Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he is looking into a ballot measure to speed up housing permits after a city report released Thursday found that San Francisco takes an average of 280 days to approve the permits necessary for construction to begin.
That is one of the longest waits in the country, and a key bottleneck for building new housing, Mahmood said. It is more than three times as long as it takes in Washington, D.C., and more than twice as long as in San Diego.
The city report, commissioned by Mahmood, has relatively simple solutions for speeding up permitting, namely to streamline coordination between the five departments currently involved in issuing them — building inspection, planning, fire, public works and the Public Utilities Commission.
The departments could, for instance, set up regular meetings, or have applicants be shepherded through the process by a designated point person.
Mahmood is also interested in bringing permitting efforts under one roof by combining the building inspection and planning departments, something that Mayor Daniel Lurie has already called for.
But Mahmood said that to “fully realize that vision,” the city will need to ask voters to change the charter because the responsibilities of each department are currently “hard coded” into the charter and can’t be easily changed. Hence the ballot measure.
Amendments to the city charter require a simple majority to pass. Mahmood isn’t the only one considering changing the charter. Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman are currently working on overhauling major portions of the charter, and reform efforts may get combined.
The report further noted that it was hard to make more specific policy recommendations because the city does not collect data on where the holdups happen or whether a delay is due to the city or to the applicant.
Nevertheless, Mahmood said he suspects that the complexity of San Francisco’s code is partially to blame. “We have one of the most Byzantine codes relative to other cities in the state,” Mahmood said. Knowing where in the process applications tend to be held up “would then in turn help us understand which parts of the code maybe people are getting stuck on,” he said.
The report was commissioned by Mahmood last March when he wanted to figure out how to “unstick” the 50,000 housing units that San Francisco has already approved but which have yet to break ground because they are awaiting building permits. It was authored by the independent Budget and Legislative Analyst’s office.
San Francisco has a state-mandated goal to build 82,000 new housing units by 2031. Last year, city supervisors voted to upzone the city’s western and northern neighborhoods to spur development, though a city controller’s report found that even with the upzoning, an optimistic projection would see the city add just 17,800 units over 20 years.