Policy Forensics

The Policy Forensics team studies the laws, mandates, and institutional decisions that shape what gets built, preserved, and destroyed. Every building operates inside a stack of regulatory regimes — zoning, building code, fire code, energy code, landmark designation, historic district overlay, public-health ordinance, insurance requirement. The team tracks how that stack changes and what the change does to the stock.

We focus on regulatory change analysis — how individual amendments ripple through the built environment — and on the political economy of the frameworks themselves. Our comparative work examines how major real estate markets handle the same questions differently, and what that tells us about building outcomes.

The team publishes for regulators, professional associations, civil-society organizations, and the research and academic communities that work alongside them.