Blog

EPA's draft 2027 Construction General Permit is open for comment until September 17, 2026. TCEQ's own rulemaking record names it as the reason for specific TXR150000 provisions.

Vested rights attach to a project, not a property. Chapter 245 grandfathering freezes the rules at the first permit filing, and dormancy kills it.

Cities and counties were zoning data centers out of their use tables. Now states are pausing them, preempting the pause, and fighting over it internally, at a level of government most site-selection diligence never checks.

Cities now regulate car washes as their own land-use class. On a new site, whether it's zoned commercial no longer answers the question.

Texas Senate Bill 840 made multifamily housing legal by-right in commercial zones across the state's largest cities. Ten months in, what decides a deal isn't the state law but each city's posture toward it.

Cities and counties are zoning data centers out of their allowed-use tables. The question on a deal is no longer how to build one, but whether it's allowed at all.

Between 2023 and 2026, U.S. cities began zoning self-storage out of their commercial districts. The question on a new deal is no longer how to build it, but whether it's allowed at all.

HUD committed $3M to put AI permitting in six jurisdictions, while admitting it has little public evidence yet for how these systems perform, are staffed, or are governed. That gap is the diligence checklist.

The Austin Business Journal covered the City of Austin's test of Noetic's AI site plan review tool, and what local engineers are seeing so far.

Los Angeles, Austin, Honolulu, and Seattle now run plan review through AI. It clears the code's measurable rules fast. The judgment calls still take a human.

B101's comply clause turns code compliance into a strict-liability duty your insurer may not fully cover, while zoning sits outside Basic Services and the blame still lands on you.

Texas exurbs traded drive-thru moratoria for 200-foot setbacks measured to the speaker, not the building.

Cities scrapped the parking minimum. Now they're regulating the queue, and it binds retail pads harder than parking ever did.

KVUE on ABC covered the Noetic pilot with the City of Austin to speed up site plan review as the metro hits a new population milestone.

Introducing Noetic, the first AI-powered site plan compliance agent designed to accelerate the time from submission to approval.

Property owners along Austin's classified streets deed land to the city for future street widening. Permanent transfers under state and local standards.

Austin site plan review has cross-discipline constraint interactions that cause multi-cycle revisions, and no single reviewer is scoped to catch them.

How Austin reviews the land developers offer for public parks, what House Bill 1526 changed in 2024, and the dedication-fee trap that catches builders.

Compatibility cost Austin an estimated 71,794 housing units. The 2024 reform cut its reach by 86 percent but kept the rule on the most transit-rich land.

Austin repealed parking minimums in 2023. Four other rules still require parking-sized pavement on every commercial site plan. What each one requires.

A 2023 McKinsey study found 47 places where Austin's overlapping rules apply different criteria to the same parcel, stretching timelines past 18 months.

A city permit is not the final word on what you can build. Private deed restrictions, enforced in Texas courts, can override the zoning code itself.

In Austin, a single mature oak can shape a site plan as much as the zoning does. A plain-English guide to the rule that decides what gets built.

Zoning sets what kind of building goes on an Austin lot. Impervious cover decides whether it fits. The watershed, not the zoning code, sets the cap.

Five separate rulebooks govern every Austin property. Zoning is only one of them — and the others can override what zoning says you can build.

License agreements are a parallel approval track that gates Austin site plan release. The City advises to start the process along with the site plan itself.

Austin site plans pass through independent departmental reviews under one application, averaging 5 formal cycles to approval. How the process works.

Less than 25% of Austin site plans pass the city completeness check on the first try. A breakdown of what gets the other 75% rejected on submission.