What Screening Is — and What It Is Not
Early-stage screening is often misunderstood as a lightweight feasibility exercise. In practice, its role is narrower — and more consequential: to determine whether a site merits further analysis at all.
It does not attempt to solve the project. It determines whether the project is solvable within an as-of-right framework.
What Screening Is
Screening is a decision filter applied before design, massing, or underwriting begins.
Its purpose is to determine whether a site clears the minimum structural thresholds required to justify further investment of time, capital, and analytical effort. These thresholds are binary: a site either clears them, or it does not.
Clarity established at this stage prevents momentum from obscuring judgment later.
What Screening Is Not
Screening is not preliminary feasibility.
It is not a rough optimization pass.
It is not an attempt to extract value from a constrained site.
Activities such as unit mix testing, efficiency tuning, height tradeoffs, or yield modeling all assume a viable development framework already exists. The purpose here is to test whether that assumption holds.
When optimization precedes a resolved decision, analysis shifts from evaluative to speculative.
Why Screening Gets Blurred
Screening is frequently blurred for structural reasons:
Unused FAR creates the appearance of opportunity
Ambiguity is mistaken for flexibility
Early rejection feels overly conservative
As a result, sites advance through the pipeline without a resolved viability decision, allowing unresolved structural risk to migrate into downstream analysis.
This is not optimism — it is deferral.
The Cost of Misordered Analysis
When early decision-making fails to function as a gate:
Massing absorbs unresolved zoning risk
Underwriting compensates for untested assumptions
Design effort is spent validating sites that should have been stopped
Late-stage failure is rarely the result of hidden complexity. More often, it reflects decisions that were never made at the appropriate stage.
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 that defer judgment — “needs more testing,” “could work with optimization,” “requires creativity” — are not conclusions. They reflect the absence of a recorded decision and indicate that the decision gate has been bypassed.
Key Takeaway
Screening is a discipline of refusal, not persuasion. It protects the pipeline by ensuring that effort is applied only where structural viability exists.
In Practice
Effective screening increases quality, not volume. It ensures that downstream effort is spent only where structural viability exists.