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ULI New York Infrastructure Council Hosts Offshore Wind Panel at HR&A Offices

December 5, 2023 / No Comments

HR&A Advisors recently hosted an engaging panel discussion for the ULI New York’s Infrastructure Council exploring the history, challenges, and potential of offshore wind in the New York metro area in our New York Office.

Huge thanks to Jeff Lee Romero, Karen Imas, and Max Taffet for sharing their invaluable insights and extensive expertise on this crucial topic and special appreciation to Chi Chi Truong, Principal Ignacio Montojo, and Director Erman Eruz for their remarkable efforts in organizing this insightful event on behalf of the ULI NY Infrastructure Council.

More about the ULI New York Infrastructure Council

The mission of the ULI New York Infrastructure Council is to examine the major urban systems needed by the City of New York and the surrounding region, in order to function and prosper: transportation, telecommunications, energy, water supply, waste treatment and storm drainage. The Infrastructure Council assesses the relationships of these systems to each other, identifies future needs, trends and plans, and identifies successful infrastructure financing mechanisms worldwide. The Infrastructure Council promotes sustainable policies and practices which impact real estate development in the New York region and improves the understanding of their relationship to real estate values. Learn more…

How HR&A uses Amazon Redshift spatial analytics on Amazon Redshift Serverless to measure digital equity in states across the US

December 5, 2023 / No Comments

This article by Harman Singh Dhodi, Kiran Tati, Sapna Maheshwari, and Washim Nawaz was originally published on Amazon Web Services’ Big Data Blog.

In our increasingly digital world, affordable access to high-speed broadband is a necessity to fully participate in our society, yet there are still millions of American households without internet access. HR&A Advisors—a multi-disciplinary consultancy with extensive work in the broadband and digital equity space is helping its state, county, and municipal clients deliver affordable internet access by analyzing locally specific digital inclusion needs and building tailored digital equity plans.

The first step in this process is mapping the digital divide. Which households don’t have access to the internet at home? Where do they live? What are their specific needs?

Public data sources aren’t sufficient for building a true understanding of digital inclusion needs. To fill in the gaps in existing data, HR&A creates digital equity surveys to build a more complete picture before developing digital equity plans. HR&A has used Amazon Redshift Serverless and CARTO to process survey findings more efficiently and create custom interactive dashboards to facilitate understanding of the results. HR&A’s collaboration with Amazon Redshift and CARTO has resulted in a 75% reduction in overall deployment and dashboard management time and helped the team achieve the following technical goals:

- Load survey results (CSV files) and geometry data (shape files) in a data warehouse
- Perform geo-spatial transformations using extract, transform, and load (ELT) jobs to join geometry data with survey results within the data warehouse to allow for visualization of survey results on a map
- Integrate with a business intelligence (BI) tool for advanced geo-spatial functions, visualizations, and mapping dashboards
- Scale data warehouse capacity up or down to address workloads of varying complexity in a cost-efficient manner

In this post, we unpack how HR&A uses Amazon Redshift spatial analytics and CARTO for cost-effective geo-spatial measurement of digital inclusion and internet access across multiple US states.

Before we get to the architecture details, here is what HR&A and its client, Colorado’s Office of the Future of Work, has to say about the solution.

“Working with the team at HR&A Advisors, Colorado’s Digital Equity Team created a custom dashboard that allowed us to very effectively evaluate our reach while surveying historically marginalized populations across Colorado. This dynamic tool, powered by AWS and CARTO, provided robust visualizations of which regions and populations were interacting with our survey, enabling us to zoom in quickly and address gaps in coverage. Ensuring we were able to seek out data from those who are most impacted by the digital divide in Colorado has been vital to addressing digital inequities in our state.”

— Melanie Colletti, Digital Equity Manager at Colorado’s Office of the Future of Work

“AWS allows us to securely house all of our survey data in one place, quickly scrub and analyze it on Amazon Redshift, and mirror the results through integration with data visualization tools such as CARTO without the data ever leaving AWS. This frees up our local computer space, greatly automates the survey cleaning and analysis step, and allows our clients to easily access the data results. Following the proof of concept and development of first prototype, almost all of our state clients showed interest in using the same solution for their states.”

