Priority Places is a powerful interactive mapping and prioritization web-based tool to facilitate business siting, neighborhood renewal, job creation, and real estate development by enabling users to identify optimal locations for their activities based on geographical criteria that they select and weight.

Client: City of Asheville, North Carolina

Challenge: The City of Asheville is the largest city in western North Carolina and serves as the regional hub for business, health and human services, and numerous other community amenities. The City has made a considerable investment in developing mapAsheville, a series of mapping tools to access information on real estate development and crime in the city. The City was looking to increase its GIS offerings with a tool that would promote economic development by enabling citizens, business owners, investors, and government agencies to identify optimal locations for their activities.

Solution: Working closely with the City of Asheville, Azavea used its DecisionTree® software framework to develop Priority Places. The tool enables users to select and assign weights to criteria that they consider important, such as proximity to infrastructure and amenities like interstate ramps, economic incentives like low tax value areas needing investment or demographic factors like density of adults with a college degree. Users also have the option of using a mask to limit their analysis to particular areas, such as Industrial Zoning. With the click of a button, Priority Places integrates this information to generate a heat map highlighting those locations that best meet a user’s specified needs.

Priority Places is integrated closely with the other mapAsheville applications. Users can click on a location to and pull up data about the property parcel, as well as ‘Smartlinks’ directing users to information about the location in other city mapping and development resources. Priority Places also leverages the capabilities of ESRI’s Business Analyst Online to enable users to generate detailed reports on demographic characteristics, retail expenditures, and housing for the area around any selected location.

Outcomes: Priority Places successfully leverages the city’s existing resources and spatial data to create a powerful, fast, and user-friendly tool for stimulating economic development. In 2008, the City of Asheville, North Carolina, won the prestigious ‘Excellence in Economic Development’ award in the ‘New Media Initiative’ category from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC) for mapAsheville Priority Places.

Websites:
http://gis.ashevillenc.gov/mapasheville/priorityplaces/