Know the rules before they become constraints

Civexa reads the jurisdiction's adopted ordinance and applies it to one parcel — then shows you the section each number came from, and tells you which provisions it could not settle.

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The question

Which rules actually govern this lot, and which of them is the one that binds?

Cited, not summarised

Every standard carries the section that produced it

Setbacks, height, floor-area ratio, lot coverage and the middle-housing tier are read from the adopted code for that zone in that city — not from a generalised table, and not from a summary of the code. Each rule that reaches the report carries a rule identifier, the ordinance section, and the authority level it sits at, from state statute down to a local overlay.

Where two encoded sources disagree at equal authority, Civexa reports both and publishes no value for that standard. Silently picking one would be the most dangerous thing it could do.

Conditions stay conditional

A tier you have not earned is never counted as capacity

The six-unit middle-housing tier applies near major transit, or with affordable units — conditions that are true of some parcels and not others. Civexa records the condition on the rule, resolves it against the parcel where it can, and marks it as requiring verification where it cannot. A conditional entitlement is never quietly promoted into a by-right one.

Versioned against the ordinance

Code changes, and the report says which version it read

The code version comes from the jurisdiction's own ordinance reference. Where a profile carries no dated reference, the version is reported as unknown rather than given today's date, and that absence is raised as a regulatory risk in its own right.

It feeds everything downstream

The rules constrain the site, the capacity and the model

Regulatory intelligence is the first engine in the chain. The site engine uses it to decide which mapped conditions legally matter; the capacity engine stamps the rule and source identifiers onto every figure it derives; the massing engine binds each applied constraint to the rule behind it and flags the massing as stale when a governing value changes.

In the report

What the regulatory section reports

Each row carries the ordinance section behind it, and each unresolved item carries the reason it is unresolved.

Front / side / rear setback20 / 5 / 5 ftcode-derived

Height limit30 ftcode-derived

Middle-housing tier6 units near transitcode-derived

Code versionOrd. 26-1041verified

Design reviewRequires verificationunresolved

Illustrative figures from a real Civexa run. Run your own address for live, code-traced numbers.

What it will not do

The answers Civexa declines to give

A model that always produces a number is a model whose confident answers cannot be told apart from its guesses. These are the cases where Civexa reports a gap instead.

A rule nobody encoded is UNKNOWN, not permissive. An absent parking standard is reported as unknown, with a note that this is not the same as no requirement.
An undated ordinance gets no invented date. Civexa reports the version as unknown and raises it as a risk.
Design review is not asserted. Where Civexa does not encode a discretionary review process, it says the process requires verification rather than implying the path is ministerial.
No language model originates a regulatory value. The engine imports no LLM client, no network and no database. Every value is harvested from an audited code model.

Questions

Regulatory intelligence, in detail

Which jurisdictions are encoded?

Thirty-nine Puget Sound cities including Seattle, Tacoma, Bellevue, Everett, Kent and Federal Way, each with a per-jurisdiction model audited against its adopted code and RCW 36.70A.635. An address outside coverage is told so rather than given an approximate answer.

How current is the code model?

Each jurisdiction's model carries the ordinance reference it was transcribed from, and that reference is what the report cites as the code version. Zoning changes, so the report tells you which version it read rather than implying it read today's.

Does Civexa make a zoning determination?

No. It reports what the adopted code says for the parcel and cites the section, so you can verify it. A determination is made by the jurisdiction, and Civexa is designed to be used before you ask for one.

What happens when two sources conflict?

Both are reported and no value is published for that standard. Where one source supersedes another, the supersession is recorded on the rule that does the superseding rather than assumed globally.