Grounded Solutions Network is a nonprofit that works to cultivate equitable communities by advancing long-term affordable housing solutions, and it supports a national membership base of organizations actively engaged in furthering shared equity homeownership. Grounded Solutions provides technical assistance services to a range of clients—such as community-based organizations, foundations, and municipalities—to facilitate the development of new shared equity projects such as community land trusts. Given that Grounded Solution’s membership is national in scope, members face differing political and financial challenges in their shared equity work. The Capstone team collaborated with Grounded Solutions to streamline the organization’s approach to conducting feasibility assessments. Through workshopping sessions with Grounded Solutions, the team identified key challenge areas that its members encounter and refined those categories based on findings from shared equity literature and feedback received from stakeholder interviews. In culmination, the team produced a toolkit consisting of a guidebook and an interactive data explorer tool.

The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) is responsible for installing and maintaining over 200 million linear feet of pavement markings, which are used on paved roadways to direct and inform drivers and pedestrians, and ensuring that the pavement markings are in a state of good repair in order to maintain the safe, efficient, and environmentally responsible transportation of people and goods. NYC DOT utilizes a predictive model to identify, inspect, and refurbish worn markings on a subset of city streets. Currently, only 70 percent of locations predicted to be worn are ready for refurbishment, and 14 percent of the agency’s refurbishment work is done on locations not predicted to be worn. NYC DOT tasked the Capstone team with improving the predictive model with refined criteria to increase its accuracy and efficiency in Brooklyn. The Capstone team recommended refining current factors, such as using the paint application month, instead of year, of previous markings, and adding potential new factors including snow plow use, street flooding, concentrations of construction sites, and environmental factors.