How CTCAC Site Amenities Scoring Actually Works

August 18, 2026 · 6 min read

Published by EZFeasi

Updated September 29, 2026

On a competitive 9% deal, Site Amenities points routinely decide whether an application clears the funding line. This category, governed by 4 CCR Section 10325(c)(4)(A), rewards sites that sit close to the things residents actually use day to day — grocery stores, schools, transit-adjacent services, medical care. It sounds simple. It isn't, and the details are where applications lose points they thought they had.

The category is generous on paper: up to a meaningful chunk of total scoring points if a site is well positioned. But each amenity type has its own distance schedule, its own qualifying definition, and its own documentation burden. Get the definition wrong and you don't get partial credit — you get zero for that line item.

The Six Categories, Point by Point

A full-service grocery store of at least 25,000 square feet is worth 5 points within a half mile, 4 points within one mile, and 3 points within 1.5 miles. The size threshold matters as much as the distance — a corner market or a small specialty grocer doesn't qualify no matter how close it sits to the site.

A public library is worth 3 points within a half mile and 2 points within one mile. A public school is worth 3 points if it falls within its own attendance area boundary and within the applicable distance for its grade level: a quarter mile for elementary, a half mile for middle school, one mile for high school. Being physically close to a school building doesn't count if the site falls outside that school's actual attendance area.

A qualifying medical clinic or hospital is worth 3 points within a half mile and 2 points within one mile — but only if the facility accepts Medi-Cal or Medicare, or operates as a community health center. A market-rate urgent care that doesn't take those patients doesn't qualify. Pharmacies are worth 2 points within a half mile and 1 point within one mile. Public parks and community centers round out the category at 3 points within a half mile and 2 points within three-quarters of a mile.

Where Applications Lose Points

Most of the point loss in this category isn't about measuring distance wrong — it's about claiming an amenity that doesn't actually meet the definition. A grocery store that's 24,000 square feet, a clinic that doesn't take Medi-Cal, an elementary school a family in that unit couldn't actually enroll their kid in because the site sits just outside the attendance boundary — these are the errors that show up in scoring appeals every cycle.

The fix isn't better measuring. It's verifying the underlying facts about the amenity before you ever put a number on the application: square footage, payer acceptance, attendance zone boundaries. That verification work has to happen at the site-selection stage, not after you've already committed to a parcel and are trying to make the scoring narrative work.

Rural Sites Play by Different Rules

Projects that qualify for CTCAC's rural designation get longer allowed distances across every category in this section — a rural site can be farther from that grocery store or clinic and still claim the same points an urban site earns at a tighter radius. That's a meaningful advantage for rural deals, but it only applies if the project actually qualifies as rural under CTCAC's definition, which is its own analysis worth getting right before you rely on the extended distances. We've covered what counts as rural under CTCAC in more detail in a separate article, since it affects more than just this scoring category.

Finding These Signals Before You Commit to a Site

This category rewards precision, and precision requires real data, not a drive-by impression of the neighborhood. EZFeasi's Parcel Search evaluates these exact six categories against real public-record sources for any parcel you're screening — the grocery signal comes from the USDA SNAP Retailer Locator, libraries from the IMLS Public Libraries Survey, schools from the California Department of Education's own school directory, medical facilities from HRSA's Health Center Program data, and parks from the California Protected Areas Database. It's the same underlying data a scoring reviewer would check against, surfaced at the parcel level before you've spent months underwriting a site that doesn't actually score the way you assumed it would.