It’s no secret among San Francisco developers that landing a building permit can take years — making it the slowest city in the state to build anything.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who recently replaced antidevelopment Supervisor Dean Preston, has now called for a city investigation into what’s taking so long to hand out permits, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Mahmood planned to ask the supervisors’ budget and legislative analyst this week to study the permitting process in five other cities across the state and compare them to San Francisco.
The study would look into the number and types of permits required by other major cities and counties that allow everything from small businesses and single-family homes to large housing projects to be built more quickly.
It would also analyze every step in San Francisco’s permitting gauntlet, and the time it takes its various departments to spit out the permits. A timeline for the proposed study was not disclosed.
“There are over 1,000 pages of San Francisco building code that have resulted in us being the slowest city to build in the entire state,” Mahmood told the Chronicle. “There are other cities in the Bay Area and across California that are building faster than us with the same interest rates, the same labor conditions, the same costs.”
San Francisco must permit 82,000 homes by 2031, more than half of them affordable, according to the state-mandated housing plan. The city is now rezoning much of the city to meet the goal.
Mahmood’s request for a new study aims to support the goals of PermitSF, an initiative by Planning Director Rich Hillis and Mayor Daniel Lurie to reform the city’s housing and small business permitting process.
“This effort to learn from other cities who are building faster than us is consistent with the goals of PermitSF to deliver bold, transformative permitting solutions to accelerate the construction of much-needed housing in San Francisco,” Hillis told the Chronicle.
It’s not clear why it has taken San Francisco so long to evaluate its glacial permitting process.
In 2023, the city greenlit the building of 1,136 homes, a 13-year-low, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. That compares to an average of 2,476 permits a year since 2001, with a peak 5,200 permits doled out in 2018, according to the San Francisco Business Times.
A year earlier, The Real Deal reported it took nearly 1,000 days on average -– 450 days for entitlements and another 525 days for permitting –– to get cleared to start a residential project in San Francisco, according to the state Department of Housing and Community Development.
A San Francisco Chronicle analysis found it took the city an average 627 days to permit an apartment project, and 861 days to permit a single-family home.
— Dana Bartholomew
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