627 days just for a permit — why S.F. building is sluggish
Delays, up 83% in past decade, can kill projects and drive up housing prices
When housing advocates and developers talk about how long it takes to get permits to build housing in San Francisco, they don’t speak in increments of days, weeks or months. They speak in years.
And they’re not exaggerating, according to a new Chronicle analysis of permit-approval data from the city’s Department of Building Inspection.
The typical applicant currently waits a staggering 627 calendar days before obtaining a full building permit from the city to construct a multifamily housing project, and 861 days before gaining the same approval for a single-family residence, the analysis found.
That’s not counting the time that some applicants take, often a year or longer, to clear an earlier stage of planning approval before applying for building permits.
Citywide, the median approval time for permits has increased 83% since 2012, effectively driving away many potential builders and shrinking the number of new homes created, even as the housing crisis has intensified with skyrocketing home prices and rents. Ten years ago, developers of housing projects typically received permits in about 342 days, the analysis shows.
The spike illustrates a problem that San Francisco housing advocates say has long been underrecognized: While efforts to speed up housing production often focus on changing zoning and density restrictions, the bureaucratic process of securing a building permit can be just as formidable an obstacle.
“Most cities have timelines
where it’s like a few weeks. San Francisco is like a few years,” said Corey Smith, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition, an advocacy group that has pushed to cut permitting times. “It just proves what we know: that San Francisco doesn’t prioritize building new housing.”
The Chronicle’s analysis comes as state housing officials are reviewing San Francisco’s housing construction practices, including its process for issuing permits.
Department of Building Inspection officials said, in response to reporters’ findings, that the agency, known as DBI, is making a series of significant changes to speed up processing times and improve customer service. They said the median wait time reflected in The Chronicle’s analysis doesn’t yet reflect these changes, which will take time to have an impact.
DBI officials declined requests for an interview, but in a lengthy statement emailed to The Chronicle, Neville Pereira, deputy director for permit services, acknowledged that “the process takes too long,” adding, “We’re working hard to drive that review time down without sacrificing public safety.”
Mayor London Breed’s office said Wednesday that it takes “entirely too long” to approve and permit new housing in the city. A spokesperson said, however, that recent leadership and operational changes at DBI have led to significant improvements.
“But we have much more work to do to speed up the construction of the housing we need to make our City an affordable place for everyone to live,” Judson True, the mayor’s director of housing delivery, said in an email.
Housing advocates and builders call the delays baffling. After all, they say, builders applying for permits have already often navigated a planning gantlet.
To build housing in San Francisco, developers must first receive planning approval, known as entitlement, to ensure the city supports the type, size and design of housing proposed for a site. This part of the process took an average of 450 days over the last 18 months, according to recent data from the state.
Then comes post-entitlement — the focus of The Chronicle’s analysis — in which developers must show that their architectural plans comply with health and safety codes in order to obtain permits to begin construction. Theoretically, the second part of the process should be the fastest. It’s less subjective, and potential opposition to a project — such as from a neighbor — would likely have been sorted out during the planning stage.
A half dozen architects and developers who have worked in San Francisco for years told The Chronicle the city’s permit process has always been arduous. But, they said, the negative consequences have escalated.
The industry professionals said the delays — when multiplied over thousands of projects — have dramatically depressed the amount of new housing in San Francisco. They said the prolonged process effectively kills many projects, pushes developers to do business elsewhere and drives up housing prices, as renters and buyers compete for fewer available units.
“The biggest impact is cost,” said Karin Payson, an architect who has built homes in San Francisco for 30 years. “This costs money for everybody in the city. It affects the quality of life for everybody, because everybody lives somewhere.”
While the median approval time has soared to nearly two years, dozens of individual developments have faced far longer delays, according to The Chronicle’s analysis.
In more than 270 projects approved since 2012, city reviewers took four years or longer to approve a permit. Thirty-four projects took eight years or longer.
The Department of Building Inspection said The Chronicle’s analysis doesn’t tell the full story. For instance, the data doesn’t separate out the period of time when a permit application is back in a builder’s hands because the city has asked for revisions.
