What Is a Zoning or Land-Use Claim Worth?
Free during the beta: describe your own facts, or upload your documents, and get a damages range with the reasoning and the cases behind it.
How damages are usually measured
Most land-use cases are about the approval rather than money: a court upholds or reverses a denial, or orders a permit issued. Damages are available only in narrower settings, such as a taking, a civil-rights claim, a vested-rights or estoppel claim after money was spent in reliance on an approval, or a statute that allows them, and the measure is usually tied to delay, lost use or wasted costs.
General background, not legal advice; the rules vary by state and by the documents in your deal.
What the calculator asks about
These are the facts it pulls from your description or documents for a zoning or land-use claim:
- Was a variance or permit denied and appealed?
- Is a rezoning being challenged as improper spot zoning?
- Is an arbitrary or discriminatory zoning denial alleged?
- Was a permit issued, money spent, then the code changed to kill the project?
- Is there a long pattern of repeated, shifting requirements?
- Was there a complete absence of notice or hearing?
- Is there direct evidence of discriminatory intent?
- Estimated lost project/development value
- Is a development agreement alleged to have been breached?
How it did on real cases
In CREdocket's published backtest (v4.3), the calculator's range contained the final outcome in 1 of 1 zoning or land-use claim cases, and in 17 of 32 cases across all categories. Each case below was run through the live calculator on a verbatim excerpt of the court's statement of facts and each side's contentions, with every sentence stating an award, finding or holding removed, then scored against the final result after any appeal.
-
5th and Walnut Parking LLC v. City of Des Moines
Calculator range: $0 – $20.92M Final outcome: $4.35M Within the range
Full backtest results and method →
Get a range for your own zoning or land-use claim
Describe both sides' positions, or upload the lease, loan documents, pleadings or appraisals. The estimate needs both sides' facts; a one-sided complaint alone is not enough to value a case. Sign-in is email only.
Open the calculatorRecent cases we're tracking
Estimates are probability-weighted ranges from the facts you provide, not a prediction of any court's ruling and not legal advice.