The Same Dollar, Different Housing Rights

A million dollars does not buy the same housing opportunity everywhere. Say three brokers send you three one-acre commercial sites on the same morning, each listed at $1 million: a General Commercial (GR) lot in Austin, an Activity Center lot in Orlando, a C2 lot on a Los Angeles commercial corridor. Same acre, same check. Which one buys the most apartments, and what do you owe for them?

The short answer, before any statute names:

Same acre, same check, three different answers. Each state law reads a different number out of the city’s zoning, and each attaches different strings. The rest of this page is where those numbers come from and how far to trust them.

The state changes the bargain. Texas’s SB 840 adds housing rights on qualifying commercial land without its own affordable-unit mandate. Florida’s Live Local pathway exchanges broader local density allowances for long-term affordable rentals. California’s AB 2011 adds a commercial-housing pathway with affordability and prevailing-wage conditions. And each one takes its density from a different number in the city’s zoning record. So the same dollar gets divided by a different number in each city.

The method is short. Take the residential density the law protects on the acre: the density allowance, the most units the rule lets you propose, not a count of units that fit. Divide the land price by it to get the land basis per potential unit. That is all this page prices: land. Construction, rents and financing are separate underwriting it doesn’t do. The records here are the Austin, Orlando and Los Angeles city profiles in this repo, read through the state pathway summaries the applet carries, each checked against statute on October 11, 2026.

Same acre, three answers

Austin, GR. The Austin profile, verified April 26, 2026, gives GR 60 feet, 75 percent coverage, a floor-area ratio (FAR, building floor area over lot area) of 1.0, and no residential density cell at all. SB 840 applies here: the record checks Austin at 974,447 people and Travis County at 1,326,436, against thresholds of 150,000 and 300,000. On qualifying commercial land the city can’t set density below the greater of 36 units an acre or the highest residential density it allows anywhere. The highest confirmed number in the record is MF-5, at 54. So: 54 units, $18,519 of land a unit, and no affordable units required by this pathway. Height can’t drop below the greater of 45 feet or GR’s own 60, required parking is capped at one space a unit, and GR’s FAR of 1.0 goes away, because the bill prohibits municipal FAR limits on these projects. Under that FAR, 54 units would have averaged about 807 gross square feet each.

Orlando, AC-1 (Activity Center 1). This row already allows housing: 20 to 40 units an acre and a FAR of 0.35 to 0.70, per the city’s zoning legend. At 40 units the acre costs $25,000 a unit. Live Local says the city can’t hold an eligible project below the highest residential density it allows anywhere, and the record names that number: AC-3 and AC-3A, at 200 units an acre. That’s 200 units on the same acre, $5,000 of land a unit. The catch is in the same statute: at least 40 percent of the homes must be affordable rentals for at least 30 years. That’s 80 restricted units. Count only the 120 unrestricted ones and the land is still $8,333 a unit, the cheapest of the three by a wide margin.

Los Angeles, C2. The most common commercial zone in the city: 75 feet and a FAR of 1.5 in the default height district, and, like Austin’s GR, no residential density on the row. AB 2011 sets density at the greater of the site’s local base density or, on an 80-foot commercial corridor in a metropolitan jurisdiction, 40 units an acre. The record can’t supply the first number, so the floor is the only one I can defend: 40 units, $25,000 a unit, the most expensive acre of the three. Six of those homes are restricted to lower-income renters for 55 years (15 percent, the rental option I chose; local rules can ask for more), and the whole building is built at prevailing wages. Put the same lot within half a mile of a qualifying major-transit stop and the floor doubles to 80: $12,500 a unit, 12 restricted, and at 50 or more units the apprenticeship and worker-healthcare conditions apply too.

