PSRC's Housing Policy Scenario Builder
The Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) coordinates regional planning across King, Kitsap, Pierce, and Snohomish counties in the greater Seattle area. As the region considered land use reform to meet growing housing needs, PSRC partnered with HR&A to build an accessible platform for planners and policymakers to identify development opportunities and understand rapidly shifting market conditions.
The Challenge
Housing stakeholders across the Puget Sound region were actively exploring land use reforms to accelerate housing production but lacked the shared data to evaluate their impact. Without a tool to assess where development opportunities existed, understand how market conditions varied across jurisdictions, or model what different policy choices might produce, decision-making was difficult to ground in evidence.
The Approach
HR&A is working closely with PSRC to build a multi-tool platform that captures demographics, housing supply, affordability, market conditions, and parcel-level development potential across all four counties.
Scenario Builder for modeling land use reform impacts on housing production.
Key features include:
- An interactive Scenario Builder that allows planners to adjust market assumptions and regulatory thresholds to model how different land use reforms would affect housing production
- Snapshot, comparison, and map views to explore housing trends and affordability metrics across multiple geographies
- A parcel soft-site explorer to identify underutilized properties by ownership type, zoning, and redevelopment feasibility — including faith-owned land, public parcels, and surface parking lots
- Automated housing needs assessments for any jurisdiction in the region, with data exports in CSV, Excel, and shapefile formats
Results & What's Next
Parcel-level explorer identifying underutilized sites across the region.
The platform has already shaped state policy: before its full launch, HR&A used an early version of the tool to analyze SB 6026, finding it could unlock thousands of commercial parcels for residential development across Washington state — helping inform the bill's passage in March 2026. As a five-year investment in regional housing planning infrastructure, the PSRC Housing Data and Policy Platform will serve as the primary shared resource for local governments, planners, and advocates across the four-county region, giving communities the evidence they need to make data-grounded decisions that accelerate housing production.