- By-right development
- A project that conforms to existing zoning and needs only ministerial building permits rather than a discretionary grant. By-right proposals are far harder for opponents to block because they remove the public discretionary vote where resistance concentrates.
- Crystallizing impact figure
- A concrete, alarming number, a water-consumption volume, a projected rate increase, a distance from a school, that enters public circulation and gives opposition a specific fact to organize around, often appearing weeks before a campaign becomes visible at hearings.
- Discretionary approval
- A land-use action, such as a rezoning, special-use permit, conditional-use permit, or variance, that a local body may grant or refuse at its judgment. Needing one is the single largest predictor of denial risk because it gives officials a lawful basis to say no.
- Frame
- The compressed, values-based argument an opposition group repeats at every hearing and to every reporter, such as it is about the water or about the children near the substation. Once a frame locks in it is very hard to dislodge with technical rebuttal.
- Moratorium
- A temporary, legislated pause on accepting or approving certain applications, enacted so a jurisdiction can study impacts and rewrite ordinances. It is fast, hard to challenge, and can stall a pending project as effectively as a denial while re-rating an entire jurisdiction.
- Opposition register
- A structured, sourced record of community-opposition and permitting events across markets, built with the event as its unit of record so that trajectories and cross-jurisdiction patterns invisible in any single project become analyzable as an intelligence product.
- Outcome state
- The classification of a project as advanced, delayed, or blocked. Tracking the flow and changing ratios among these states over successive quarters, rather than a single snapshot, reveals whether a market is opening to or hardening against new development.
- Regional contagion
- The tendency of opposition outcomes to spread spatially as templates, ordinance language, organizers, and media coverage travel between jurisdictions, so that a moratorium or denial in one place raises the assessed risk for still-quiet sites across the surrounding corridor.