Test the assumptions
behind the price.
Examine what is supporting a proposed district premium, how repeat demand is supported and who would have to execute the plan.
Engagement: Acquisition District Screen ↗
Hall Capital Advisory
Methods for the decision you face.
What the framework settles, before how it is built.
Background: the mapped adopted downtown boundary of Downtown Chicago, drawn from the District Index map. It is not a reading or a result.
How the engagement works
Start with the capital decision.
- Define the capital decision.
- Declare the geography.
- Build the ground-floor record.
- Measure each question separately.
- Translate findings into action.
- State the limits.
For public-private partnerships, the work establishes a common evidence base for public authorities, capital providers and development teams.
The instruments organize evidence for a capital decision. Their scores are planning inputs, not direct estimates of property value, rent or observed pedestrian activity.
How each instrument is built
Inspect the purpose, definitions and thresholds of each instrument. These are published frameworks, not calculated results for a selected district.
Who the framework serves
Start with your decision.
The firm serves public entities, institutional investors, family offices and developers. The District Index supplies structural evidence. The four instruments combine that evidence with engagement-specific analysis to inform capital decisions.
Test the assumptions
Choose what to retain,
lease and change.
Compare tenant uses, examine gaps in routine demand and identify the coordination a leasing strategy would require.
Engagement: Ground-Floor Strategy ↗Connect public spending
to an executable plan.
Identify the district constraint, the parties needed to address it and the private response a public intervention depends on.
Engagement: District Capital Plan ↗Published research frameworks and planning inputs. These are not live scores generated by drawing a boundary in the District Index. Any application depends on available evidence and the agreed engagement scope.
Methodology · model in development
Structural Footfall Potential
What pedestrian activity should the district’s structure support?
Structural Footfall Potential (SFP) is Hall Capital Advisory’s proprietary model framework. It is intended to connect residents, workers and district characteristics to an expectation of pedestrian activity.
Describe the district
The District Index measures business tenure, turnover and ownership concentration. Residents and workers provide separate structural context.
Develop the expectation
SFP would account for land uses, connectivity, transit and other district characteristics. It is not a calibrated metric or a client output.
Test against observation
Observed activity and independent validation would be needed before any model result could be published. Return Ladder benchmarks do not replace those observations.
MODEL IN DEVELOPMENT · DO NOT CALIBRATE
No SFP score, projected visitation, footfall estimate or Attraction Lift is published. Drawing a boundary does not generate an SFP result.
Return LadderCompare tenant uses by benchmark trip generation.Audience use, method and evidence
How this instrument serves your decision
Capital allocators
Question whether the proposed tenant mix supports the investment thesis.
Owners & developers
Compare uses when setting tenant retention and recruitment priorities.
Cities & districts
Examine which uses an intervention is intended to support, before selecting an incentive.
Method, evidence and limitations
The Return Ladder
Four rungs · weekday person trips per 1,000 sq ft
EXTERNAL BENCHMARKHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDNew York City's CEQR Technical Manual, chapter 16, Table 16-2, December 2025 edition, supplies the trip-generation rates. Hall Capital Advisory converts them into four rungs. The cuts at 500, 200 and 50 weekday person trips per 1,000 square feet are Hall Capital Advisory thresholds.
Find a downtown in the District IndexThe Return Ladder ranks ground-floor uses by the pedestrian activity each use generates for the space it occupies. The measure is weekday person trips per 1,000 square feet.
New York City's CEQR Technical Manual, chapter 16, Table 16-2, provides the trip-generation evidence the ranking is built on. It is a municipal standard applied in law, and it publishes rates, not rungs. Hall Capital Advisory converts that evidence into four Return Ladder rungs: daily, weekly, periodic and occasional. The cuts at 500, 200 and 50 weekday person trips per 1,000 square feet are Hall Capital Advisory thresholds, placed in the gaps the published rates cluster around. A reader should not mistake the four rungs for an official CEQR classification, because CEQR publishes no such classification.
Rent rises toward the top of the ladder. Traffic rises toward the foot. The tenant who generates the most repeat visits is therefore the tenant least able to pay market rent. A street leased to the highest bidder ends up with frontage and no traffic.
The ladder is a rate. It says what a use returns for the space it takes, and it does not say how many people are within reach of that use. The District Index now publishes that second number as Baseline Presence, the residents and workers inside the boundary. The two are read together and are not the same measure: the ladder chooses the tenant, and the base says how large the audience for that tenant is before anybody walks in.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDING
The reading
Counter-service food and coffee
906 trips
DAILY
How it was measured
The band mean across counter-service food and coffee, in weekday person trips per 1,000 square feet, from CEQR Table 16-2.