— Harman Singh Dhodi, Analyst at HR&A Advisors, Inc.

Storing and analyzing large survey datasets

HR&A used Redshift Serverless to store large amounts of digital inclusion data in one place and quickly transform and analyze it using CARTO’s analytical toolkit to extend the spatial capabilities of Amazon Redshift and integrate with CARTO’s data visualization tools—all without the data ever leaving the AWS environment. This cut down significantly on analytical turnaround times.

The CARTO Analytics Toolbox for Redshift is composed of a set of user-defined functions and procedures organized in a set of modules based on the functionality they offer.

The following figure shows the solution and workflow steps developed during the proof of concept with a virtual private cloud (VPC) on Amazon Redshift.

Figure 1: Workflow illustrating data ingesting, transformation, and visualization using Redshift and CARTO.

In the following sections, we discuss each phase in the workflow in more detail.

Data ingestion

HR&A receives survey data as wide CSV files with hundreds of columns in each file and related spatial data in hexadecimal Extended Well-Known Binary (EWKB) in the form of shape files. These files are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The Redshift COPY command is used to ingest the spatial data from shape files into the native GEOMETRY data type supported in Amazon Redshift. A combination of Amazon Redshift Spectrum and COPY commands are used to ingest the survey data stored as CSV files. For the files with unknown structures, AWS Glue crawlers are used to extract metadata and create table definitions in the Data Catalog. These table definitions are used as the metadata repository for external tables in Amazon Redshift.

For files with known structures, a Redshift stored procedure is used, which takes the file location and table name as parameters and runs a COPY command to load the raw data into corresponding Redshift tables.

Data transformation

Multiple stored procedures are used to split the raw table data and load it into corresponding target tables while applying the user-defined transformations.

These transformation rules include transformation of GEOMETRY data using native Redshift geo-spatial functions, like ST_Area and ST_length, and CARTO’s advanced spatial functions, which are readily available in Amazon Redshift as part of the CARTO Analytics Toolbox for Redshift installation. Furthermore, all the data ingestion and transformation steps are automated using an AWS Lambda function to run the Redshift query when any dataset in Amazon S3 gets updated.

Data visualization

The HR&A team used CARTO’s Redshift connector to connect to the Redshift Serverless endpoint and built dashboards using CARTO’s SQL interface and widgets to assist mapping while performing dynamic calculations of the map data as per client needs.

The following are sample screenshots of the dashboards that show survey responses by zip code. The counties that are in lighter shades represent limited survey responses and need to be included in the targeted data collection strategy.

The first image shows the dashboard without any active filters. The second image shows filtered map and chats by respondents who took the survey in Spanish. The user can select and toggle between features by clicking on the respective category in any of the bar charts.

Figure 2: Illustrative Digital Equity Survey Dashboard for the State of Colorado. (© HR&A Advisors)

Figure 3: Illustrative Digital Equity Survey Dashboard for the State of Colorado, filtered for respondents who took the survey in Spanish language. (© HR&A Advisors)

The result: A new standard for automatically updating digital inclusion dashboards

After developing the first interactive dashboard prototype with this methodology, five of HR&A’s state clients (CA, TX, NV, CO, and MA) showed interest in the solution. HR&A was able to implement it for each of them within 2 months—an incredibly quick turnaround for a custom, interactive digital inclusion dashboard.

HR&A also realized about a 75% reduction in overall deployment and dashboard management time, which meant the consulting team could redirect their focus from manually analyzing data to helping clients interpret and strategically plan around the results. Finally, the dashboard’s user-friendly interface made survey data more accessible to a wider range of stakeholders. This helped build a shared understanding when assessing gaps in each state’s digital inclusion landscape and allowed for a targeted data collection strategy from areas with limited survey responses, thereby supporting more productive collaboration overall.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how HR&A was able to analyze geo-spatial data in large volumes using Amazon Redshift Serverless and CARTO.

With HR&A’s successful implementation, it’s evident that Redshift Serverless, with its flexibility and scalability, can be used as a catalyst for positive social change. As HR&A continues to pave the way for digital equity, their story stands as a testament to how AWS services and its partners can be used in addressing real-world challenges.

We encourage you to explore Redshift Serverless with CARTO for analyzing spatial data and let us know your experience in the comments.

