We developed four scenarios to forecast the impacts of policy measures affecting new housing unit lot sizes on single-family residential water consumption for the City of Phoenix and Town of Paradise Valley, Arizona. Policies approximated the statistical distribution of year 2000 lot sizes or produced smaller lot sizes. Policies mirrored the year 2000 spatial pattern of lot sizes or were distributed with higher densities (smaller lots) near transportation corridors. Along with lot size, we used census tract level parameters from year 2000 water estimates for percent homes with pools, percent homes with mesic landscaping, and mean household size to forecast water consumption. Each scenario was modeled with a local geographically weighted regression (GWR) model and a global ordinary least squares regression (OLS) model. This is the first study to apply GWR to forecasting. A policy mirroring the year 2000 spatial pattern of lot sizes with smaller lots produced the lowest mean annual housing unit water consumption at 214.77 ccf. Higher density lots along transportation corridors would have little impact on consumption. GWR forecasted lower per capita water consumption than the OLS for all scenarios. Our approach should be used in other forecasts exploring policy implications for natural resource management.
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Paper provided by GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation in its series GeoDa Center Working Papers with number
2008-9.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C53 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Forecasting and Other Model Applications