Portland startup Polytechnica wants to do for municipal zoning what Intuit did for the tax code. That is, the company wants to make it easier for architects, developers and other urban planners to understand zoning requirements on a piece of property the way Intuit's TurboTax helps users file their taxes.
In both cases the information is public. However, it’s tough to find and dense.
Polytechnica’s flagship product UrbanForm is being tested by a handful of Portland customers using the Rose City’s zoning code. The company hopes to add Seattle’s code to its product early this year.
With UrbanForm, users can get site-specific information on zoning through a web application. It uses artificial intelligence and GIS technologies to tell users what can be built on given properties, with a summary and links to source documents and calculated results for elements like setbacks and building heights. Users can also search and filter sites based on building parameters.
“The product is from my experience as an architect for 20 years,” said co-founder and CEO Quang Truong. Manually searching out, reading and interpreting zoning code “was part of my job. I spent hours doing this work for every project that walked in the door. I knew there must be a better way.”
Several dozen Portland-area building and planning professionals are beta-testing the product. Early feedback has been encouraging, Truong said, and the testers have helped the company see just how big of a business concern the traditionally time-consuming work is.
“Both building regulations and zoning were born out of concerns for public health: clean water, fresh air, effective sanitation. But political expediency and outmoded planning concerns drove many of those early regulations, and jurisdictions have spent a century applying Band-Aids to problems,” said Paddy Tillett, principal at ZGF Architects in a written statement. “We now have massively complicated regulations running to thousands of pages in length that require an army of experts to interpret and implement.”
The platform is built to scale and can add other jurisdictions. Portland and Seattle, which both have complex zoning codes, provided good starting places to ensure a robust system, Truong said.
The company intends to generate revenue two ways: through a single-use charge for those interested in one-time reports, and, for companies with bulk land assessment needs, subscriptions.
Truong said he has been thinking about how to solve this problem for years but has been working on it full time for the last two. Currently, the company consists of Truong and co-founder Anna Shakotko as well as a team of contractors building the product.
Truong has considered ways to address zoning challenges for years and began working on the item full time for the last two. The company currently consists of Truong and co-founder Anna Shakotko, as well as a team of contractors building the product.
The startup is bootstrapped so far, but Truong said outside funding could be a possibility with the right partner.
