What Screening Is and What It Is Not
The proccess is often misunderstood as a light check. In reality, its role is narrower and more important. It exists to answer one question early does this site deserve further work at all.
Screening does not try to solve the project. It decides whether the project is even solvable within an as of right framework or a discretionary path.
What it Is
Screening is a decision step that happens before design, massing and underwriting.
Its purpose is to determine whether a site clears the minimum structural requirements to justify further time, capital, and analytical effort. At this stage, outcomes are simple. A site either clears those thresholds or it does not.
Making this decision early prevents momentum from pushing weak sites forward.
What it Is Not
Screening is not preliminary feasibility.
It is not early optimization. It is not an attempt to “make a deal work.”
Tasks like unit mix testing, efficiency tuning, height tradeoffs, or yield modeling all assume that a viable development framework already exists. And the screening exists to test whether that assumption is true.
Why Screening Gets Blurred
Early stage review is frequently blurred for structural reasons:
Unused FAR looks like opportunity
Ambiguity is mistaken for flexibility
Stopping early feels overly conservative
As a result, sites move forward without a clear viability decision. Structural risk is not resolved — it is simply pushed into later stages.
That is not optimism. It is deferral.
The Cost of Misordered Analysis
When early decision making does not function as a real gate, problems compound.
Massing absorbs unresolved zoning risk. Underwriting compensates for assumptions that were never tested. Design effort is spent validating sites that should have been stopped.
Late-stage failure is rarely caused by hidden complexity. More often, it comes from decisions that were never made when they should have been.
A Disciplined Outcome
A disciplined review produces one of two outcomes:
Proceed, with clearly identified sensitivities
Proceed with Risk feasible, with clearly identified sensitivities carried forward intentionally
Stop, with documented structural rationale
Outcomes like “needs more testing,” “could work with optimization,” or “requires creativity” are not conclusions. They signal that the decision was avoided and the gate was bypassed.
Key Takeaway
Screening is not about convincing a project to move forward. It is about having the discipline to stop when the structure does not support further work.
In Practice
Strong screening does not increase volume.
It improves quality by ensuring that downstream effort is spent only on sites with a real path forward.