The low-lying green and yellow developments are those that produce a low amount of tax revenue, while the tall purple and red plots have a high tax value.

What’s fascinating about this model is that, without knowing the city or county, having no idea what the underlying development looks like, it’s nearly impossible not to find downtown. (The image is Des Moines, Iowa by the way.) Smaller satellite downtowns, new urban developments, and historic districts are similarly easy to find. What’s more difficult to find are the typical symbols of economic development. Can you find any of the three major shopping malls in this model? The vast office park headquarters of Wells Fargo? The Bass Pro Shop?

They blend in with the background radiation of suburban housing and are eclipsed by the potency of compact development. It’s important to keep in mind that this means an acre of big box store or shopping mall is only marginally more productive than one modestly sized detached housing.

Of course, developments like big box stores are not touted as success without cause. They often hold a substantial share of a community’s economic activity and produce more property tax individually than downtown buildings. What accounts for this huge disparity in tax productivity though, is configuration. Parking dilutes the substantial tax production of development with fiscally barren waste. When we account for that waste, we see a much different pattern of tax production.

MAPPING LAND WASTE

We can infer a great deal about the urban fabric from models like the one shown above, and we can supplement that understanding with some direct concrete examples. For today's data project, though, we also supplemented with land cover data, which gave us the opportunity to more directly compare compact land use with tax productivity. This data codifies the components of development, building footprints, roads, and of particular importance, parking.

For hundreds of years, figure ground maps such as this have been instrumental for understanding how development is woven together to form a place, or, what some call, the urban fabric. With these other elements at our disposal we can explore a more perverse kind of map: the distribution of parking in the city. In the map below, parking is illustrated in glaring red.

Let’s take a closer look at how different configurations of buildings and parking contribute to tax production efficiency in this example city of Des Moines.