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 of the voters 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 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 upzoning, an optimistic projection would see the city add just 17,800 units over 20 years.
““fully realize that vision”. There’s just that nagging doubt how all that would happen is a giant turd (DBI) dissolving in a bucket of murky water. While we’re being told it’s turning Tahoe Blue.
Great discussion. The key point is the Yimby position does not pencil out, has not penciled out and is in no way going to pencil out anytime soon. Toss the supply side cool aid into the bay on the outgoing tide. Affordability in housing needs to happen now. This means more government involvement in the market – well beyond tax breaks and permit streamlining.
This is clearly timed to take the heat off Mahmood after he and the mayor introduced legislation to slash $100 million a year in funding for affordable housing by repealing Prop I.
There’s a new streamlining bill or measure every year, and we’re clearly hitting diminishing returns. The 50,000 units Mahmood refers to aren’t waiting on permits; they can’t get financing, and some of them at the Hunters Point Shipyard are waiting for the Navy to clean up land.
Meanwhile all over the city thousands of affordable homes are stalled for lack of funding. Want to speed up housing? Fund it.
Prop I was a general tax, not a special tax for affordable housing. Progressives have been reduced to running revenue measure after revenue measure to gift conservative mayors with more resources with which to screw progs and then whining when mayors screw them.
The right wing and the developers have successfully commanded the narrative. Progressives have not had a new idea since Prop M in 1986. The prog snake oil is rancid. Either progs adapt a message on housing and land use from something that’s not resonating to something that does resonate or this only gets worse.
The reason housing is not built has nothing to do with permits. The stumbling block is profit. There is not enough market for infinite luxury developments, but on the other hand, it’s simply not possible to build homes that are both to code and within the reach of people who make $50-80k a year.
Someone who earns $80k a year and pays $1,867 a month is paying 28% of their income, which is what most lenders want to see. Ok, so if your total is $1,867 after a 20% down payment on a 30-year, 6% mortgage, that means that the selling price must have been $242k and your down payment $48k. And if the selling price is $242k, the construction cost was probably $206k after the typical 15% contractor’s profit.
Can you build a home for one person for $206k? No, absolutely not. No matter how tall you build, if you observe all the building and safety codes, even a 400 sq. ft. is going to cost more than $206k to build!
The only solution is the government building housing and selling or renting it at a loss.
Agreed on all the math above, no funds = no projects.
Now, more importantly let’s contemplate the projected mass white-collar layoffs in the next 2-5yrs and poof – thousands of units come to the market driving lower rents & sales prices as they free up to those leaving town.
I don’t see how SF has any business building 20k new units, let alone 82k. That number is now outdated with Covid and AI progress, and the law needs to be amended for the future of what things will really look like NOT what things looked like 3-4yrs ago.
Times they are a changing.
Anyone know of any economists looking at AI’s impact on housing in SF? Especially at city hall?
Agreed on all the math above, no funds = no projects.
Now, more importantly let’s contemplate the projected mass white-collar layoffs in the next 2-5yrs and poof – thousands of units come to the market driving lower rents & sales prices as they free up to those leaving town.
I don’t see how SF has any business building 20k new units, let alone 82k. That number is now outdated with Covid and AI progress, and the law needs to be amended for the future of what things will really look like NOT what things looked like 3-4yrs ago.
Times they are a changing.
Anyone know of any economists looking at AI’s impact on housing in SF? Especially at city hall?
Thank you for doing the calculations. We need a lot more housing–we the people and our government must mandate it. Remember when BMR housing developers lined up for permits? That was when they got big tax incentives. But the incentives expired. Can we reinstate them? A good hearted local official expressed concern for the comfort of her constituents if higher density housing were built. If she can’t think of more housing in humanitarian terms then she might want to consider it politically. If our state cannot provide housing for everybody we will lose 4 more congressional seats. California will be less effective at implementing standards for the nation to follow. Feel free to disagree–that’s how I learn.
What’s next, making up for slack capital markets by taxing San Franciscans to subsidize the production of luxury condos by private developers?
By doing this, Mahmood is also speeding up his paybacks to the billionaire Real Estate moguls who funded his dishonest campaign. He’s been selling out D5ers since he first took office, from his support of the mayor’s upzoning plan to his efforts to cut the transfer tax in half.
I live in D5 – while I would have liked a more progressive supervisor, at this point I’m willing to vote for anybody who will increase the amount of housing in the city. I don’t care if its affordable or market rate.
Dean Preston wrote 2020 Prop I, which is raising $100 million a year for affordable housing. Mahmood wants to repeal that to give rich real estate investors a tax break. That’s not how you increase the amount of housing.
$100 million will build 50-100 homes in SF. Meanwhile Preston delayed or outright killed thousands of units worth of development over the years.
You got a point, because the biggest problem by far isn’t even mentioned: Which isn’t moving along multi billion prestige projects run by corporations who keep teams of layers on retainer. It is mom and pop landlords who try to get a renovation, window replacement or ADU through the process.
You mean progs lost in what had been the most progressive district in San Francisco twice in the past 15 years? What’s up with that?