Glossary & About the data

Plain-language definitions for the terms used across the dashboard, and a short note on where the numbers come from.

Where the data comes from

The database is the system of record. Editors maintain projects in-tool (audited; manual edits are never overwritten by the weekly refresh). Two sources fed it:

Cumulative Project List (legacy xlsx) — The Cumulative Project List is an Excel workbook the planning team historically maintained. It was the one-time baseline that originally seeded the database, but it is no longer a live source of record: data is now maintained in-tool (the database is the system of record) and reseeds from the xlsx are retired. It still appears, labelled 'legacy', in the historical source-reconciliation queue.
Ministerial PDF — The Ministerial PDF is the City's published 'Status of Ministerial Housing Applications' document. It lists each ministerial application with its plan documents and key dates. In a source conflict it appears as 'Ministerial PDF'.

Prior disagreements between the two are kept in the source-reconciliation queue as read-only history (no new conflicts are generated now that the xlsx is legacy). Plan-derived fields are extracted from each project's development plans by an AI model and carry inline provenance (source page + quote) and a confidence score. The data is refreshed weekly from the Ministerial PDF; manually-managed projects are never overwritten by the refresh.

Unofficial — not affiliated with the City of Santa Monica. Verify against official City sources before relying on any value.

Status

Lifecycle stage: A project's lifecycle stage tracks how far it has progressed through review and construction: Pending, Approved, Under Construction, or Completed. Lifecycle is independent of disposition — a project can be Approved (lifecycle) yet Expired (disposition). Always read the two together.
Disposition: Disposition tells you whether a project is still moving forward (Active), lapsed (Expired), or pulled by the applicant (Withdrawn). It is a separate axis from lifecycle stage. The combination matters: 'Approved + Expired' means the project earned approval but the entitlement has since lapsed.
Lifecycle vs. Disposition (two-axis model): The single most important idea in this dashboard: a project is described by two independent axes. Lifecycle stage = how far it progressed (Pending/Approved/Under Construction/Completed). Disposition = whether it is still live (Active/Expired/Withdrawn). They do not imply each other — an Approved project may be Expired, and an Under-Construction project is almost always Active. Filtering or counting on one axis says nothing about the other.
Review stage (derived vs. override): Derived automatically as the furthest of (a) the project's plan documents' stages and (b) its milestone dates — a formal-application date means at least Formal; an approval or building-permit date means Approved. Setting an override replaces the derived value everywhere and is audited (who/when). Stage matters because a Preliminary-stage project is treated as an SB330 preliminary-only filing and is EXCLUDED from RHNA counts and every countable dashboard surface — changing it can move the city's RHNA numbers.

RHNA

RHNA: RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Allocation) is California's mechanism for distributing housing production targets to local governments. Each city receives an allocation, split across four income categories, that it must accommodate during the cycle. Santa Monica's 6th-cycle target is the benchmark this dashboard tracks progress against.
6th-cycle RHNA target: Santa Monica's 2021–2029 (6th cycle) state housing target, broken out by income category. The bars on this screen show permitted/approved progress toward it.
Countable: A project is 'countable' when its units are eligible to count toward RHNA progress. Records are excluded when they are duplicates of another entry, superseded by a newer filing, withdrawn or expired, or otherwise not net-new housing. An editor can override the automatic decision per project.
Permit gate: RHNA progress is officially credited at building-permit issuance. The permit gate distinguishes permitted units (credited) from merely approved ones.
Reconciles to bars: A check that the per-project numbers in the table sum exactly to the totals shown in the RHNA bars above — so the detail and the headline never drift apart.

Income levels

ELI — Extremely Low Income: Extremely Low Income: households at or below 30% of Area Median Income (AMI). Reported within the Very Low RHNA category.
VLI — Very Low Income: Very Low Income: households between 30% and 50% of Area Median Income (AMI).
LI — Low Income: Low Income: households between 50% and 80% of Area Median Income (AMI).
Moderate Income: Moderate Income: households between 80% and 120% of Area Median Income (AMI).
Income categories: RHNA splits homes into four affordability tiers by share of Area Median Income (AMI): Very Low (incl. ELI ≤30%), Low, Moderate, and Above Moderate (market rate).

Units

Market-rate units: Homes rented or sold at market prices with no affordability restriction. Counts toward the Above Moderate RHNA category.
Affordable units: Deed-restricted homes reserved for income-qualified households (ELI/VLI/LI/Moderate). Excludes market-rate units.
SRO — Single-Room Occupancy: Single-Room Occupancy: compact single-room units, often with shared facilities. Counted separately from standard market-rate and affordable units.
Total units: All proposed homes in a project: market-rate + affordable + SRO (plus any live/work).
Unit mix: The breakdown of homes by bedroom count (Studio/SRO, 1-bdrm, 2-bdrm, 3-bdrm) from the project's unit schedule.
Affordability %: Share of the project's homes that are deed-restricted affordable (affordable ÷ total units).