HR&A Advisors at Ten Across Summit in Los Angeles

December 5, 2023 / No Comments

HR&A is excited to engage with fellow climate advocates, transportation planners, housing experts, and change-makers at the Ten Across Summit in Los Angeles on December 5 – 7th.

About 10 Across

“The Ten Across geography—from California to Texas to Florida—features a diverse range of socio-economic, demographic, and climate related challenges. With an election year looming, the divisions in the country continue to widen, especially between red and blue states, urban and rural populations, and the major political parties. While the public is relatively consistent in its view on many critical issues, the distance between varying points of view has been exaggerated by social media, recent state legislation, and various court rulings.” Learn more…

Speaking
HR&A Advisors Partner Kate Collignon will be speaking in a panel discussion titled “Recovery of the City: Imagining Los Angeles and 10X Urban Centers in 2030…and Beyond,” alongside Tracy Hadden Loh, Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking Fellow at Brookings Metro and Marty Borko, Executive Director at the Urban Land Institute Los Angeles.

Connect with HR&A Attendees

Kate Collignon, Partner, San Francisco

Connie Chung, Managing Principal, Los Angeles

Martha Welborne, Senior Advisor, Los Angeles

Garrett Rapsibler, Director, Los Angeles

Ray Cabrera, Senior Analyst, Los Angeles

Verenice Sanchez, Administrative Assistant, Los Angeles

HR&A Advisors Supports Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund to Underwrite a $22.5M transaction for 80 Affordable Homes at Howard University

December 1, 2023 / No Comments

HR&A Advisors is pleased to announce the closing of $22.5 million in acquisition financing through the Amazon Housing Equity Fund (HEF) for the creation of 80 affordable homes at Howard Manor. Howard Manor is a historic building located on Howard University’s campus in Washington, DC. Howard University, in partnership with Provident Resources Group Inc. (PRG), is acquiring the building and, with the support of the Amazon Housing Equity Fund, converting the entire residential portion to affordable housing.

HR&A worked with Amazon, Howard University, and PRG to underwrite and close the transaction on behalf of the Amazon HEF. 100% of the homes will be affordable to households making 60% of area median income and will remain affordable, through rent restrictions, for 99 years. This project is part of a larger commitment from Howard University in 2017 to utilize best efforts to create 50 – 100 affordable units near its main campus. Howard Manor will immediately fulfill the University’s 2017 commitment at closing.

Rendering: Urban Investment Partners

The Amazon Housing Equity Fund is providing more than $2 billion to preserve and create over 20,000 affordable homes in Amazon’s home communities of Washington State’s Puget Sound region; the Washington, DC area/Arlington, VA; and Nashville, TN. Since its launch in 2021, the Amazon Housing Equity Fund has committed more than $1.8 billion to create or preserve more than 14,400 affordable homes for renters across the company’s hometown communities, including more than $1 billion to create or preserve more than 7,500 affordable homes for renters and homeowners in the Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia region.

HR&A works with Amazon as a credit underwriter for transactions in the Washington DC Metro Area and Nashville.

HR&A Summer Internship Program

November 29, 2023 / No Comments

HR&A is proud to be an employee-owned, mission-driven company committed to building a robust workforce with the brightest minds in our industry. Our people are dedicated to delivering on our mission to create vital places, build equitable and resilient communities, and improve people’s lives. Our Summer Analyst Internship Program offers students and early professionals an opportunity to turn their passion for urban development and policy into action. Interns earn invaluable real-world experience working alongside industry leaders who are tackling the complex challenges facing cities and communities across the globe.

As a company that believes great ideas emerge from bringing different voices and perspectives to the table, our Summer Analyst Interns are invaluable members of our teams, offering fresh ideas and asking questions that help us re-examine the status quo. Interns work on a wide range of project responsibilities including preparing written reports, presentations, Excel models for clients, firm marketing materials, and proposals for new projects. Many current members of HR&A’s team started as Summer Analyst Interns.

HR&A Spotlight on our People: Academic Engagement

November 28, 2023 / No Comments

HR&A Advisors is consistently inspired by our employees’ passion and dedication to supporting cities and communities around the globe. Congratulations to Research Analyst, Nisha Singh for showcasing her thesis in Istanbul at the “The Urban and Local Dimensions of Political Violence in Syria and the Middle East” conference hosted by the Syrian Urban Research Project. 

