It Now Takes Three Years to Get a Building Permit in San Francisco

The San Francisco Chronicle did an analysis of the timeline for building permits in the city and even to an SF pessimist like myself the results are pretty shocking. On average it takes more than two years to get a building permit for a single family residence in the city. It’s only slightly less for a multi-family dwelling.

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.

“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.

A decade ago the time for approval averaged just under a year (342 days). That’s still not good but it’s a significant difference. And the figures above don’t include planning approval, another step that happens before a permit application can be submitted.

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.

Add all of that together and it’s 3-4 years before you can build anything in the city. The Chronicle spoke to builders who work in the city and they pointed out this was why projects don’t get built in San Francisco. And over time that means the cost of housing goes up because there are more people fighting over a stagnant number of homes.

The situation has gotten so bad that Gov. Newsom announced an investigation into SF’s housing approval process a few months ago.

After a year of escalating warnings, Gov. Gavin Newsom is launching an unprecedented review of San Francisco’s notoriously lengthy and difficult housing approval and permitting process, aimed at identifying and removing barriers to construction of new residential development in the city…

“We are deeply concerned about processes and political decision-making in San Francisco that delay and impede the creation of housing and want to understand why this is the case,” said Housing and Community Development Director Gustavo Velasquez…

“San Francisco stands alone as an example of what is an acutely concerning pattern of delays and denial,” said Jason Elliott, senior counselor to Newsom.

The inability to build new housing is one of the major factors contributing to the city’s homelessness problem. Earlier this week the Atlantic published a story arguing that the number one predictor of homelessness is a lack of cheap housing.

…some urban areas with very high rates of poverty (Detroit, Miami-Dade County, Philadelphia) have among the lowest homelessness rates in the country, and some places with relatively low poverty rates (Santa Clara County, San Francisco, Boston) have relatively high rates of homelessness. The same pattern holds for unemployment rates: “Homelessness is abundant,” the authors write, “only in areas with robust labor markets and low rates of unemployment—booming coastal cities.”

The thrust of that piece is that people will only tolerate rampant homelessness and the crime and filth that comes with it for so long before they start demanding the city and the police do something about it. And that’s certainly part of why you saw San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin get recalled in one of the country’s most progressives cities. But if you believe the only lasting solution is more cheap housing then a 3-year delay on new construction is obviously a major problem.

The Atlantic piece, surprisingly, doesn’t try to blame this all on the right. On the contrary, the author says the problem is a loose coalition of groups and interests on the left:

As the historian Jacob Anbinder has explained, in the ’70s and ’80s conservationists, architectural preservationists, homeowner groups, and left-wing organizations formed a loose coalition in opposition to development. Throughout this period, Anbinder writes, “the implementation of height limits, density restrictions, design review boards, mandatory community input, and other veto points in the development process” made it much harder to build housing. This coalition—whose central purpose is opposition to neighborhood change and the protection of home values—now dominates politics in high-growth areas across the country, and has made it easy for even small groups of objectors to prevent housing from being built. The result? The U.S. is now millions of homes short of what its population needs.

Los Angeles perfectly demonstrates the competing impulses within the left. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to subsidize the development of housing for homeless and at-risk residents over a span of 10 years. But during the first five years, roughly 10 percent of the housing units the program was meant to create were actually produced. In addition to financing problems, the biggest roadblock was small groups of objectors who didn’t want affordable housing in their communities.

In this view of things, there’s a small-c conservatism that dominates even among progressive homeowners. People in places like San Francisco want to be sanctuary cities and want to care for the homeless, they just don’t want it to happen on their street where there home values have doubled in the last decade.

Incidentally, I think that’s also why you get such a reaction of shock and dismay when border state governors send busloads of migrants to the places where progressives actually live. The residents and mayors of New York and Chicago and Washington, DC are all for keeping those migrants here in the United States, just not right here where they live.

My own take is that there’s probably a lot of truth to the idea that lack of new housing leads to homelessness, but building more apartments won’t solve the problem of the chronically homeless drug addicts who choose to be on the streets because that’s where the drugs are. Getting those people off the streets is not going to happen because of a new housing development. Many of them won’t even stay in shelters or tiny homes because they feel the rules (against selling or using drugs) are too onerous.

Still, I think it’s correct that you could improve the situation over time by reducing the number of new homeless people being added to the streets every day. And that won’t happen so long as it takes 3 years just to get approval for new multi-family housing.

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