How to read a land-use agenda, and why it beats permit data
A rezoning case scheduled for a public hearing is intent that exists weeks before the decision and months before any permit. Most cities publish these agendas through an open API. Here is what is in them and which cities are worth reading.
A scheduled hearing is the earliest addressable signal in public record, but only in cities that legislate land use parcel by parcel.
The tier above pre-permit
Permit data is usually described as the earliest construction signal. It is not. Before a permit there is a decision, an entitlement granted, and before the decision there is a case scheduled for a hearing.
That scheduled case is a matter of public record from the moment the agenda is published, typically one to three weeks ahead. The owner has already filed, paid fees, and in most cases engaged a land-use consultant or attorney. Nobody has called them, because the thing a competitor would be reacting to has not happened yet.
A scheduled hearing precedes the decision by weeks and any building permit by months
Where the agendas live
A large share of US cities publish their legislative record through Granicus Legistar, which exposes an open read API at webapi.legistar.com with no key required. Matters, agenda items and future meeting events are all queryable.
The API returns everything the body handles, most of which is not land use. Filtering is on the matter title and the case number format, Austin uses C14 for rezonings, NPA for neighbourhood plan amendments, SP for site plans.
The catch: not every city legislates land use
This only produces leads where the city council or planning commission decides property-specific cases. Where land use is handled administratively by staff, the legislative record contains citywide code amendments instead, policy, not leads.
The difference is stark in practice. In a recent 400-matter sample, Austin produced 53 land-use cases carrying a street address, 25 of them for hearings still to come. Seattle's land-use matters over a comparable window were almost entirely municipal-code amendments with no property attached.
Austin matters carrying a parseable street address in a recent sample; 25 were future-dated hearings
Source: Granicus Legistar, City of Austin
Check before you trust it
Legistar instances are abandoned as often as any other public dataset. San Francisco's still answers queries and returns hundreds of matters, but the newest introduction date is 2020, it is an archive being served as though it were live.
The check takes one request: order by last-modified descending and look at the top row. If nothing has moved in a month, the feed is decorative.
- ·A case number in a recognisable format, which tells you the case type.
- ·A street address in the title, the thing that makes it addressable at all.
- ·A scheduled hearing date, frequently in the future.
- ·The body hearing it, which tells you how far along the process is.
- ·Often the previous and proposed zoning, which tells you the scale of what is planned.
Is agenda data free?
Yes. Granicus Legistar's read API requires no key and no account. The cost is in normalisation, every city writes its titles differently, not in access.
How do I know if my city publishes parcel-level cases?
Pull a few hundred recent matters and count how many titles contain a street address. If it is close to zero, the city handles land use administratively and the feed will not produce leads.