I have a project proposal that would place elderly housing on vacant property that the Comp Plan classifies as commercial. What are some basic techniques for estimating the size of the market area for neighborhood-serving commercial around this site, and how much retail floor area the market could support based on Census information?
What is a good reference for finding such techniques?
You need to use a gravity model to determine the trade area for a specific (subject) commercial area.
Boundary = distance
1 + the square root of the square footage of the competing commercial areas divided by the square footage of the subject
where distance = drive time from subjet center to competing center
In addition to the Gravity Model, the Urban Land Institue might have some information for you.
www.uli.org
You can use County Business Patterns to develop population threshholds (i.e., type of store per capita in the region) or get some good information from ULI's Dollars and Sense of... series.
Sign square footage
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