Her thesis “Planning Equitable Cities for the 21st Century: A Multi-Scalar Analysis of Urban Refugee Integration in Beirut and Istanbul” identifies potential solutions for compassionate, intercultural city planning by looking at other non-European cities and advocates for a mobility-centered approach to refugee policy. 

Abstract: 

According to the Center for Global Development, over 60 percent of the world’s 26.4 million refugees and around half of the world’s 48 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) live in urban areas, mostly in low and middle-income countries. This thesis explores how modern refugee policy, which is primarily developed at the international and nation-state levels, influences how both refugees and residents navigate urban environments in host countries. The case studies examined in this thesis are Beirut, Lebanon and Istanbul, Turkey. Both cities are sites of ancient civilization, former Ottoman metropolises, and have found themselves front and center of tremendous waves of regional displacement in the modern era. This thesis ultimately identifies a severe sedentarist bias in refugee policy which translates to rigid municipal policy ill-adapted to the true nature of displacement. This thesis identifies potential solutions for compassionate, intercultural city planning by looking at other non-European cities and advocates for a mobility-centered approach to refugee policy.

Read Nisha’s full thesis here. 

MDOT awards two contracts to study possible Light Rail, Metro, MARC Penn Line expansions

November 27, 2023 / No Comments

This press release was originally issued by NottinghamMD.

HANOVER, MD—The Maryland Department of Transportation on Thursday announced that two contracts have been awarded to study potential transit-oriented development sites at light rail and subway stations in the Baltimore region and at MARC Penn Line stations in the Baltimore-Washington corridor.

The contracts were awarded by the department’s partner, Maryland Economic Development Corporation, and officials say they are an important step in the state’s commitment to a bold new approach to create vibrant, diverse transit hubs.

“Governor Moore has entrusted us to create a world-class transportation network that’s accessible, sustainable and equitable for all Marylanders, and connect all modes through transit centers that rejuvenate and celebrate our neighborhoods and communities,” said Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul J. Wiedefeld. “These studies put that mission in motion.”

The two study contracts were awarded in recent weeks to the international research and consulting firm HR&A Advisors Inc., which has served as a consultant and master plan developer for projects in New York, N.Y.; Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Calif.; Research Triangle, N.C., Houston, Texas; and dozens of other communities in the United States and abroad.

“HR&A is thrilled to have the opportunity to work closely with MDOT and MEDCO to advance transit-oriented development in the State of Maryland,” said Stan Wall, Managing Partner at HR&A Advisors Inc. “Catalyzing the real estate market around MARC and MTA stations leverages the state’s existing infrastructure, increases access to opportunity, and fosters equitable and sustainable economic development. This strategic approach to TOD will create a lasting positive impact for the existing and future residents and business of Maryland.”

The Baltimore Region Study will examine the Maryland Transit Administration’s Light Rail and Metro Subway stations in the Baltimore region to identify sites with strong market potential for transit-oriented development that can provide new transit access and economic opportunity for communities. The study will evaluate the overall market for transit-oriented in the Baltimore region, identify challenges, opportunities and tools needed to incentivize impactful transit-oriented development; and engage with communities and potential private, institutional and nonprofit partners.

The Penn Line Study will initially look at MARC stations along the Baltimore-Washington corridor – Seabrook, Bowie State, Odenton, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, Halethorpe and West Baltimore – and examine market potential, infrastructure, investment needs, benefits and financing. A second phase will study stations north of Baltimore including Martin State Airport, Edgewood, Aberdeen, and Perryville. Both phases will consider the impact of MARC service expansion. Cross-state service into Delaware and Virginia is anticipated based on Maryland’s recent framework agreements with both states to advance discussions and explore pilot service opportunities.

The contract awards stem from two requests for proposals announced in August by the Maryland Department of Transportation and the Maryland Economic Development Corporation. Both studies will identify sites poised to become transit centers now, and also determine needs at other sites that could be addressed to make them strong candidates in the future.

