For a site in Manhattan, just by using Google Earth and drawing a 1/4 mile circle is easy to see that the density is met without any issues. But for sites near open spaces, or in suburban areas, what is the best way to document this credit? Use Google Earth and the ruler to measure out the roads and then estimate the footprints of buildings? Use an Autocad file, if available from the Design Team, to measure footprints and do calculations of areas? Go to the tax assessor website and try to find the buildings within the radius? All of these seem to take a large amount of time. Is there one way that reviewers prefer to see?
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Emily Purcell
Sustainable Design LeadCannonDesign
LEEDuser Expert
371 thumbs up
February 18, 2019 - 5:46 pm
Hi Deborah, there was a good thread about this on the NC credit forum: https://leeduser.buildinggreen.com/forum/option-1-documentation-0
I've had the most luck downloading property data sets and using ArcGIS to do the calculations...but I'm lucky that my firm has an ArcGIS license and we mostly work in big cities with good data sets. Even then I can usually make the software give me a total land area in the radius calc quickly but I still have to do a decent amount of manually going back and forth with tax databases.
Would love to hear if anyone has successfully submitted something like a 1/4 mile circle in Manhattan without doing the math. I haven't had a v4 project in such a dense area yet but have a couple potentially coming up...
Katie Fluence
Elme Communities3 thumbs up
February 25, 2019 - 11:43 am
I haven't found a strategy that allows us to avoid the painful math all together, but we've actually found the dense areas to be much easier to document since you can stop documenting once you hit the threshold. Focusing on several very dense sites makes the documentation much faster!