Every jurisdiction in Coos County

Coos County has become the second county in America with every one of its jurisdictions' zoning codes and maps digitized and publicly searchable from a unified online platform. With unincorporated Coos County now live and a new contract bringing on Coquille, Lakeside, Myrtle Point, and Powers, the county joins Yamhill as one of only two places in the country where anyone, a property owner, a developer, a lender, a planner, can look up what can be built on any parcel, regardless of which city line it falls inside.

A distinguishing component of this South Coast work has been the relationship to the jurisdiction(s), from the number of iterative passes, and the closeness of the feedback loop with the jurisdictions. County and city staff tested the platform against records they know better than anyone and told us where it did not match. Giovanna Hite flagged a zoning designation that disagreed with the county's own maps. Jill Rolfe identified that our data was not accounting for split zoning, and then supplied the corrected shapefiles herself. Amy Dibble read through our sample reports and sent back a detailed list of what needed fixing.

Zoning lives in documents, but its accuracy lives in the people who administer it every day and know where the exceptions are. Our work is to move what they know into a place everyone else can reach, so that the answer is waiting before the question gets asked.

This is what we're trying to build: intelligence that surpasses what can be discovered publicly, achievable only through close collaboration with the jurisdiction, rivalling what the most experienced and knowledgeable people possess only within their heads, and paid forward to all through a better experience.

Two things launched alongside county coverage, in large part due to our relationships with the jurisdictions. Permit data is now available across all Coos County jurisdictions, layering active and historical permit activity onto the zoning picture.

And we are launching land use and building inventory dashboards, which answer questions about a whole jurisdiction rather than a single parcel — what is already built, how land is currently used, and where capacity remains.

Thanks go first to Stephanie Hadley at Southern Oregon Coast Regional Housing, who funded this work and championed it through all three phases, and to the Oregon Community Foundation. Amy Snyder and Nathan Wildfire at the Missing Middle Housing Fund kept the coordination moving, and Matthew Vorderstrasse at the North Bend City / Coos-Curry Housing Authorities connected the effort to the region's broader housing work. Thanks as well to Jason Olson, Amanda Jimenez, Ellen Breiter, Jason Corbus, Mike Dado, and Paul Slater at Coos County Community Development; to Palak Pandey, David Milliron, and Derek Windham in North Bend; to Nichole Rutherford in Coos Bay; and to Nicollete Cline and Shannon Smith-Franklin in Bandon.

Welcome to the teams in Coquille, Lakeside, Myrtle Point, and Powers. None of this would have happened without the active participation of the jurisdictions themselves.

Read out press release, attached here:

UrbanForm_CoosCounty_PressRelease_260819.pdf

Download PDF • 151KB

Take a look at UrbanForm for Coos County here: coos.urbanform.us