What the comparison below shows

The applet fixes the acre, the $1 million and the plan: new rental housing on a site I’ve assumed qualifies for its state’s pathway, with no density bonus. What changes is how many rules you let in. Press Play and it steps three times. First, the local zoning row alone. Second, the state pathway on a commercial corridor. Third, the same pathway near major transit. The blue bar is the density allowance on the acre, orange is the restricted rentals that come with it, and a dashed empty bar means the record holds no residential number for that row. Each card names the number that set the allowance and the hole in the record behind it.

Watch the first step. On base zoning alone, two of the three sites have no residential number in the record, and the only one that does, Orlando, tops out at 40. The second step is the whole argument: Austin 54, Orlando 200, Los Angeles 40. The cheapest land per unit is the one with the most strings. The third step moves only Los Angeles, because the Texas and Florida rules don’t key density to transit. Florida’s transit provisions touch parking, which the applet doesn’t model.

Keep the distinction between the allowance and the building. A lower land basis can be offset by restricted rents, labor costs or a site that cannot fit the allowed density. Those are underwriting inputs, not reasons to confuse an allowance with a finished building. Two hundred units on one acre in Orlando needs height. Live Local’s height is generally the higher of three stories or the highest eligible commercial or residential height allowed within a mile, and the AC-1 row has no height cell. Three stories over the entire acre is 130,680 square feet, about 653 gross square feet a unit before a corridor, a stair or a parking space. Either there’s a taller building within a mile of the site, or 200 is a number you can’t build.

The limit of the record

Every number above is copied from a record, and each record has a hole right where the answer lives.

Austin: 54 may be too low. The law’s number is itself a minimum, and the record may be understating the input to it. MF-6, the highest-density multifamily district, shows no unit cap in the code’s site-development table, and its per-acre limit in §25-2-67 wasn’t retrieved. MF-4’s wasn’t either. If either reads above 54, or if “the highest residential density allowed in the municipality” reads to an uncapped district, the Austin denominator rises and the land basis falls. The record also flags the airport approach surfaces around AUS, and SB 840 excludes sites within 3,000 feet of an airport.

Orlando: the 200 may not be base density. The record copied it from the city’s GIS zoning legend because the code host blocked scripted reads, and the profile has never been marked verified. The legend gives AC-3 as a range, 75 to 200, and Florida excludes bonus, variance and special-exception densities from the benchmark. Nothing in the record says whether 200 is reachable without a bonus. If it isn’t, the Orlando answer drops, and I don’t know to what.

Los Angeles: the site’s own density is missing. The record carries R4 at 108.9 and R5 at 217.8 units an acre, but AB 2011 reads the base density on the site, not the city’s densest row, so those don’t count. If C2 carries a local residential density above 40, the LA answer rises with it. The record points to ZIMAS, the city’s parcel lookup, as the authority; check the parcel there before believing 40 or anything above it. This profile, researched April 19, 2026, isn’t marked verified either.

And none of the three records certifies that any parcel qualifies. Population thresholds, the share of commercial land, corridor width, the coastal zone, industrial and airport adjacency, the project’s start date: the applet assumes every one and lists them under the comparison.

So which acre? On land basis alone, Orlando looks cheapest: $5,000 a unit against $18,519 and $25,000. But that is the one number on this page I wouldn’t underwrite yet. It buys 80 rent-restricted homes for 30 years, it rests on a 200 the record can’t confirm is base density, and it may not fit under the height the law allows. Until someone confirms the 200 and the height, the number Orlando’s record can defend is the AC-1 row’s own 40, which is $25,000 a unit. Austin buys the cleanest right, 54 units with no strings from the pathway, and possibly more once MF-6 is read. Los Angeles buys the smallest right and the most conditions unless the lot is near transit. My judgment: price the obligation with the dirt, and underwrite each city from the number its record can actually defend. That makes Austin the acre to underwrite today, at 54. Orlando is the acre to investigate: if the 200 holds and a tall enough building sits within a mile, it beats Austin even after the 80 restricted homes ($8,333 an unrestricted unit against $18,519). Los Angeles is a transit question. The cheapest denominator doesn’t win until you’ve checked that it’s real and buildable.