Challenge 01

Development Feasibility & Pro Forma Navigator

Build an AI-driven tool that generates a Development Ease Score for potential housing sites.

How to use these briefs

These briefs consolidate the original challenge set and the additional ideas developed in review. Each is broad enough to support multiple approaches while still naming a concrete user, decision, and demo.

Teams should build a working prototype, use real regional data where possible, explain assumptions and uncertainty, and demonstrate the product with at least one Pittsburgh or Allegheny County use case.

Problem statement

The region's older housing stock and constrained development environment create significant friction for new housing production, especially affordable and starter homes. Developers and planners struggle to understand how zoning regulations, infrastructure limitations, and environmental constraints interact to affect project feasibility. Without a clear way to quantify these barriers, development pipelines remain slow, costly, and unpredictable.

This challenge seeks an AI-driven tool that generates a Development Ease Score for potential sites, highlighting regulatory bottlenecks, required variances, and infrastructure gaps so cities and developers can prioritize fast-track sites and identify areas needing policy or resource intervention.

Success looks like

A user can enter a parcel ID or compare multiple parcels and receive a source-grounded Development Ease Score, a plain-language explanation of the biggest barriers, and clear flags for zoning, environmental, infrastructure, or policy issues that require further review.

Ready to build?

Use this brief to test a real parcel and housing concept.

The strongest submissions will make site feasibility easier to compare while showing the sources, assumptions, and human-review points behind each score.

Register for the hackathon