Why it falls here
906 sits at or above 500, which is the DAILY rung. Multi-tenant office reads 20 on the same axis and sits on OCCASIONAL, so the same 900 trips take 45,000 square feet there.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDINGHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDA planning input. Every cut behind this reading is published.
Baseline Coverage ScoreExamine the sources and timing of routine demand.Audience use, method and evidence
How this instrument serves your decision
Capital allocators
Test the demand assumptions behind rent and occupancy projections.
Owners & developers
Identify use-mix and daypart gaps to investigate in a leasing plan.
Cities & districts
Examine whether a proposal addresses routine demand or depends on recurring programming.
Method, evidence and limitations
The Baseline Coverage Score
0 to 100 · three weighted components · gate at 70
PUBLIC DATAHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY DERIVEDHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLD2020 Census and LEHD LODES supply the resident and worker halves of audience depth. The three component weights and the gate at 70 are Hall Capital Advisory thresholds.
The Baseline Coverage Score is one number out of 100, built from three weighted components: frequency mix, daypart coverage and audience depth.
Frequency mix carries 50 points and weights the uses on a street by the rung each one sits on, measured in weekday person trips per 1,000 square feet. Daypart coverage carries 30 points and counts how many of the five dayparts hold demand. Audience depth carries 20 points and counts how many distinct audiences the street can reach.
The gate is 70. A district scoring under 70 is carried by a calendar of events somebody has to keep funding, not by a baseline that holds on its own.
Audience depth used to be the component with the weakest public source, because it asks who is within reach of a street and nothing free counted them. Two of its three audiences are now measured. The District Index publishes the residents and the workers inside every boundary it reads, with anyone who is both counted once. The sources are the 2020 Census and the Census Bureau workplace file. The third audience, the visitor, is still not measured, and the score says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDING
The reading
Downtown Dallas
44.70 to 53.55 of 100
PARTIAL
How it was measured
Daypart coverage 13.44 of 30 and audience depth 20.00 of 20 are stable across every construction. Only the frequency mix moves, because the component weights ground-floor space and the only public source reaching this geography counts establishments.
Why it falls here
PARTIAL covers 40 to 59. Every defensible construction lands inside that band, and the whole envelope sits at least 16 points under the gate of 70. The reading is published as a range because the instrument cannot support a point.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDINGHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDA planning input. Every cut behind this reading is published.
District Premium ScoreExamine the conditions behind a claimed district premium.Audience use, method and evidence
How this instrument serves your decision
Capital allocators
Structure diligence on the conditions assumed to support the price.
Owners & developers
Compare proposed improvements against the district conditions they aim to change.
Cities & districts
Distinguish the drivers a capital program can address from conditions that take time.
Method, evidence and limitations
The District Premium Score
0 to 100 · six weighted drivers · anchor floor at 39
PUBLIC DATAHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY DERIVEDHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDPublic registers and county rolls supply the tenure and curation drivers. The six driver weights and the anchor floor at 39 are Hall Capital Advisory thresholds.
Find a downtown in the District IndexThe District Premium Score is one number out of 100, built from six weighted drivers: tenure, narrative, anchors, curation, the physical realm and activation. Every driver is read on the same zero to ten scale.
Tenure carries 24 points and narrative 20. Those 44 points are earned with time, and no check buys either driver. Anchors carry 18 points, curation 14, the physical realm 14 and activation 10. Those 56 points answer to money on a schedule.
The anchor floor is a ceiling. A district scoring 0 to 3 on anchors cannot pass 39 out of 100, whatever that district earns on the other five drivers.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDING
The reading
Downtown Dallas
38.6 of 100
COMMODITY
How it was measured
Six weighted drivers. Anchors 2, curation 2, physical realm 5, activation 6, narrative 6, tenure 3. Buyable drivers contribute 19.4 and drivers earned with time contribute 19.2.
Why it falls here
COMMODITY covers 0 to 39, so 38.6 sits 1.4 points under EMERGING. Anchors at 2 also triggers the anchor floor, which caps the composite at 39 and does not bind here because the composite already sits beneath it.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDINGHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDA planning input. Every cut behind this reading is published.
Mandate ScaleAssess the ownership, coordination and resources a plan requires.Audience use, method and evidence
How this instrument serves your decision
Capital allocators
Test whether a business plan depends on parties outside the investor’s control.
Owners & developers
Identify ownership and coordination requirements before setting a leasing sequence.
Cities & districts
Identify who must act and how public tools could support execution.
Method, evidence and limitations
The Mandate Scale
0 to 40 · four moves · gate at 7 on standing
PUBLIC DATAHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY DERIVEDHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDCounty property rolls supply the standing reading after entity resolution. The four moves, the standing cuts and the gate at 7 are Hall Capital Advisory thresholds.
Find a downtown in the District IndexThe Mandate Scale is one number out of 40, built from four moves scored zero to ten each and left unweighted: standing, retention, sequence and capital.
