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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 building inspection, planning, fire, public works and the Public Utilities Commission.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The departments could, for instance, set up regular meetings, or have applicants be shepherded through the process by a designated point person.<\/p>\n
Mahmood is also interested in bringing permitting efforts under one roof<\/a> by combining the building inspection and planning departments, something that Mayor Daniel Lurie has already called for.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Mahmood said that to \u201cfully realize that vision,\u201d the city will need to ask voters to change the charter because the responsibilities of each department are currently \u201chard coded\u201d into the charter and can\u2019t be easily changed. Hence the ballot measure.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amendments to the city charter require a simple majority to pass. Mahmood isn\u2019t the only one considering changing the charter<\/a>. Lurie and Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman are currently working<\/a> on overhauling major portions of the charter<\/a>, and reform efforts may get combined.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Mahmood said he suspects that the complexity of San Francisco\u2019s code is partially to blame. \u201cWe have one of the most Byzantine codes relative to other cities in the state,\u201d Mahmood said. Knowing where in the process applications tend to be held up \u201cwould then in turn help us understand which parts of the code maybe people are getting stuck on,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n The report was commissioned by Mahmood last March when he wanted to figure out how to \u201cunstick\u201d the 50,000 housing units that San Francisco has already approved but which have yet to break ground because they are awaiting building permits.\u00a0It was authored by the independent Budget and Legislative Analyst\u2019s office.<\/p>\n San Francisco has a state-mandated goal to build 82,000 new housing units by 2031. Last year, city supervisors voted<\/a> to upzone the city\u2019s western and northern neighborhoods<\/a> to spur development, though a city controller\u2019s report<\/a> found that even with the upzoning, an optimistic projection would see the city add just 17,800 units over 20 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said he is looking into a ballot measure to speed up housing permits after a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29625,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[49115,47026,1011,101,103,102,69371,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-205664","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-bilal-mahmood","9":"tag-department-of-building-inspection","10":"tag-housing","11":"tag-san-francisco","12":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","13":"tag-san-francisco-news","14":"tag-san-francisco-planning-department","15":"tag-sf","16":"tag-sf-headlines","17":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}