When an Edmonton house is demolished for infill, is what replaces it typically worth about three times as much?

Limitations

• Not established here means no conforming population series was produced in this run or located in a published source, not that the arithmetic would come out small. Nothing published or produced here carries a matched, unit-level ratio series on the brief's rules, so neither the size of the typical gap nor the share of replacements sharing it can be read either way.
• This claim replaces an earlier version that asked whether more than half of matched replacement dwelling units carried a higher constant-dollar assessed value than the house that came down, with bounds on the unclassified cases and with the median and the distribution reported alongside. That version returned Not established. The editor judged afterwards that a direction-only test does not carry the magnitude the circulating quotation asserts, so a verdict on it told a reader almost nothing about the claim in circulation. It was re-briefed on the magnitude proposition and re-run; the story changelog records the change.
• The test was fixed in the brief before any result existed. For the claim to hold, the midpoint of the ratio spread had to reach 2.5, and better than half of matched replacement dwelling units had to reach 2.0; a weaker reading of each, 2.0 and 1.5, was declared alongside so the answer could also be given under the version most favourable to whoever holds the claim. A figure counts as met only where the lower bound meets it and failed only where the upper bound fails it. With no classified population to bound, both sat undetermined, and undetermined is what produces this finding.
• No series meeting the brief's dwelling-unit rules came out of this run. One seat ran a 40-permit feasibility probe instead of the ten-year frame and said so; the other two reported that no such series exists in print. An earlier run built a proxy that does not meet those rules, and it is not the series this proposition needs.
• The probe values replacements on the 2025 roll rather than on each replacement's first full roll after completion, so a dwelling finished in 2019 carries up to five years of market movement inside its ratio. One seat documented that departure. Its constant-dollar arithmetic removes general consumer-price inflation and nothing else.
• The demolition frame is candidate records rather than a validated one. It was built from permit job-description text because the dataset's category coding changed in 2019, it admits garage-only demolitions coded as houses, and it leaves out semi-detached and other dwelling demolitions that the frame requires.
• The seats disagreed about what the record cannot do, without disagreeing on the finding. One documented that the inputs are all published and the join is feasible, so the honest statement is that nobody has produced the calculation, not that it cannot be produced. Another had treated a missing pre-joined dataset as making the calculation impossible.
• One seat's round-one review cited nothing at all: both its evidence lists were empty and it recorded no URL, so none of its statements can be checked against archived bytes. Two other seats documented that.
• Eighteen of the 35 probe lots found on the 2018 roll failed an exact legal-description match on the 2025 roll, and three of those were recovered by address as subdivided pairs. One seat documented that this is a linkage risk only: it measures neither how often a legal-description-only join loses a subdivided replacement nor which way the population moves.
• Two developer-portal pages cited for the dataset field definitions returned the portal shell under an HTTP 200 and were byte-identical to each other, so the archived bytes cannot verify what either was cited for. Neither was ingested and neither is cited here.
• The alleged $350,000 to $1,000,000 example has no captured source, address or property. The two round numbers were fixed in advance as context rather than cutoffs; the example received no verdict and nothing here verifies it.
• The run found no cohort-level public source for sale prices, asking prices, contract rents, tenure, bedroom counts or fire-order and safety-order flags on these lots. Every measure standing on those is recorded as missing rather than proxied.

What remains unknown

• The city-wide median ratio, and the share of matched replacement dwelling units at or above 2.0 and at or above 1.5, each with the bounds the unclassified-case rule requires. This is the proposition, and it stays open.
• Which of the 2016 to 2025 demolition permits actually constitute the frame, once garage-only records are struck out and semi-detached and other dwelling demolitions are added in.
• How many self-contained dwelling units sit on each replacement title, and which of them are separately titled.
• How often a legal-description join loses a subdivided replacement, and whether the lots it loses differ from the lots it keeps.
• The distribution by demolition year, and whether the move toward rowhomes of five units or more after Zoning Bylaw 20001 pulls the per-dwelling median down for the later cohorts.
• The result on the frozen 2023-12-31 mature-neighbourhood boundary, and on the City Plan redeveloping area.
• Whether the demolished houses were owner occupied or rented, at what rent, and whether any tenants were displaced.

Missing evidence

Records we asked for and have not received, or that do not appear to exist publicly.

• The matched series itself: each demolished house's assessed value on the roll in force the year before demolition, set against every replacement dwelling unit's assessed value on its first full roll after completion, with the dwelling-unit count on each title, across every house demolition permit from 2016 to 2025. By the freeze date, 2026-09-02, no City report, open dataset or third-party study had published one (City of Edmonton Assessment and Taxation with Urban Planning and Economy; critical).
• A reproducible frame of every residential demolition permit for 2016 to 2025, carrying parcel identifiers, the prior dwelling count, fire and safety orders, and the unmatched cases, with garage-only records excluded (City of Edmonton Urban Planning and Economy and Development Services; critical).
• Parcel and title lineage carrying each demolition through subdivision, consolidation and address change to every replacement title and assessment account (Alberta Land Titles and AltaLIS with the City of Edmonton; critical).
• Completion and occupancy dates for permits before 2021, enough to pick each replacement's first full assessment roll without a heuristic that depends on the outcome (City of Edmonton permit and inspection systems; critical).
• Verified self-contained dwelling counts and title structure for every replacement building, read from the assessment side rather than inferred from the permit units-added field, together with the land and improvement split of assessed value (City of Edmonton Assessment and Taxation with Alberta Land Titles; high).
• Arm's-length sale prices and dates on both sides of each pair, which the predeclared sale-to-sale sensitivity needs (Alberta Land Titles at Service Alberta, and REALTORS Association of Edmonton MLS records; high).
• The section 814 appendix boundary as it stood on 2023-12-31, as a parcel-level layer rather than a neighbourhood list (City of Edmonton; moderate).
• Prior tenure, prior rent, tenant notices and any recorded displacement for the demolished houses. The run identified no complete public registry or source for these (property owners and tenants, City of Edmonton; moderate).