When you add remedies to your site, you can begin to see the estimated benefits and costs of your site design. Benefits and costs can be viewed for each site individually, as well as for your sketch overall as a sum total of all sites in the sketch.

These estimates are intended to guide early project proposals and are subject to more rigorous site design and feasibility studies. Additionally, the benefits and costs shown are not intended to provide a "right answer" for your design but rather to guide a deliberative process of assessing what values fit your community's needs.

You can view an overview of your site's benefits in the Benefits bar at the top of the site profile. You can see a breakdown of each benefit in the Benefits tab.

The benefits indicate an overall mix of outcomes your project can be expected to generate. Benefits are indicated by progress bars, with the colored portion representing the amount of benefit your site is generating, and a full bar representing a reasonably large level of benefit a site of your size could be expected to generate. The benefit visualization is intended to highlight the relative mix of benefits, rather than specific measurable quantities, to guide early project visioning and scenario comparison.

Every remedy is assigned a point value for every benefit. In the guidebook, you can see the relative impact each remedy has on each benefit, indicated by a certain number of upward or downward arrows. These arrows correspond to a point value that is used to calculate the overall benefit level for the site:

This model was derived based on calculations of for a handful of benefits that can be easily quantified, such as water supply, flood safety, water quality, and cooling. The benefit calculations for these benefits were used to derive the above point thresholds and then applied to the additional benefits in the model.

Because the benefits are based solely on the remedies used on the site, they do not reflect the conditions of the site itself. For example, if you add remedies with a high water supply benefit, the benefit will show as high even if your site does not receive sufficient stormwater runoff to fill the capacity of your remedies. It is important to validate the estimated benefits through feasibility studies and detailed design.

Benefits are categorized into four color-coded categories:

If you hover over a benefit in the Benefits tab, you will see icons for:

If you click on a benefit:

You can view an overview of your site's costs in the Creation and Care bars at the top of the site profile. The creation cost indicates the estimated up-front cost of the site design, including planning, design, and construction. The care cost indicates the annual cost of maintenance, operations, and monitoring.

Each cost metric is displayed using a progress bar. A full bar indicates the site's target budget, which can be set in the site profile. If no budget is set, a default budget is estimated based on the size of the site.

Similarly to benefits, each remedy is assigned a creation and care cost, which you can find in the guidebook article for each remedy. In general, costs were estimated using LA County market pricing as of 2023 and then rounded to reflect the high degree of unknowns for projects in an early design phase. The total cost of your site represents the sum of the cost of all remedies in the site.

Because cost estimates reflect only the cost of remedies in the site design, they do not reflect site-specific needs or costs of site preparation, such as utilities relocation or soil remediation. More detailed cost estimates should be derived through feasibility studies, site testing, and detailed design.