Agenda - Planning Commission - 04/20/2015 - Special

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+2.0 has a substantially higher ratio or proportion than average, and a community with a Z-score of -2.0 has a substantially lower ratio or proportion than average. Next, we rescaled both sets of Z-scores to percentages so that the pre-adjusted allocation 10 would not be increased by more than 100% or decreased by more than 100%.This simply changes the scale of the standardized scores; it does not change their distributions. The result is a set of adjustmentfactors that can be weighted as desired to achieve the intent of the policy. For example, weighting each adjustment factor at 50% would allow existing affordable housing and job/worker balance to affect the adjustment step equally. We weight the affordable housing adjustment at 67% and the job/worker balance adjustment at 33%, allowing affordable housing to have twice as much influence on the allocation as job/worker balance. We do this because the existing housing stock is a more stable and place- based indicator; workers are more likely to move than housing units are. Table B-2 shows these calculations for Golden Valley and West St. Paul. For example, 58% of Golden Valley’s existing housing units are affordable to low-income households—lower than 66%, theaverage share for all sewered communities. This is reflected in the Z-score of +0.34 for Golden Valley’s housing measure. (The actual Z-score is -0.34, but we reverse the sign because the original measure does not go in the desired direction: communities with lower-than- averageexisting affordable housing shares have their allocations adjusted upwards.) West St. Paul’s affordable housing share of 92%, though, is considerably higher than the average of 66%; it receives a Z-score of -1.03. If we multiplied the pre-adjusted allocation by the standardized scores in Column C to calculate the adjustments, some communities’ allocations could be negative or more than their forecasted growth. The rescaled standardized scores described above avoid this problem: Golden Valley’s rescaled housing score is +0.10, while West St. Paul’s is -0.30. Applying weights (Column E) to the rescaled Z-scores (Column D) yields the final adjustment factors (Column F): +7% for Golden Valley and -20% for West St. Paul. The jobs adjustment factors work identically, although the sign of the Z-score is not flipped because the original measures goes in the desired direction (communities with higher-than- averagejob/worker balance ratios have their allocations adjusted upwards). Note that both communities are farther from the average community with respect to job/worker balance than existing affordable housing (the Z-scores are farther from 0). Because of the weighting, however, the adjustment factors are equal in Golden Valley and larger for housing in West St. Paul. 10 To do this, we divide the Z-scores for affordable housing and job/worker balance by 3.44, the standardized score with the highest absolute value. Page -22|METROPOLITAN COUNCIL