Standing is the share of a ground floor the largest private owner holds. Retention is what a city commits each year to keep a long-tenured business trading, and whether that money reaches the business. Sequence is the written order in which a street is filled, together with the rule that sets that order. Capital is the money that reaches a lease rather than a building.
Standing gates the other three moves. A district scoring under 7 on standing fails the firm’s coordination threshold. Execution also depends on agreements, authority, resources and the parties involved.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDING
The reading
Downtown Dallas
3 of 40
CANNOT BEGIN
How it was measured
Four moves, unweighted. Standing reads 1 of 10 on a largest private holder under 8 percent of the ground-floor commercial accounts.
Why it falls here
CANNOT BEGIN covers 0 to 9. The composite reports the state of the street and the standing score reports whether anyone can act on it, so the two are always read together. Below 7 on standing, the framework flags coordination requirements; the score alone does not establish whether a party can execute the plan.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDINGHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDA planning input. Every cut behind this reading is published.
Evidence labels and their meaning
Provenance
How to read a label
Every figure on this site carries the class of evidence behind it. The labels sit beside the number rather than under the page, because a reader deciding whether to trust a figure should not have to hunt for what kind of figure it is.
PUBLIC DATA
A figure taken directly from a government or public administrative record. Census, LODES, a county roll, a state or municipal register. Free to anyone, and checkable against the same file.
LICENSED EXTERNAL DATA
A commercial or licensed source used in an analysis. Named, with its vintage, so a reader knows which part of a reading they cannot reproduce without the same licence.
EXTERNAL BENCHMARK
Published academic, industry or agency evidence the firm is citing rather than producing. The source and the table are named.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY DERIVED
A calculation the firm produces from source observations. A rate, a share, a median, a concentration. The inputs are public; the arithmetic is the firm's.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY FINDING
An interpretation produced by the firm's research: what the numbers mean for a decision, stated plainly enough that a reader can dispute it.
HALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLD
A proprietary cut, weight, gate or scoring rule. This is where the firm made a choice. Move the cut and the band changes, which is why every cut on this site is printed.
MODEL IN DEVELOPMENT
A Hall Capital Advisory model whose purpose, variables and validation sequence are published and whose coefficients are not yet estimated against observed activity. It marks a method, never a number. No reading is published under it.
MODELLED
An estimate produced by a calibrated model rather than a directly observed count. A model earns this label after calibration, holdout testing and a published error. Nothing on this site carries it yet, and the Index says what would have to happen first.
The last two labels are the ones to watch. A finding is an interpretation the firm will defend. A threshold is a cut the firm chose, and every cut on this site is printed so a reader can move it and see what happens.
Every reading the firm publishes is a planning input. It states what the
public record supports. It is not an appraisal, not investment advice, and not a substitute for
diligence on a specific asset.
Research context: district value and the ground floor
Why the district matters
The most productive ground in the country
is the ground
nobody underwrites.
Walkable urban cores hold about one percent of the land in the largest American metros and produce about a fifth of national output. A downtown acre in Asheville returned roughly ninety-eight times the property tax of an acre of edge-of-town retail. That productivity rests on foot traffic, foot traffic rests on the ground floor, and the ground floor is the thing conventional underwriting never measures.
Here is the staggering economic paradox
The most productive ground in the United States is severely mispriced, unmanaged, and misunderstood by municipal leaders, private lenders and developers alike.
Figure · The Yield Paradox
EXTERNAL BENCHMARKFoot Traffic Ahead, 2023, and Urban3. Cited, not produced here.
This is Hall Capital Advisory’s philosophy.
Capital flows to quality.
Quality is not derived from brick and mortar.
The building was never the asset.
Quality must be measured before it can be priced.
Start here
Why a Sidewalk Is
Worth More Than a Building.
Foot traffic is the asset in retail and urban economics, and the sidewalk is the infrastructure that generates, captures and protects that traffic. A building is a container. Without the sidewalk it is economically isolated, whatever it cost to build.
Figure · The exchange rate on a ground floor
EXTERNAL BENCHMARKHALL CAPITAL ADVISORY THRESHOLDNew York City's CEQR Technical Manual, chapter 16, Table 16-2, supplies the trip-generation rates. Hall Capital Advisory converts them into four rungs. The cuts at 500, 200 and 50 are Hall Capital Advisory thresholds, not a CEQR classification.
1,000 square feet of counter-service food and coffee generates about 900 weekday person trips. Multi-tenant office and hotel rooms need 45,000 square feet to generate the same number.
The tenant who generates the most consistent, repeatable foot traffic needs the least space and pays the least amount of rent. The tenant who pays the most rent generates significantly less footfall. A ground-floor space leased based on generating the highest rent ends up with frontage but no footfall.