Land Corridor Tracking

Challenge

Understanding land in a fast-growing corridor — where development pressure is heading along the I-35 and US-377/82 axes north of Dallas–Fort Worth — meant browsing county GIS portals one parcel at a time, eyeballing road frontage from screenshots, and manually cross-referencing FEMA flood maps, utility service boundaries, and city limits. The civic and infrastructure facts that actually determine whether raw acreage can ever be developed were scattered across a dozen agency portals with no systematic way to read an entire county at once, or to notice when those facts changed. It is the same reusable-infrastructure problem Uplift Capital’s approach is built to solve, applied to land.

Solution

Built a self-contained PostGIS engine that ingests county parcel, road, and hazard data into one spatial database and runs corridor-scale geospatial analysis directly in SQL — paired with watchers that track public infrastructure and entitlement signals over time.

• County adapter pattern normalizing each county’s CAD/GIS source into a common parcel schema — Cooke County alone loaded 32,357 parcels, 5,730 road segments, and 2,247 flood zones, with adapters for Denton, Grayson, Montague, Wise, Fannin, and Navarro
• Road frontage measurement computing exact linear feet of frontage per parcel against TIGER/Line centerlines in Texas State Plane (EPSG:2276), using ST_Boundary intersection to avoid the polygon-area trap, plus road classification and multi-frontage detection
• FEMA flood analysis quantifying the share of each parcel in 100-year and 500-year hazard zones and the usable acreage that remains after flood exclusion
• Parcel geometry analysis deriving width, depth, regularity, and developable-yield estimates from raw lot shape
• Utility service-area layer loading PUC of Texas water and sewer CCN polygons (228 water + 88 sewer in-corridor) and computing each parcel’s serving provider and distance-to-service-edge — 84% of Cooke parcels fall inside a water CCN
• Jurisdiction layer classifying every parcel as inside city limits, within an ETJ ring (computed from Local Government Code §42.021 population tiers), or unincorporated county — the entitlement regime that governs what can be platted at all

Impact

• Corridor-scale screening reads an entire county’s development-relevant geography in one pass, replacing parcel-by-parcel portal browsing with reproducible SQL
• A single spatial source of truth unifies parcels, roads, FEMA flood, utility CCN areas, and civic boundaries that previously lived in incompatible agency portals
• Public infrastructure signals are surfaced as they move: a CCN-amendment watcher re-pulls PUC service-area shapefiles weekly and diffs them to catch new and pending utility expansions, and a city-agenda watcher scans posted agendas for entitlement activity across corridor towns
• Additional civic watchers extend the radar to deed activity, MUD/PID filings, school-district growth, TxDOT access permits, and co-op/utility expansion — each tracking a public signal of where development capacity is forming
• Distance-to-utility and jurisdiction reads turn an abstract map into a concrete civic question per parcel: can this land be served, and who decides whether it can be platted
• A transparent weekly digest summarizes movement across the corridor with every conclusion traced to a written, inspectable reason — keeping a human in the loop rather than substituting an opaque score