried. Would a cluster of buildings disrupt the scenic landscape?

Enter CommunityViz, a state-of-the-art, three-dimensional computer mapping software that helps communities visualize and analyze the future. "Steamboat Springs residents used CommunityViz to see exactly what the development would look like from the road," explains Doug Walker, managing director for the company, based in Boulder, Colo.

Introduced to the general market by the Orton Family Foundation less than a year ago, this planning software —available for $4,995 per licensed user—lets users create virtual towns and experiment with various scenarios and consequences. So far, the program has been scooped up by more than 100 communities across the country from Falmouth, Maine, to Los Angeles, Calif.

ComunityViz view

Like SimCity, the computer game that allows players to build make-believe cities with fictional citizens, CommunityViz is a virtual-reality program. But while SimCity fans deal with monster attacks and nuclear meltdowns, CommunityViz subscribers—regular folks or people on planning commissions—try to envision how a proposed strip mall, for example, might affect a country road or impact education, land-use, utilities, or tax revenues.

In Steamboat Springs, the town planning board and council ultimately approved the apartment buildings under the condition that trees be planted to screen them from the road. In addition, says Walker, residents who had assumed the hike in housing costs resulted from rising land costs, realized, with a CommunityViz analysis, a small decrease in bank interest rates would have a greater impact on lowering mortgage rates, for example, than lowering the price of land. "Community pressure then shifted away from landowners and onto financial institutions," Walker says.

The software program’s roots took hold more than 50 years ago in Weston, Vt., a village in the Green Mountains. In 1947, an entrepreneur named Vrest Orton opened a tiny shop that would grow, under the direction of his son Lyman, to become the successful online and catalog company known today as the Vermont Country Store. Lyman, a long-time participant on Weston’s planning board, and his neighbor, Noel Fritzinger, decided that it was time to give back to the community. So in 1995, they formed the Orton Family Foundation, a private, not-for-profit operating foundation that would launch and run programs to help rural areas cope with the social, environmental, and physical effects of development. CommunityViz was their first venture.

"Lyman wanted to help citizens become involved in the process of shaping their own changing environments," says Walker.

(CommunityViz)

Ken Wall, president of Geodata Services, Inc., in Missoula, Mont., has jumped on the CommunityViz bandwagon. "I’ve been doing community mapping since the mid-80s, and this is by far the most exciting tool I’ve used," he says. Wall’s company is using the technology, as part of a national Firewise program developed with $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Services and the Department of Interior, to assess the risk for private homes located in fire-prone areas in the West.

"There has been tremendous growth in the Rocky Mountain region over the last several years, and the many homes being built—both permanent residence and vacation homes—create lots of issues in terms of fire risk," Wall says. A safer home would have, for instance, a clearing of 300 feet around the structure, a metal roof, more than one road leading away from the house, and access to water and a fire station.

CommunityViz saved Wall a lot of leg work, allowing his team to assess an entire community at a time—including homeowners who don’t live in the area year-round—and present them with "what if" scenarios. For example, what would happen if 20 percent of homes installed metal roofing instead of shingles, or 50 percent of people cleared trees and brush around their homes?

"One of the coolest things about CommunityViz is you can pop from a two-dimensional map to 3-D map," Wall says. "It’s as if you’re walking around the land or flying in the air. People get a much better sense of what’s going on when they can see trees and homes and roads."

Sound easy? The folks at CommunityViz assert that the everyday homeowner could use the interactive technology from the kitchen table. But according to Matt Mega of Eureka Township, Minn., a rural community of 1,490 located two miles south of Minneapolis, the learning curve is a bit steeper than the company lets on. "Your average citizen wouldn’t be able to use it without assistance," says Mega, of 1000 Friends, an organization focused on protecting the state’s environment and resources.

Early last year, before the software went public, the small farming town was one of 20 communities nationwide to receive CommunityViz free of charge. Eureka’s proximity to the booming Twin Cities means change for this rural community. The population of its county had increased by nearly 30 percent between 1990 and 2000, according to the U.S. Census, and the city of Lakeville, just north of Eureka, is predicted to be one of the fastest-growing cities in the area over the next 30 years.

"We wanted to look at the town’s options for growth and answer questions like ‘How much farmland would be lost?’" says Mega, who led the project.

With equipment from the Orton Family Foundation and a $50,000 grant from the Minnesota Office of Environmental Associations, 1000 Friends and the town of Eureka assembled a 10-citizen committee to meet once a month to review and give input on twelve different growth scenarios.

"CommunityViz is a great asset to us. Without it, we would have spent a lot more time communicating and analyzing the scenarios," Mega says. "But there’s so much the software can do. The trick is to get it to do what you want it to do."

http://www.nthp.org/magazine/archives/arch_story/092002.htm