Pereira, the DBI deputy director, said the city is working to improve how departments enter data into its permit-tracking system, which will allow it to track the time that the city waits for applicants to respond to comments.
The department reviewed and suggested changes to The Chronicle’s data analysis to ensure that the final numbers excluded duplicate permits and permits unrelated to the construction of new housing units. Department employees also proposed that The Chronicle count only business days in its analysis, but the newspaper decided to include all days to capture the true length of developer wait times.
The Chronicle’s analysis did not separate out the time that other departments or entities — such as the Fire Department, Public Works or the Public Utilities Commission — take to review portions of building permit applications under their purview.
The data also doesn’t separate out instances in which building permits are returned to the planning department for further review due to new modifications to a structure’s exterior. Finally, it doesn’t separate out instances in which developers may shelve a project due to changes in ownership or other factors.
Projects can break ground at different stages of the approval process. Most builders wait to obtain a “full” permit before they begin construction. But developers can also apply for a “site permit,” which authorizes them to begin some work in phases after they receive planning entitlement approval and while they wait for a final building permit. For example, they might be allowed to begin excavation and foundation work after a site permit is issued.
Typically, the phased permitting is used by large developers with complicated projects. The process costs more in fees and can increase costs if a project site becomes idle while the builder awaits later permit approvals.
Pereira said the department began struggling to keep up with the permitting process after the 2008 recession, when internal layoffs coincided with increases
in permit applications.
The median turnaround time for a building permit soared higher around 2016, as the growth of tech jobs and low interest rates fueled a real estate boom. Permit applications also jumped after the city made it easier to build accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, small units often referred to as in-law units or granny flats.
Applications hit a record high in 2019. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, causing a glut of applications that has persisted. Delays spiked as the city shuttered inperson operations and began a turbulent transition to electronic permit reviews.
“COVID completely disrupted our permit-application review processes right after that large influx in applications, and we are still working our way out of that backlog,” Pereira said.
Pereira added that the department is working to shorten permit-approval timelines in five primary ways, including by prioritizing “rechecks,” or project revisions, and by flagging incomplete applications early so applicants can quickly resubmit. The department is expecting to see the results of these improvements by the end of 2023.
Today, San Francisco has the slowest permit approval time of any large city in the state, according to a database compiled by the state Department of Housing and Community Development. The data, which looks at projects submitted in the last 18 months, shows the permit process took, on average, almost 400 days longer in San Francisco than in Oakland and more than 300 days longer than in Berkeley.
Moreover, the impact of San Francisco’s sluggish approval process isn’t felt evenly across the city.
Housing advocates and builders said the complexity and subjective nature of the process favors large, well-financed developers at the expense of small property owners or landlords looking to build one or a handful of units.
The Chronicle’s analysis shows that, as of 2022, the city typically takes about 240 days longer to approve permits for single-family homes than for multifamily apartment buildings.
Mark Hogan, an architect who’s worked on housing in the city for 16 years, said the delays make it difficult for property owners and developers to pull together financing for projects, particularly affordable-housing projects that include below-market-rate units and require several funding sources.
“You’re looking at multiple years of construction cost escalation while the building is being permitted,” Hogan said. “There’s a lot of projects that are in permitting now that are going to get canceled or postponed indefinitely.”
Architects and builders said large developers often fare better for one clear reason: money. They said the process is easier for those with the resources to hire attorneys and others to help navigate byzantine rules. Many large developers hire specialists known as “permit expediters” who charge as much as $500 per hour to visit the city daily to nudge permits along. Industry professionals said using expediters can often save months on a project.
Toby Levy, a fellow of the American Institute of Architects who’s worked in the city for more than 30 years and builds mostly large multifamily buildings, said the department usually does a better job turning around permits for larger housing projects. She said the issue for small property owners is largely a matter of scale because they cannot afford to hire the same parade of consultants and permit expediters.
“If you’re doing the project yourself, you don’t have that type of money to spend,” Levy said. “If you put all the same requirements on a four-unit building, it’s daunting. The consultants become disproportionate to the project size.”
