Mayor Corey O’Connor signed an executive order on Jan. 6, his first full day in office, directing City departments to speed up Pittsburgh’s building permit process.
The order gives departments 60 days to identify inefficiencies in the permitting system and propose solutions that could reduce wait times for developers and builders. Changes to this process could affect Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University — both of which are continuing to expand — differently than the small businesses they coexist with in Oakland.
A spokesperson for O’Connor said the order aims to identify where the current system fails permit applicants.
“It’s clear that there are inefficiencies in the current City permitting processes that cost small businesses, residents and others time and money in delays and unforeseen obstacles,” the spokesperson said. “The goal of Mayor O’Connor’s executive order is to look at every city permit process to understand where the bottlenecks are and overhaul the systems to make it easier for applicants to get more smoothly through the process.”
Pittsburgh’s building permit process is split into two main stages, according to the City’s Department of Permits, Licenses, and Inspections. The Zoning Department first reviews whether a project complies with the City’s zoning code. After zoning approval, the Department of Permits, Licenses, and Inspections reviews construction plans for compliance with building and life-safety codes.
Andrea Boykowycz, executive director of the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation, said the current system creates unnecessary delays because departments do not coordinate effectively.
“Right now, the city’s permitting process is really siloed, and it can be cumbersome and rage-inducing to have to navigate each step with inspectors who don’t communicate with each other,” Boykowycz said.
She said applicants are often forced to re-submit the same information multiple times and wait on approvals that could be reviewed concurrently.
Michael Glass, director of Pitt’s urban studies program, said coordination problems are one of the most common causes of permitting delays, particularly for large or complex developments.
“When different systems aren’t talking to each other, delays are almost inevitable,” Glass said.
Sal Puccini, owner of Puccini Hair Design in Oakland, experienced those delays firsthand when trying to relocate during the pandemic.
After the original location on Atwood Street proved unsuitable for salon operations, Puccini sought approval to move into the Sennott Square building on Forbes Avenue. What he expected to take months stretched into nearly four years.
Puccini said state requirements forced him to repeatedly print and mail physical blueprints to Harrisburg for review. Each round of feedback required revisions and restarted the review timeline, adding weeks or months at a time, according to Puccini.
“Every revision meant starting over,” Puccini said. “You’d wait weeks just to find out you needed to change something small.”
Although his delays involved state agencies rather than the City, Puccini said his experience shows how permitting bottlenecks, at any level, can affect small businesses in Oakland.
O’Connor’s executive order specifies who departments should consult, including architects, contractors, unions and “a local attorney experienced in zoning and land use.” Small business owners and neighborhood organizations are not included.
Boykowycz said this omission raises concerns.
“Why not include the small businesses and neighborhoods for whose benefit the projects are supposed to be easier to approve?” Boykowycz said.
The executive order applies only to the permitting phase and does not concern earlier steps such as zoning approval or community meetings, where residents can comment on proposed developments.
Still, Boykowycz said the order’s language frames delays primarily as obstacles to construction. It directs departments to “identify system deficiencies.”
“The order strongly implies that the ‘deficiencies’ the agencies should be looking for are anything that gets in the way of builders building things,” Boykowycz said. “I definitely would hate for anyone to start to think that opportunities for public review and comment are obstacles to be streamlined and removed. Public review is really important, and we need to be careful not to cut that step out.”
According to Glass, streamlined permitting will not affect all projects equally. He said the scale of a project determines how much it will benefit from faster approvals.
“The small-scale projects are going to see less impact,” Glass said. “Where you are going to see a big shift is in those larger developments that could get stalled out through burdensome permitting processes.”
Glass pointed to Pitt’s campus master plan — which includes new graduate student housing and other facilities — as an example of the type of large-scale development that could move faster under streamlined permitting.
“The larger institutions stand to benefit from a greater speed to moving through the permitting process,” Glass said.
According to Puccini, small businesses face disproportionate burdens under the current system.
Forty-seven percent of small businesses say they spend too much time fulfilling regulatory compliance requirements, according to a Q4 2024 U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index survey.
“At the end of the day, how is this helpful for the little guy?” Puccini said.
Boykowycz said better coordination between city agencies could reduce burdens on small business applicants without eliminating necessary oversight.
“There are definitely a lot of ways to find efficiencies and transparency in better information-sharing across agencies,” Boykowycz said.
City departments will present recommendations by early March on how to reduce permitting delays.
To evaluate whether reforms work, Glass recommended watching for data on permit processing times, monitoring the types and scale of projects coming before the city zoning board and tracking whether the City shares information showing improvements.
Glass said development decisions affect everyone in Oakland, from students who live there temporarily to longtime residents.
“[Pitt] should really be cognizant of what our role is going to mean for the broader community,” Glass said.