Both studies will be conducted in the coming months. These efforts will analyze feasibility and overall goals for stations which will then lead to master developer partnerships and a full community engagement process.

“We value this opportunity to pursue Governor Moore’s vision and partner with the Maryland Department of Transportation to deliver transit-oriented development solutions that improve access to opportunity and enhances the lives of all Marylanders,” MEDCO Executive Director Tom Sadowski said.

Transit Briefs: AmeriStarRail, CTA, MBTA, Gateway Development Commission, MDOT, SEPTA, CHSRA (Railway Age)

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HR&A 2023 Firmwide Summit

November 17, 2023 / No Comments

Throughout 2023, our passionate staff have been committed to helping our visionary clients and ourselves to do better, and we decided to come together in person to share what we’ve learned, reconnect with our mission, and deepen relationships.

We brought our six offices together for our first ever Firmwide Summit where we hosted sessions about the future of cities — housing affordability, infrastructure, climate change, the future of downtown, technology, plus how we continue integrating equity into our work. We emerged with new ideas, stronger connections, and a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of the challenges facing our cities and communities — oh, and we had a lot of fun along the way.

HR&A at Urban Tech Summit

November 13, 2023 / No Comments

HR&A is excited to engage with entrepreneurs, policymakers, industry leaders, and public sector officials to delve into how cities worldwide are advancing decarbonization at the 2023 Urban Tech Summit. This two-day event at Cornell Tech’s campus in NYC will address technology, finance, and workforce trends shaping urban decarbonization prospects, fostering knowledge exchange through panels, keynote speeches, fireside discussions, and interactive workshops. The Urban Tech Summit serves as a comprehensive learning platform with the goal of igniting innovative solutions.

Be sure to catch HR&A Leaders at these speaking engagements:

November 14, 10:20 AM | HR&A Advisors Partner Jonathan Meyers will be a panelist on the Decarbonizing Building: Beyond Local Law 97 panel. Panelists will discuss the leading solutions for energy, efficiency, electrification, and carbon capture.

November 15, 2:15 PM | HR&A Advisors Director Giacomo Bagarella will facilitate the Climate Innovation Workshop: The Future Workforce: From fear of AI to fear of missing out.

November 15, 3:35 PM | HR&A Advisors Partner Kate Wittels will be the moderator for the Innovative Funding Approaches for Climate Tech panel. As the climate tech market grows more established, it’s essential to consider the future trajectory of the venture capital market for climate tech over the next decade and understand the various mechanisms that support innovation in this field.

HR&A Spotlight on our People: Academic Engagement

November 8, 2023 / No Comments

At HR&A, we believe that bringing a diversity of perspectives, identities, experiences, and skills to our work is essential for tackling the complex challenges facing our cities. As former public servants, urban planners, designers, city officials, activists, real estate developers, economists, and academics, we create value for our clients by integrating multiple disciplines into our work to help our clients transform their visions into actionable solutions.

As an employee-owned company, we love celebrating the achievements of our people, and we are consistently inspired by their passion and dedication to supporting cities and communities. Today, we’re excited to spotlight Allie Padgett and Amruta Salkalker for their recent academic accomplishments!

Senior Analyst Allie Padgett recently earned the ACSP 2023 Ed McClure Award for Best Master’s Student Paper for her paper “A Taco Truck on Every Corner: The Effects of Heightened Enforcement Threats on Street Vendor Legalization in Los Angeles.”

The Ed McClure Award recognizes superior scholarship in a paper prepared by a master’s student in an ACSP-member school. Submissions may address any topic of investigation generated in the course of pursuing a master’s degree in urban/city/community/town/regional planning.

Learn more here.

Amruta Sakalker shared research findings in the Journal to Environmental Science and Policy and at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference.

Check out this article in ScienceDirect, which highlights Senior Analyst Amruta Sakalker’s research findings from a 2-year effort for the National Science Foundation’s Smart and Connected Communities Initiative. Amruta showcases how Texas coastal communities are facing tremendous impacts of climate change while pollution from non-renewable industries continues to grow within the region. She highlights the critical role local CBOs are doing to support these communities. The article will be available in the journal’s January 2024 edition. Amruta also presented her recently completed doctoral research on a similar topic at last week’s Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Chicago on October 20th.