Industry professionals said higher overhead costs motivate many developers to build luxury units, such as condo towers, or to convert duplexes into large expensive single-family homes. Such projects usually have a higher profit margin.
Matthew Lewis, a spokesperson for California YIMBY, an advocacy group, said because many small developers or property owners are shut out, the result is a lack of new small-scale apartment projects, such as fourplexes, geared toward middle-income earners. The loss of such projects is often dubbed the “missing middle” by housing experts.
“San Francisco has set up a system where just to get through the gate, you have to be a deeppocketed developer,” Lewis said. “You’re forcing the market toward the high end with this process.”
Builders say excessive delays are the result of structural issues like chronic understaffing and a complicated building code that opens the door for challenges to projects, as well as the general culture within the Department of Building Inspection, which they say is often combative.
Pereira said the department disagrees with complaints about its internal culture, adding that staff members “are active participants in the city’s efforts to boost housing production.”
San Francisco’s housing landscape is inherently challenging, builders say. It’s the densest major city west of the Mississippi River and known for its historic preservation and charm, which means construction is often subject to more restrictions.
Advocates have pushed for San Francisco to overhaul its process, which has come under growing scrutiny amid the city’s worsening housing and homelessness crisis.
The California Department of Housing and Community Development announced in August that its accountability unit was initiating a review of San Francisco’s housing approval and permitting system. The agency separately ordered the city to redo its housing element, the road map the city must create to outline how it can meet state-mandated housing goals.
San Francisco is required to show the state that it has a realistic plan to build 82,000 housing units by 2031, which will depend heavily on whether the city can show it’s able to build tens of thousands of units already under review.
Christopher Roach, an architect who chairs the American Institute of Architects’ San Francisco public policy committee, said he worries that delays obtaining permits will only worsen as the city tries to coax more development. City supervisors passed legislation this year to allow property owners across the city to build fourplexes on lots once reserved for single homes, and to construct up to six units on all corner lots.
“The ability to deliver on those is going to be enormously constrained by these pipeline problems we have,” Roach said. “The building department is going to have this firehose of projects.”
Architects will meet with state officials next week to discuss recommendations for how San Francisco could fix its permit process. Among their ideas: allow multiple departments to more easily review permits simultaneously; fully adopt an electronic permit-review system, replacing the current mishmash of paper and electronic permits; and create deadlines for the city to respond to applicants.
The Department of Building Inspection faces these challenges as it attempts to regroup after a corruption scandal. Last week, former Senior Inspector Bernard Curran pleaded guilty to two counts of accepting gratuity payments as rewards for approving building permits.
The department’s former director, Tom Hui, resigned in 2020 after he was accused by the City Attorney’s Office of misconduct, including that he gave preferential treatment and access to a permit expediter.
Department officials declined to comment on Curran’s plea deal. Several builders who spoke with The Chronicle said they worry the culture within the department won’t change unless inspectors are forced to follow a more objective set of rules and approval timelines.
Potential reforms may hinge on a brewing fight that is likely to play out in Sacramento, between the city and YIMBY advocates, who want the city to build substantially more housing quickly.
This year, legislators overwhelmingly passed AB2234, which requires most cities to respond to building permits for housing within a strict timeline. The bill sets deadlines for cities to approve permits or respond with suggested revisions: 30 business days for small housing projects with 25 or fewer units, and 60 days for large projects with 26 or more units.
But the measure likely doesn’t apply to San Francisco. The bill contains a loophole that arguably exempts the city because it has discretionary building-permit reviews, meaning neighbors can appeal permits. The vast majority of cities have a nondiscretionary process.
San Francisco is at risk of losing that exemption next year. The Housing Action Coalition said it is working with legislators to introduce a bill that would end discretionary permit reviews statewide.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said state lawmakers likely must intervene because the Board of Supervisors has resisted change. He said he often hears complaints that the city forces builders to abide by subjective decisions that cause their costs to skyrocket.
“I don’t know if San Francisco is capable of fixing it on its own,” Wiener said. “If you’ve met all the rules, then you should get your permit, and the city shouldn’t be able to change the rules in the middle of the game.”