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Solutions

Make housing conversations easier to follow.

Housing is the most contested subject in most plans. Tortoise 40 does not settle the argument. It makes the input legible, keeps the record complete, and separates what people said from how it was summarized.

What this covers

Engagement for housing planning

  • Housing plans
  • Community priorities
  • Location-based feedback
  • Policy education
  • Surveys
  • Document review
  • Public comments
01

Education before opinion

Housing policy is technical. Publish the background, the definitions, and the constraints as reviewable documents so comments respond to the actual proposal.

  • Housing element documents published for review
  • Page-level comments
  • Plain-language summaries alongside the technical text
02

Location-based feedback

Where housing goes matters more than whether housing happens. A map activity records which locations people consider suitable, and why.

  • Map comments on candidate sites and areas
  • Category tags for suitability, infrastructure, and compatibility
  • Comments kept in their original wording
03

Priorities across the whole community

A housing plan has to weigh affordability, supply, design, and location. Ask people to allocate across them and the responses become a distribution.

  • Priority allocation questions
  • Policy trade-off scenarios
  • Optional postal code field for geographic context
04

A record that holds up

Housing engagement is often challenged. Every comment stays attached to its document version, its page, and its date, so the record can be defended.

  • Comments tied to the version they were made against
  • Staff response recorded next to each comment
  • Full export for the public record
05

Reporting without distortion

The report shows the counts, the themes, and the original comments. Nothing is editorialized on the way in.

  • Theme development with counts
  • Representative comments quoted in full
  • What We Heard report ready for the council packet

Next

Give your public project a Shell.

Tortoise 40 is free to use. Set up a project, publish it, and start collecting public input.