Building

Density bonus (DB): Extra units a project earns above base zoning by providing affordable housing, under State Density Bonus Law. Shown as a % above base.
Base units: The number of units allowed by base zoning before any density bonus is applied.
Bonus units: Units granted on top of base zoning through the density bonus (in exchange for affordable housing).
FAR — Floor Area Ratio: Floor Area Ratio: total building floor area ÷ lot area. A FAR of 2.0 means floor area twice the lot size.
FAR (allowable): The maximum FAR permitted on the site (base zoning plus any bonus). Compare against the proposed FAR.
Stories: Number of building levels/floors above grade as proposed.
Site size: Lot area of the project parcel(s), typically in thousands of square feet (ksf).
Building footprint: Ground-floor building area (a.k.a. lot coverage) — how much of the site the building covers at grade.
Ground-floor plate %: Building footprint as a share of site size (footprint ÷ site area).
Parking: Parking spaces provided in the project as approved (not the code-required minimum).

Zoning

Zoning: The land-use district governing what can be built. We show live GIS zoning, falling back to the workbook's recorded value.
Zoning mismatch: The live GIS zoning for the parcel differs from the value recorded in the workbook. The amber ≠ badge shows the recorded value for comparison — not necessarily an error.

Data management

Canonical record: When several records describe the same development, one is chosen as canonical — the version that counts. The others are superseded.
Superseded: A duplicate record that has been replaced by the canonical one for the same project. Kept for history but excluded from counts.
Active-vs-active conflict: The most serious source conflict: both sources treat the project as active but disagree on a value. Prioritized for resolution because it affects live counts.
Eligibility override: An editor decision that forces a project to count or be excluded, overriding the automatic countability rule. Manual overrides win and survive re-imports.
Duplicate cluster: A group of records that appear to describe the same development, grouped so an editor can pick the canonical one.
Needs units: A residential project whose unit count couldn't be derived — usually because the application's proposed-units table was scanned and the OCR garbled it, with no corroborating floor area. It stays at 0 (never fabricated) until a reviewer reads the plans and sets the count.

Provenance

Provenance: Where an AI-extracted value came from: the source sheet/page plus a verbatim quote. Every plan-derived field carries its provenance.
Confidence: How sure the extraction model is about a value (0–100%). Below ~75% the value is flagged for human review.
Cumulative Project List (legacy xlsx): The Cumulative Project List is an Excel workbook the planning team historically maintained. It was the one-time baseline that originally seeded the database, but it is no longer a live source of record: data is now maintained in-tool (the database is the system of record) and reseeds from the xlsx are retired. It still appears, labelled 'legacy', in the historical source-reconciliation queue.
Ministerial PDF: The Ministerial PDF is the City's published 'Status of Ministerial Housing Applications' document. It lists each ministerial application with its plan documents and key dates. In a source conflict it appears as 'Ministerial PDF'.
Status source: Which source the displayed lifecycle status was derived from (workbook status column, status dates, the City's cumulative list, or the ministerial PDF dates).
Ministerial Applications tracker: Editors maintain each ministerial project's three milestone dates (Preliminary application submitted, Formal application submitted, and Approved/determination issued) and the santamonica.gov plan-document links per stage. Edits are audited and lock the project against the weekly automated refresh (manual-wins). This is the same data the City publishes as the 'Status of Ministerial Housing Applications' PDF — now maintained directly in the database, the system of record.

Scope

Scope: Active only vs. All dispositions: 'Active only' restricts every number on the screen to projects with an Active disposition; 'All dispositions' also includes Expired and Withdrawn. Watch which scope is selected when reading totals.

Capacity

No Net Loss (HCD §65863): Government Code §65863 (the 'No Net Loss' law) forbids a city from reducing residential capacity below what is needed to accommodate its remaining RHNA, evaluated SEPARATELY for each income tier. The test is run per tier with NO cross-tier offset: a surplus of above-moderate capacity can never cure a shortfall of very-low capacity. When a site is developed (or down-zoned) and a tier falls short, the city has 180 days to rezone or identify additional sites for that specific tier.
SSI (Suitable Sites Inventory): The Suitable Sites Inventory was transmitted to HCD in September 2022. Table B lists the 202 non-Category-1 candidate sites with their per-tier capacity (very-low/low/moderate/above-moderate) — this is the inventory the No-Net-Loss test draws down. Table A 'Category 1' parcels are already-entitled or pending projects (production); counting them as available capacity would double-count, so they are excluded from the capacity total.
Inventoried (realistic) capacity: Each SSI Table-B parcel carries a 'realistic capacity' estimate per income tier. When a parcel is developed, the No-Net-Loss test removes that parcel's INVENTORIED capacity from the remaining total — regardless of how many units the actual project built. An overbuilt parcel still removes only its inventory (and a tier's remaining capacity is floored at zero, never negative).
No-Net-Loss buffer: The buffer (Figure F-12 calls it 'Buffer') is remaining capacity − remaining need for each income tier. A healthy Housing Element keeps a positive buffer in every tier. Because the test is strictly per-tier, the overall site inventory only 'passes' when ALL four tiers show a non-negative buffer.
ADU stream (Option A vs B): ADUs are never part of SSI site capacity. On the NEED side the city may optionally credit projected ADUs (the Housing Element / Figure F-12 projection of 376 units, split by tier) against remaining RHNA. The headline view (Option B) keeps ADUs as a parallel stream so the sites must satisfy RHNA alone; Option A applies the credit but first nets out ADUs already permitted (which already count as production) so they are not double-counted.